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

lol

ha ha!
and exactly how many people have you told *that* story to?!

xpost

META ANECDOTE

But two coworkers plus ILX. Heh.

But to be fair, this coworkers' antics are one of my closest coworkers and my favorite topics of conversation so we get pretty excited when he does something new and noteworthy.

Not bitching, but this is weird: Our firm's main calendar has numerous entries like today's "L!nda bloodwork" and later in the week "Sh3rry Mammogram." We're supposed to write on the calendar when we're out of the office, but those details are way too much.

or you can pretend those are their full names

Or that they're stage names of a new medical-procedures-themed punk band.

Sh3rry is an older woman who seems very sweet. She has worked for various permutations of the firm's small town, downstate office for 20-some years. Sh3rry does or has done the following:

- Taken to writing entire emails in the subject line. Not only reasonable stuff like "Please call Joe" but also multi-sentence emails.

- Takes messages w/ only info that the caller volunteers b/c she doesn't "want to be rude" by asking too many questions (e.g. "May I tell him what the call is regarding?")

- Has two adopted Chinese children, but scornfully refers to other Asians "Those people." Also refers to parts of town as "too dark."

- Taken to writing entire emails in the subject line. Not only reasonable stuff like "Please call Joe" but also multi-sentence emails.

this is amazing, it's like collect-calling someone and trying to get an entire message into the space where you're supposed to say who's calling.

ha!

Jesse has shared some of this individual's actual phone messages with me and they are pretty amazing.

coworker (who is lazy, decitful,awful) has spent maybe a week telling everyone about her thumb, how sore it is, owwwwwww my thumb, what do you think's wrong with it (we all told her several days ago that it looked a little ingrown, maybe).

so she took two days off (even though we're currently insanely understaffed - lol public sector) with her ingrown thumbnail and came back with it rather comically bandaged and immediately launched into ooow my thumb i shouldn't reallly be back but i know how busy we are oooooow my thumb though i think i know now what a disabled person feels like (this to her harried coworker, whose 6 yr old's leg has been constantly breaking for the past 18 months due to a bone condition).

Response was "You're so unlucky, Mary, your poor thumb! And it the very first time you ever took it out out of your arse too"

Here is a subject line only email from Sh3rry that Jesse gave me permission to share:

"DID i MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?? TtHE NAME IS [client name] "

He also emailed me to tell me that she "has been sending firm-wide emails each time the firm receives a Christmas card."

ha ha!

lollll darragh

someone give that person a pay rise

(much love for Sh3rry too)

I found a whole transcribed phone message but there is too much detail to post it here. She did not include the person's last name, phone number, or the name of the company the person wants to sue, however, ending the transcription with "he might have said the company, but I didn't listen to the whole thing."

Darragh's coworker wins the snappy comeback award. Poor Mary.

"DID i MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?? TtHE NAME IS [client name] "

lolol - That's the one I was trying to remember. She wasn't being rude or pushy, she was just following up on an email she just sent, but she just sometimes accidentally hits caps lock.

xpost to darraghmac's thumb, person (similarly duplicitous & lazy) said he had liver trouble, and came in one day with... do you remember those very slender, quite short radio walkman antennnae? Very thin meaningless wires? He had one of those coming out of his nose, taped to his neck, going down under his t-shirt. But unfortunately you could see when he was typing that it wasn't actually connected to anything, was just flapping loose. Unfortunately no responses as good as that one.

so the company i work for is split between two coasts, and the vp of sales (on the east coast) insists on holding a weekly meeting at 9AM eastern. people on the west coast have repeatedly asked him to move the meeting, since it really sucks to wake up at 5:30AM, but he refuses. his boss (the CEO) thinks this is completely reasonable, since we're all salary employees. ugh.

Fuck that mindset. That VP and his boss are wrong, both from a business standpoint and in terms of human decency.

shitheads

you should ask to schedule a meeting at 4:30pm PST

we've thought of doing that, but every meeting with this d-bag goes on for two hours (he's a talker, he is), so we'd end up being there late too. my solution was just to stop going to the meeting, and since my boss is on the west coast too, she's cool with it. it still annoys me on principle, though.

well, sounds like the problem is solved either way (not going).

seriously tho - what a douchebag thing to do.

Who the hell wants to have a meeting at 9 AM anyway?

Type-A's without any hint of sleep issues and an inability to imagine that anyone might be worthwhile or successful that isn't exactly the same as themselves.

Its ok most of those types end up divorced and then dead at 60 of a heart attack anyway.

he's 61 and just got married! in fact, he sold the CEO on making his wife a [position of employment] for the [country] sales division. tan. lives in [place]. mustache. republican. huge [sports team] fan.

well that's crystal clear :)

might have been redacted slightly

mustache is pretty much all you need to know

OMG IT'S RON BURGUNDY

I'm starting to feel like I need anger managment therapy. I'm 2 months through a 3 month notice period and I'm going insane.

They want me to document everything because I'm the only one left who knows half the system (they already alienated everyone else who did, they all quit last year or the year before, I was too lazy/settled to get around to leaving at the same time, although it's been total crap at my company for about 2 years, this is my punishment for laziness I guess), but they can't stop bugging me about other things, giving me more work to do which should probably go to the person who's taking over from me (with me available to help them if they get stuck), etc.

I'm probably lucky they haven't fired me yet given I've basically insulted everyone who works in any kind of management position on a regular basis.

fizzles' liver-wire story made me genuinely lol. tempted to try it myself, to be honest

"It's just funny going to the Asian market downstairs and hearing the strains of Johnny Cash walking the line."

It's not an Asian market. It's a convenience store. They don't sell anything remotely Asian there. You go there to buy diet coke. The owners are Asian-Americans. If you owned a convenience store, it wouldn't be an Irish-American market.

Also, more than just white people can like Johnny Cash.

James, the problem with the liver wire was it was very difficult to work out what such a flimsy piece of apparatus could possibly doing that would require it to be fitted. If you're going to give it a go, can I suggest a an actual piece of tubing (rather than clock-radio aerial)? Also, don't use masking tape to affix it to the side of your neck. Lay in some medical-looking stuff - translucent or something.

I mean even before the lol of seeing that it wasn't really joined to anything, there was the immediate scepticism of 'this person has a long record of telling fibs and swinging the lead - tho this is next level tbqf'.

(Good example of fib - he once told a group of us that one of his aunties had won the lottery. Then about half a year later he told us that his auntie had won the lottery, which was greeted with 'Another one!'. His response? A look of brief confusion then, 'Yes, that's what everyone said, amazing isn't it?'

I mean, it's basically pitiable and funny, although I also didn't talk to him for about two years because it is also boring and annoying. The bus he used to get home in the evening used to be called The Big B___ Bus of Bullshit, because of the Preposterous Tales you'd be subjected to on the way home.

I mean, I generally like to have a default setting of believing what people say, but this guy was something else.

If somebody is going to be completely full of shit, I would prefer them to be completely full of shit about interesting things so I can say, "Yes, this is surely false, but my world is so much interesting if it's true and so I chose to believe."

Did anyone call this dude on the wire?

No, none of us (his colleagues) did. Really wouldn't have been worth the fuss iirc. The manager at that time was so ineffectual that he wouldn't have said anything. But the general ambience of contempt and laughter it provoked meant he didn't come in with it again.

He never did anything quite so egregious again, until recently when a heavily worked/airbrushed/photoshopped profile photo of him on facebook appeared and people were incredulous when he was showing it off, because he kept saying 'Amazing isn't it? It must have just been a trick of the light'.

This dude sounds awesome.

Not stupid or annoying, but just found another coworker in my division is resigning. Thats the second one in less than a month, leaving the rest of us with a huge workload. So stressed out.

Two guys among my group resigned in August and we still haven't replaced them, largely due to a combination of red tape and office politics. I've been told that I'm supposed to replace one of the guys (i.e. get a promotion), but we have to hire for the other position first, because it really is a more essential role. So we've been overworked for 6 months and I've been left hanging on this promotion for six months. I feel your stress.

wow. that wire story is something else.

Having just sent round the new set of business cards I designed following a logo change, I was asked "Why can't we have ATTRACTIVE cards?", to which I replied "I'll design attractive cards when we have attractive workers." -- a reply I was quite proud of until I saw I had emailed Reply to ALL

liver wire man is gonna get srsly ill for reals one day and no one will believe him.

aw shit james

a reply I was quite proud of until I saw I had emailed Reply to ALL

ohhhhhhh no! I hope you dont end up in the paper or something! ;P

pet peeve: when someone "corrects" a word and is completely wrong.

example, i had a sentence that read "Care should be taken so that our work complements the efforts of our sister branch." An edited version comes back an hour that says "Care should be taken so that our work complements compliments the efforts of our sister branch."

sigh. not a big deal, but it happens all the time, and always ends with either a) a quick visit to dictionary.com or b) the other person "agreeing" with me but the look on the face suggests that they're just letting me get my way to save me face

One photographer I deal with called her business "Photo's by _______". I pointed out the error and she was pretty pissed off. "I'm not changing it -- I already have my business cards printed."

ha ahha hahaaa.