Let's bitch about our stupid, annoying co-workers

ot-fucking-m

Essentially, yes. In this case an issue popped up related to one of the projects she is managing. Since I'm going to be in the area of her project tomorrow, for a completely unrelated project of my own, she sent an email telling me (and copying in all of our outside contractors involved in her project) to meet with her team, walk the project and get back to her with the scope of the issue.

― Maxmillion D. Boosted (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, June 27, 2023 12:46 PM (nine hours ago)

the pass-agg way would be to say: You know, as I am not the lead on this project, I worry that my sense of the scope (and any changes that might be required based on my walkthrough) would not be as useful as if you were to do this yourself. As I, too, have a lot of projects to manager, I am concerned that I don't have time to do a comprehensive read of what has already been planned/done on this project, and might miss some key detail.

personally a mail to your manager and hers just checking whether or not your work/time was to be directed by this person or whether you were to continue on as planned with your own manager

then ignore the multi cc mail

Thanks, I think I might try the direct approach with her, or at least give it a run. A mutual coworker allegedly approached her about a similar thing earlier this year (though I wasn't around to know what was said/expressed) and apparently her response was along the lines of, "I don't care how other people receive my tone, I'm here to do my job".

For some added context, she has, on multiple occasions, self-described as "a climber" and frequently leads off conversations with, "when I lead this department". Fwiw, she's been here for just over a year and there have been zero indications that she is soon in line for any sort of management position, I think she is just one of those people that views every single interaction through the lens of, "how do I use this person to forward my career?". Unfortunately my recently departed boss thought intra-office strife was funny and "good for getting results" so he never spoke up when she said things like this. So far I get the vibe that my new boss isn't going to have the patience for that and might eventually tell her to curb it, but we're still in early days.

Ultimately, I'm also just here to do my job, but I don't need to deal with someone whose approach is "act like you've already got the job you want" and doesn't really care about the people she's pissing off along the way.

in that case, I would approach her in a more straightforward "realpolitik" way ... obv I am me, and you are not me, but, if it were me (and I've honestly been in this situation before) I would say (maybe have a one on one with her) --

Look, I am willing to have your back and cover for you because in order for things to work well (which I am committed to), we have to work together. But the thing is, I am more willing to go out of my way for you, if you acknowledge that I am, in fact, going out of my way for you. I could be passive-aggressive and throw you under the bus, and ask for authorization from my supervisor to take on your workload, which will definitely delay you getting what you need, right? And more than that, this could make it look like you aren't capable of doing your job. I don't think you want people to think you aren't capable of doing your job. But I don't want to be an asshole and do that. I really don't. I want to see you move up the ladder, as it seems like you want to do, right? And, if you are willing to be respectful of me, and acknowledge when I'm doing you a solid, then I will totally support you moving forward.

xp Such people are generally a cancer and more often than not will self-sabotage.

I would probably spend a lot of time plotting how to sink said colleague. You absolutely should not stand for that and make it as spectacular a bomb drop as possible.

Unfortunately my recently departed boss thought intra-office strife was funny and "good for getting results"

four of us are working on making revisions to our instructor introduction guide to ensure it's accurate for 2023 and make it more palatable for new instructors.

we were all asked to give our written feedback, which we did. Assumed that person leading this project would read all the feedback, make updates they understood/agreed with, and set a follow-up meeting to go over any feedback they were on the fence about or don't understand.

No, instead, he didn't read it at all, and we're going item by item and discussing them in real time, and then waiting while he makes the adjustments in the doc in real time.

Sooooo boring. hence why I'm reading here in the truckloads of space between items

Unfortunately my recently departed boss thought intra-office strife was funny and "good for getting results"

This has to be among the top three Bad Boss Types.

"anger = passion!!!111!!"

Eugh definitely seems like this person wouldn’t have been hired if non-toxic work culture was a concern with management

Absolutely. Another one of the "lasting legacies" he's left us with on his way out.

No, instead, he didn't read it at all, and we're going item by item and discussing them in real time, and then waiting while he makes the adjustments in the doc in real time.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah = one "ha" for each hour I have wasted in similar situations in the recent past

it's just like....about as much fun as standing behind someone else as they play a video game that you've already beaten

totally! two days ago I spent several hours holding my co-worker's hand while he made a billing statement for a client because he needed to understand it himself

Any other teachers here actively avoid co-workers at all costs? I have to engage with some as a special education instructor, but my god do I try to get away from these immature, cliquey brats. Some people unfortunately get into this field because they have messianic complexes and think they’re capable of “saving” kids

dude goes to my manager asking why training invites for next Tuesday's class haven't gone out yet, saying he has people signed up who work atypical shifts so they can make arrangements with their families.

The time of training is always 9:00 am - 5:30 pm ET, has been for over a decade, and in addition to the fact that he's been signing people up for this class for years, the exact time of the class is listed explicitly at the top of the sign-up sheet, right below the dates of training. we never send invites further out than two days in advance because the roster changes so significantly in the week leading up.

our invites aren't supposed to be the first time the attendees learn of the dates/time, he himself was supposed to tell them after signing them up weeks ago. This is why people fail to show up on Day 1 sometimes.

I avoided my usual snark though so score one for me not being a dick like usual

AND (hilariously) one of our partner sites apparently has continued to connect to VPN with Citrix, which we phased out months ago for AWS Appstream. It hasn't been fully decommissioned yet, because there are other things besides VPN that it's used for which haven't transitioned yet, which explains why they can still get onto it, but 11 days from now, it will no longer be available.

kind of sad that we discovered this now because the hilarity of nobody being able to get online at this site in 11 days would have been a great popcorn moment.

One constant, in every single job I've had throughout my career, is that poor managers really cannot handle being asked for clarification of task priorities. Every single directive they come up with is a "A1 main priority" and you can consistently see their brain start to break down if you directly ask them which of the sixteen A1 priorities should be done first.

"buh buh buh buh all of them buh buh"

Case in point, since last Wednesday I've been handed six new "high priority" tasks to get done "ASAP" (naturally all of these on top of my normal workload). When being given the most recent this morning, I reminded the head of our department about the other five she had already put on my plate. I asked if there was a priority order within these six and was greeted by a blank stare for a good twenty seconds, as if I'd asked her to fly to Mars. Her ultimate response was, "all of them".

Gee, I can't fathom why people feel stretched too thin with low morale.

my manager's all over the place attention-wise, which I can relate to, but he's also relatively new to managing people so I can mention after (or during!) a meeting that he's said coworker A can work on three different things, and perhaps we should line those up in a backlog because none of them are fires needing fought and perhaps the large important task should get done first

xp - you should propose that they come up with a new priority category - "A1!" for things that are even bigger priorities than A1 priorities. You should send many emails regarding this new categorization system.

running out of patience for people who both don't turn banner notifications off in MS Teams and don't turn off email notifications in Outlook before leading a class. so I send them an email or a private message and inadvertently see it beamed in front of the entire class and have to ask them/show them how to turn them off during a break, and until I can do that, hold off sending PMs or emails until they're not screensharing.

Photo shoot today in the operations space. "Oh we'll stay out of the way, here's the shot list" immediately shifted to "can someone clear out this area that wasn't ever planned to be on camera and wash that wall?" Utter chaos.

oh that's ridiculous

that's pretty standard, sadly ... ugh

they gave me a 401(k) class to supervise this week and neither trainer knows 401(k) very well. one hasn't touched it in years, one I think only just learned it himself not that long ago.

gee, how do you think it is going. I have had to join to answer questions so many times people have mistaken me for a third trainer.

one said I had a radio voice this morning though so that was a nice compliment

xp - yeah, photoshoots are almost always shitshows. minor inconveniences at best, huge disruptions at worst. at my old firm we had a shoot scheduled for a Thursday that was supposed to just be head shots for our new website. turned into "candids" as well and they decided that my desk was located in one of the shots and, thus, had to be cleaned off and vacated for "a short bit". this turned into six and a half hours during which I couldn't work at my desk, despite having a huge deadline for the next morning at 8 a.m. ended up finally leaving that night at nearly midnight since it was essentially 6 pm before I could start my day.

Uuuugggghhhhhh that's awful.

We are supposed to do a headshots and group photo thing in two Fridays and I am so not looking forward to it.

v important q for u Jaq -- will you have the cats in the photo?!

OMG that would be amazing, I should bring all 7 for truly complete photoshoot chaos 😂

We have more than one fish microwaver and I genuinely thought that was the one office rule everyone knew. Why????

I could make a very crass joke re yr post ENBB but I will refrain lol ... I know I fought the pro-fish microwaving battle in the past, but I am no longer invested in it and understand why so many people are against it.

Global Security is trying to get a bunch of people who owe them a response in a security audit to respond. so in their infinite wisdom, they emailed all 300+ people on the same thread and asked them to respond.

and they're all replying all.

omg!!!!!!!!!

do any of them have sig files?

p much all

the predictable response from someone who replied all to tell everybody to stop replying all just happened.

oh the laughters out loud!

"hey, two people are getting this error message".

"cool, can you have them try this thing?"

*crickets*

"hi again, I didn't hear back, so here are three questions I have for you, and two things to try, if the issue hasn't resolved, can you answer these?"

"Hi Neanderthal, just confirmed these two learners are still having the issue, plus one additional person"

"so...you ignored my questions, and you didn't try any of the things I asked you to try?"

*crickets*

"cool, here once again are three questions I have for you, and two things to try, if the issue hasn't resolved, can you answer these?"

boy what a week.

we told this new hire to contact IT via web chat to report an issue. they'd inadvertently created a non-urgent online ticket instead of going through IT web chat, which means it will get shoved to the bottom of the priority pile. so I asked the trainer to have them report the issue to IT web chat.

he lets me know he's finished and shares the screenshot, which shows that he had her submit the ticket the exact same (wrong) way a second time. the option for chat is literally named "I want to request help via chat" and both of them inexplicably they picked the other option.

it is good to know that I am not the only one who has these type of people in my work-life

At the bar, I work with mostly great people. But one young woman, the youngest on the crew, gets slowly wine drunk all shift, disappears for long periods, ignores customers in favor of scrolling through her feeds, and shows up wild late and leaves early… yet tips are pooled, and since she is technically there for the same amount of time as the rest of us, she gets paid the same amount for doing much, much less work. Drives me up a wall, and it is driving my coworkers up a wall, too.

my coworker cannot keep track of her emails even on a good day, but when she travels it’s worse

she emails me to send her a proposal “in a ‘clean email’ so i can easily forward” (deep eyeroll from me bc that means now there’s going to be two chains for the same goddamn thing)

ok. so i do that. subject line clearly calling out HEY THIS IS THE THING YOU JUST ASKED FOR

two hours later, she replies on her original request “hey did you send this”?

me: yes, sent in a clean email like you asked (attaches clean email)

later:

her: ohhhh i didn’t see it thank you!

me: muffled screaming

I’ve worked for the same small business forever and it’s well documented on this thread that my boss was an incredibly frustrating person to work. She’s the kind of person who’s owned her own business since she was in her early 20s - she’s now about 65-70 - because in her own words she’s literally incapable of working for anyone else. Disorganized, scatterbrained, a poor communicator, etc etc.

Well, at the end of the last year she finally managed to convince someone to buy her failing business (she’s remortgaged her house multiple times over the 40+yrs of running this business, it hasn’t made a profit in god knows how long. RC is in her 30s, owns a couple other businesses, has long resume in event planning - she sounded like someone who was gonna come on board and really turn things around.

Nope.

I moved states in March and was obviously going to be quitting but RC wanted me to stay on remotely and help with the transition and some backend work online. It’s been so fuxking frustrating.
- She asks me the same questions repeatedly because she loses the info/doesn’t organize the info.
- despite having run two other businesses she doesn’t seem to grasp basic business concepts, like gross and net numbers.
- she never proofreads her texts and they’re often really garbled to the point that context isn’t even helpful.
- she overly complicates every single process. I created really efficient and readable spreadsheets for a couple of processes and she keeps putting info in the wrong fields, adding extraneous columns, not using a consistent format, creating extra spreadsheets requiring the same info to be added to multiple sheets in different ways.
- I had to train her and her business partner on how to do the dyeing, over the phone, because my replacement quit after a couple months because she couldn’t handle the job*. This was a NIGHTMARE. Dyeing is a very straightforward process but these two women - one of whom I’d trained in person several times, and had written out very clear instructions for - just couldn’t get a single fucking thing right.
- I have a million more complaints but I’ll leave it there.

*so the last 3yrs I’ve been hella depressed and my old boss was out of the country 6mo of the year so I was honestly barely working. Like I wouldn’t bother going in for 2 weeks (but I was still claiming hours worked). I legit worked maybe a third of the hours I was paid for. I figured I was gone look bad when I left and my replacement starting getting way more done in half the time. But the opposite happened - she was working twice as much and getting only about a third of the work done (and badly), so now everyone thinks I’m a rockstar. When you hate working you just get really good at making shit highly efficient and streamlined and don’t tell anyone.

she never proofreads her texts and they’re often really garbled to the point that context isn’t even helpful.
- she overly complicates every single process. I created really efficient and readable spreadsheets for a couple of processes and she keeps putting info in the wrong fields, adding extraneous columns, not using a consistent format, creating extra spreadsheets requiring the same info to be added to multiple sheets in different ways.

I feel sympathetic anger and frustration about this! ... There is a person at one of my jobs who is basically the same ... they want to learn financial stuff, like bookkeeping (my job), but they are just very not good at it. They were making these spreadsheets that were inconsistent, incorrect (info in wrong fields!), and apparently taking quite a while to do it ... So I came up with a simpler method to do what they had been doing, using the Project Management Software that everyone in that department uses, so that it would also be more efficient, and less likely that things are missing or wrong.

Now, this person, wanting to continue to be helpful, and further their learning, has now started making extraneous, inaccurate, and half-assed spreadsheets for other financial information.

I have showed this person how to export reports from the accounting software into spreadsheet format.
They said they understood.
They have now admitted, they did not understand how to create and export reports from the accounting software.
This is very user friendly accounting software with numerous tutorials and help menus.
This person apparently doesn't find those useful.

We’re just using google sheets, and the two main examples of problems are ridiculously simple - one is a sheet that tracks special orders (i.e. items not in stock in the store) for customers, and the other is sheet that sorts those orders by color so the workshop knows what needs to be dyed. The other problem is that there are 10 or so store staff and not a single one has managed to fill out the special order sheet correctly in 3 months. I go in and fix them every time, so now there are 70+ orders that are correct - they just have to look at any one of those 70 examples of how to do it right.

I understand some people just aren’t very smart but this is just lazy ignorance.

they just have to look at any one of those 70 examples of how to do it right.

<3 <3

this person's original effort at financial spreadsheets was tracking income from event rentals. They would regularly record the income in the "received" column before we actually received it. So there was no simple way of seeing who had not paid for their event. Some events require a deposit paid prior to the event itself. The amount of the deposit would not regularly get recorded.