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

So that nutty security guard who washes her keys? I'm walking down the hall today and she stops me to express surprise and pleasure that I'm wearing a skirt (fact: I wear skirts or dresses ~90% of the time), tells me I should wear skirts more often (like, in the shower?) and then caps it with, "I wish I had big legs like that."

Doesn't everybody, though?

Wow. In case it wasn't mentioned earlier, this security guard washes her bags of chips in the nasty public bathroom sink.

wait, waht

She buys bags of chips from the vending machine.
She takes the chips into the bathroom and washes the exterior of the bags with soap and water before she opens them.

Once as I was leaving the bathroom behind her she turned around and went back in muttering, "I forgot to wash my keys."

She puts newspaper down before she sits on chairs. All chairs, including the one she exclusively occupies.

That all makes her sound too sympathetic. I mean, I don't wish her any ill but her weirdness extends far, far beyond potential OCD behaviors. Like, I could write you a ten page treatise on her wig choices alone.

She's wearing this long, straight wig today that is mostly notable for being constantly cock-eyed, but my favorite is her long, curly red hooker wig. She's a church going grandmother, btw, who endlessly sings hymns in the bathroom. In her curly hooker fetish store wig.

Oh she also always wears two pairs of pants and starts the process of unfastening them in the very public hallway outside the bathroom.

And she does some weird chinchilla dust bath thing with dry paper towels in the accessible stall where she'll take two huge piles of tri-fold paper towels from the dispenser into the stall and do go knows what but its like nonstop paper rustling and hymn singing for at least ten straight minutes.

I mentioned she's the security guard, right?

Once a very very old coworker of mine collapsed in the bathroom and I found her and called the security guard and told her to dial the emergency number for our building and she proceeded to run back and forth across the bathroom threshold calling "JESUS CHRIST! OH JESUS!" and was still helpfully engaging in hysterical prayer when somebody else came along to keep an eye on the collapsed woman and I could go call the emergency number myself.

I think she needs her own thread.

Sales boss and sales person currently having shouting match in closed door office, which we can all notice. Overheard snippet of "you're always like this, you have a go at me EVERY SINGLE DAY"... can't blame the guy tbh. Said boss is a snide, rude, unfunny "dry-humoured" English asshole.

"English" would suffice

Two pairs of pants? Is one pair like PJ pants? Livin the dream if so.

training this week's going great, but this one utter dolt on the team that nobody likes (and few know what he actually does) emails me (and CCs the project manager) on this deliverable that my group hasn't even agreed to do yet (and if we do, it won't be me, more than likely)...and he basically says "we need to get moving on this now. What will your role be?".

I was tempted to send him a pic of an animated bear shrugging, but everybody told me to just ignore him.

Pants: she wears a security guard uniform over street clothes.

I think she needs her own thread.

She wears 2 sets of clothes!?

She sounds like she has some..erm... rather serious problems?

I'm in an exam room with a patient who is standing around in his underwear when my coworker knocks on the door. I yell, "one moment!" and continue to evaluate the dude. She knocks again, pops her head in and tells me it can't wait. I excuse myself and step outside. The big emergency? She was running to Starbucks and wanted to get my coffee order.

I don't even drink coffee.

omg

Yeah thats not on. Actually that reminds me, of a witnessed co-worker suck I guess. I was in the waiting room at my physiotherapists, and one of the head older physios came out, and proceeded to rudely, loudly chew out the receptionist in full earshot of all of us in the waiting room, for disturbing him while with another patient. The guy was pissy at some other patient who'd apparently turned up late, he was all "five minutes late is LATE, its not good enough, I dont care if he's sitting in his car stressing out, do NOT disturb me with a patient again do you understand!?"

He was so rude I almost wanted to make a complaint. I just sat there quietly glad he isnt my actual physio.

(he's done it again since, I think I now know why the receptyionist seems to change every few months).

OMG. The woman today that is walking around the entire office letting each and every person know just how much of a trooper she is for coming in when she is "sooooo sick" and "feeling absolutely awful", while she sneezes, coughs, and generally spreads sickness everywhere. No one is impressed, stay the fuck home next time.

someone put letterhead paper in the printer (one I don't use) and while I'm waiting for my print job to come out, she's like hmmm there's fancy paper in this one. is it supposed to be like that? and i'm like oh yeah, that's probably a mistake, and she says hmm, someone should change it and then she walks away. ugh. why don't you just change it? everyone in this office is like this. so i just changed it.

Ugh, why are architects so stupid? We got a call this morning from a (potential, not current) client asking us to do a rush exercise to create some marketing materials for a presentation they have this Thursday, as in just a couple days from now. In their infinite wisdom, the powers that be have decided we'll do this for free, "just in case they ever decide to bring us work in the future". WTF kind of business plan is this? Its annoying. I realize the market is still shaky, but giving away your services is not the solution.

agghhh. my colleague NEVER gives me a clear idea of the task she wants me to do. I read her emails where she asks me to do something, and unless it's something very simple like "update the website with x", it's always EXTREMELY confusing. I can't even pinpoint where I don't understand what she's saying. Maybe her language is too vague? And she sent me this email 5 minutes before she leaves for the weekend, and no response to the clarification questions I immediately sent. How am I supposed to do what you want me to do if you can't even tell me clearly and aren't around to answer my questions about it?

she sent me an email once while she was on holiday, forwarding me an email saying "can you please take care of this", and I have absolutely no context or knowledge of what was being requested, and my entreaties for more background info went unmet. Ugh.

and my entreaties for more background info went unmet

I'd just make sure I CCed my boss into all such entreaties so as to cover my arse

not co-workers, but a fucking CLIENT.

when we train call centers, we always give our clients the ability to call in and "test" the representatives knowledge. We also do our own internal testing. This is done using a controlled environment, with scripts, and specific answers we are looking for. The testing comes at the end of training, and is one way of measuring the readiness of teh representatives.

As a result, we always tell our contacts not to ad lib, because that kills the 'controlled' environment, and makes calibrating the results more difficult. In addition, sometimes they throw out a question that would not be confusing in a real life environment, but that would be in a controlled test environment (example forthcoming)...or they ask an invalid question that the representative couldn't realistically find the answer to.

We had our first round last week, and it went well, so I was expected similar success, as the training went very well. Within minutes of today's client session starting, though, it was clear that something was amiss. One of the client contacts went completely off book and started asking "trick" questions about other services that this call center didn't handle (and the correct answer was presumably to offer to transfer the call to the right place). Now, in real life, those representatives would know to transfer that call or give them the correct number to call. But since it was a test environment, they all thought that it was a REAL LIFE call that got misrouted, since they weren't supposed to be getting calls like that, so they all got confused as to what to do.

In addition, one of the callers asked a question that I had specifically omitted from the question bank because there was no possible way for the representatives to answer it as the test software didn't have the necessary information in the test environment...and there was also a tool we were building for our representatives that wasn't done yet. If I'd known they planned to ask this question, I could have put together a 'temporary' means of getting the info to them, but when they went rogue, obviously I couldn't.

One caller adlibbed a question that we don't have the answer to because THEY NEVER FUCKING GAVE THE INFORMATION TO US (and it's not something we should be expected to know ANYWAY).

I don't know if this was their attempt at playing "gotcha", to ask 'off' questions to see if we were truly ready, but if so, this is NOT the way to do it. Now they pretty much rattled the representatives unnecessarily, and made it impossible to truly assess the individual reps since they sabotaged the calls.

I was so angry I left before the 'feedback' came in because I was raging too much and was afraid I'd say something nonprofessional. Any 'negative' feedback would be a joke -- how can you broadside someone and then turn around and complain about it? And even if they don't, and give us 'weighted' feedback in light of the problems, they've rendered the whole exercise useless. It's no-win either way.

Frustrating as it was a great training class and I enjoyed teaching them, and hate that it has to end on a sour note.

Basically it was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=NYgrHQVBWb0#t=463s

I THINK THERE'S BEEN A RAPE UP THERE

love that Office episode lol

Ugh, my boss has asked me to send out a generic sales email to a bunch of existing and potential advertisers. I hate becoming a spammer.

If someone is going to send out an email announce the death of a coworker's parent, maybe compose a subject line like, "Death of Bob Smith, Court Reporter Jill Smith's Father" AND NOT "Death of Court Reporter Jill Smith Father Bob Smith." (sic)

While I'm at it, my boss is notorious for projecting his Irish Catholicness on to everyone around, ie just presuming that all white people are Irish Catholic (and all people who aren't white are Catholic and wish they were Irish). So I'm eating leftovers at my desk and let's not even get into how annoying it is for him to decide this is a great time to come over and talk to me about work, but anyway, the leftovers consist of braised kale, roasted potatoes, and roasted chicken. He looks at my food and says, "Oh, you've got a little corned beef and cabbage leftover from St. Patrick's day!"

Is this guy actually Irish or is he American?

That's not how (Irish-)Americans think....

LOL yeah, he is an American of Irish descent living in Chicago, which is kind of a whole different thing than being from Ireland or being American and of Irish descent somewhere else (except probably Boston).

That's part of what's so damned irritating about it. He's at least third, maybe fourth generation American. And statistically, white people in Chicago are more likely to be Polish than Irish. But he looks at the world through giant, green, shamrock-shaped novelty sunglasses.

Plastic Paddy.

I'm American but I grew up around Irish immigrants, so this is irritating....although it's usually someone who never had a living Irish relative that acts this way.

We barely celebrate St. Patrick's Day in my family. Not that we hate it or something.

I am getting dumped on again just because I have experience with something that my co-workers don't. However, it is not in my job description. Fortunately for them, I am more than happy to do it for the experience and personal enrichment...however I am not being compensated for it. It's just that it keeps happening...I talked to my boss about it a long time ago and she said it wouldn't happen again, and then it does.

Tell them that you're too busy to doing your actual job to do this thing that in no way helps you. They'll soon find someone else to do it when they realise that you aren't. Though I guess you've done that already, right?

does anyone ever get compensated extra for using skills not directly mentioned in their job description?

My job description is so vague it could encompass anything, I basically take it to mean "do what you're told unless it's a daft idea, occasionally think up some ideas of your own for other people to dismiss as daft"

NotEnough, the thing is, I love doing it and it does help me. If it doesn't get done, it won't get done. It is not my boss or my office mates, it is a management problem. They need to create a new position to do this job and they won't or don't have the funds, so they use people like me who only had college coursework in this area (I have minimal professional experience in this area). So, it's like, I have to take a chill pill and do it.

The thing is, it's against official policy to have people like me doing this particular task, which is supposed to be done by a professional.

We have one printer between about sixty people. It's a nuisance to have to wait for documents sometimes but it's generally ok as long as people are vaguely considerate.

We've had someone hot-desking with us recently who spent this morning running off 15 copies of an 800-page document. Leaving aside the fact that it'll probably end up costing us about two grand, who does that at 10am in the morning?

She's printed off half a dozen novels as well and hasn't bothered to go and collect them. I can just about accept that if you work for a publisher you might need to read e-books occasionally (even rapey Twilight fanfic, apparently) but print them overnight when other people aren't actually in the office. Or get a Kindle!

OMG is the document for work? Otherwise wait until the end of the work day. With that level of work, outsource that stuff or you need a print department!

Nothing worse than feeling like the office rat, you end up feeling petty. But that is so rude!

Yes, i think it's work-related but we have people they can outsource things to and the printers can be set up to run overnight!

I can't even begin to full articulate this complaint without putting more details than I'm comfortable with on line and also boring you all with the minutia of my boring job, but suffice it to say, I cannot compete a time sensitive task because of utter incompetence/laziness at four different points along this particular file's journey.

It's also going to make me look bad in the end because the powers that be track things by raw numbers with no ability (or understanding) of the nuances of those raw numbers.

OMG people who collect stuff "for future use" and then...let it sit there. Which just so happens to be part of my job as a support staffer - file the crap that will be used later.

The problem is we also have co-workers like ShariVari has, and the files become so enormous that we don't have room! I own ONE filing cabinet...and it has to be accessible to my boss, so it can't be crammed with nonsensical documents.

The backlog got so bad I boxed up the ephemeral shit and took it home, where it sits in boxes in my basement (with the tacit permission of my boss, who is not amused by hoarding behavior). I figure if they need the documents in the future, I'll bring them in.

Also, people who make five copies of something trivial when at most you need two copies.

That's so weird that your boss let you take them home. It seems like it should be your boss's responsibility to 1) find a place to put these documents; or 2) instruct people on what to save. I mean, what happens if your basement floods or there's a fire?

just presuming that all white people are Irish Catholic (and all people who aren't white are Catholic and wish they were Irish

denial imo, denial and envy

but print them overnight when other people aren't actually in the office.

Not really feasible unless someone's willing to hang around overnight adding paper and toner to the machine. But office printers really aren't made to handle 12,000 page output jobs. This should have gone to a copy shop, where they'd probably do it for $500-600... $1000 tops.

xpost to carl - they're like book and CD reviews and stuff that one could find in an electronic database or even on the web. The only reason we keep paper copies is because we write notes on them and it's easier to send a photocopy to another department than to e-mail pdf's. Plus web pages and even electronic databases get updated or deleted.

WmC, that is true, you can't print an 800-page novel overnight unless you have a large machine! But it's not my business how large someone's copier is.

However, I have often stayed past 5 when I need to print off some large documents (not 800 pages, though).

800 pages isn't THAT huge a print job.

Not for Kinko's or a print department certainly...