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

calls out CONSTANTLY with no remorse and for reasons that are confirmed bullshit (he'll be "sick" but then come in later that day to buy a sandwich or be at another co-workers house just hanging out talking about how he doesn't want to go to work)

had someone who would do this years ago when i worked at a very busy ice cream shop. remember one time she called in sick and we had to call in someone to cover for her; he really didn't want to, but he took the bullet. an hour later, he's taking her order.

Bloody hell. Sure, take a sickie, but... to actually go in and prove that you're not sick, that just seems... incredibly stupid?

I worked at one place with a lot of flaky students and one time one of the boss guys played us this really apologetic voicemail message one of them had left, calling in sick with diarrhea but then not hanging up the phone properly and going 'do you think that sounded convincing? diarrhea's always convincing because no-one would say it otherwise, right??'

I guess they do but apparently, the DL scoop is that the whole week he called out was bcz he was in withdrawal from quitting Subutex so I think he might have played the "boo hoo I was in serious shit and I'm trying to get better" card, and I almost wanted to feel sorry for him but he's such an awful person otherwise that I just can't. Apparently it's damn near impossible to get fired from this job

so i've been at my new job for over a month, but i'm still feeling very bitter and angry about my old job. i just need to let go, but at random times of the day, i'll think about how awful it was and just get mad for a few minutes before i'm able to reassure myself that my new situation is amazing and literally has no drawbacks compared to my old situation. i guess it will fade away with enough time, but still - i wasn't expecting it.

When did you get a new situation??

a month and a half or so ago. it's a great job in the city working for a super nice guy making a really fun product.

I have a friend who had a terrible job where they treated her like garbage and it took her a year to get over it. I think when you spend eight hours + each day in a situation where you are stressed and angry and mentally sieged, you're using so many resources just to get by, and when that stress is taken away, there's something like PTSD left behind. It probably will fade with time, but if the bitter angriness starts to get in the way of you truly enjoying your new job, I think it's reasonable to seek counseling on the issue.

I guess what I'm mostly saying is that those kinds of feelings are pretty normal after leaving a terrible job. And congrats on your new situation!

I just went through this very same thing. I've been at my new job for over 3 months now and am happy to report the crushing negativity is pretty much gone now. But in the 1st month I found myself still getting wound up over tiny things and even considered quitting over basically nothing. Now I'm settling in well and the previous few years of stupid annoyingness are becoming a memory.

I'm no industrial psychologist but I seriously think people get mild PTSD after leaving a shitty job. I'm thinking that when I finally get out of my current job, I'm going to have to check myself in for a stint in a residential program.

Am really fed up with my job -- it should be a cycle of 4 weeks light duty and 4 weeks heavy duty, but it's a cycle of 6.5 weeks light duty and 10 days of blind deadline panic. Workday is 6 a.m. to midnight all this week.

Picked a bad week to stop sniffing glue and arguing politics with my brother in law.

i spent four days in a nightmare job right out of college and i'm not sure i'm over it yet, six years later

Jesus what did they do to you!?

so here's some of the beef i had with my last job a la thread to get over a breakup(the "you" below is four separate people i'm rolling into one):
- you acted like the office was a frat, and i was forced to choose between playing along and losing all self-respect, or resisting and being labeled a problem, ostracized, and possibly fired.
- you gave me tons of shit about supporting the hiring of a female coworker you didn't find very attractive.
- you called a different female coworker "torpedo tits" all the time behind her back, even though i told you that was bullshit, and even after i told you that she had breast cancer and reconstructive surgery. you did, however, accuse me of "ruining your night" when i told you the breast cancer thing.
- you would call and demand 100 things right after sitting down on a plane, and before i could explain why your demands were unrealistic, you told me that you had to go, since you just sat down on a plane.
- you forced me to cut all kinds of corners on product development just so you could hit deadlines, and you would get mad when i would refuse to sweep known product defects under the rug.
- you would act all genial and great and fun and whatever, and then as soon as a meeting started, you would just start yelling at me and my team, because you could, because you're head of sales and without a sales department "we might as well all go home."
- not a single person in upper management was willing to entertain the idea that constant yelling, tantrum throwing, and in-fighting was bad for the company.
- even for tiny mistakes, all four of you would take separate turns making sure i knew how bad i fucked up.
- you would call me to complain about things i had done wrong 6 months prior, just to remind me how important it is not to make mistakes like that.
- when i completed a certain giant project to high accolades from multiple coworkers, you told me you could have done a better job and then used your power as CEO to forbid anyone else from using it.
- you hired three new people, told me i should help coordinate their jobs, train them, and oversee their work, but paid me 20% less than those people.
- when i finally left over my frustration with the above bullet point, you told a coworker i was making the biggest mistake of my life, and then emailed the whole company with, "ytth has left to take a new position of increasing responsibility, albeit at a much smaller company."
- you think the company is a great place to work.

you forgot the bit about
- they made you and other salaried workers come in on weekends to do the jobs of the hourly-paid staff, so they wouldn't have to spend extra

- and the CEO refused to address you directly after you gave notice

even just reading the above is making steam shoot out of my ears xxpost

Oh god, that sounds like a nightmare.

And I sincerely hope, somewhere in his/her black little soul, the "torpedo tits" commenter is positively on fire with shame, for belittling a cancer victim, what in the actual christ.

he felt bad about it for like a day and then started up with the name again later, but mostly with other people. see the above part about "resisting" and becoming a problem.

that list is only a tiny percentage of the shit he endured for 5 years

and also that guy's aunt died of breast cancer

I'm trying to fix a piece of writing for publication and the original is so bad and nonsensical and legally incorrect in a really obvious way that I can't fix without torpedoing the entire thing. It's making my head hurt.

Ugh yes, similar thing happened to me last week. I'd gathered a bunch of data around E3 in early June, then for some reason the data was given to the interns to make into an 'infographic' that we could post on the company blog (the interns are not there to do graphics). Their end product was eventually given back to me with instruction to fix it. Not only was it graphically poor (no corporate/professional blog would ever dare claim it as their own) but half of the little blurbs they'd written based on the data were factually incorrect. Brilliant use of everyone's time, that -- could've saved both interns a full work day had it just been given to me in the first place (and it would've been ready in time to be relevant instead of being completed two weeks after E3 finished). Felt kind of bad for the interns being told to work on that project to begin with, think they were a bit out of their depth.

a while back a friend of mine was translating something from french for academic publication, except it turned out she wasn't really translating, she was merely editing the esl prose. great! except it became evident that it had been largely fed through google translate, and it turned out there wasn't a french original. the border between editing and co-authoring quickly disappears.

new annoying but also creepy coworker:

our new driver is sort of the worst. he started this week and he's already gotten on the bad side of at least half the female staff. we've had this problem before with one guy just hitting on all the women constantly: the old GM fired him, the new GM hired him back. fortunately the new GM is gone soon but who knows who's replacing him.

on a less important note, he doesn't really seem to understand things. me and another driver will be trying to coordinate tomorrow's huge giant orders, trying to get everything organized and he's just hindered us at every step. we'll tell him exactly what the plan is and how we're going to do it (and i'm talking micro-tasks like "moving these boxes over here for now") and he seems to understand and happily agrees, and then does the complete opposite. he speaks and understands english better than half our employees and they'd all understand what we meant anyway.

also he just doesn't leave. he'll stick around and keep working hours after managers tell him to clock out. he was still there an hour into my second shift yesterday (and he took one of my orders before i even knew it existed). i asked him why he won't clock out and he goes "yes, i'm still here because i get what i want." i had to inform him that they're going to cut his hours off if he gets close to making overtime. it's hard to talk to him about anything seriously because he's always so smiley and bubbly!

on a much more important note, he was talking to a girl on the phone and said this exact quote: "i hate it when you say you're scared of me. if you say you're scared of me again i'll kill myself." WELP

"i hate it when you say you're scared of me. if you say you're scared of me again i'll kill myself."

jesus christ

Well, here's hoping he's a man of his word! And that he won't want to take anyone with him when he goes.

woah, thats a real One Hour Photo vibe right there

I can definitely vouch for the job PTSD. I just had my one year anniversary at new job but from time to time I still find myself reacting unnecessarily (internally, not in interactions with peole) to things some people do because I was so conditioned to awfulness.

Xpost that guy sounds scary!

that is creepy but i think we're all glossing over the fact that trayce made a "one hour photo" reference

My boss replies to emails pretending to be me. Urghhhhhhh.

lol what was wrong with my ref?

My boss replies to emails pretending to be me. Urghhhhhhh.

Can you send an email to your boss to stop fucking doing that with their name at the bottom?

That was my first thought too!

guys

no stupid annoying co-worker problems to report in a whole week

btw i abbreviated stupid annoying coworkers there but caught it just in time

I decided against dealing with the issue via email over the weekend, which means I have to confront it in person today! Eeek. I hate confrontation. But I hate someone pretending to be me even more. I think...

Don't apologize for confronting them and don't argue with them. Just tell them how you feel and that you want them to stop. #justcamebackfromacourse /annoyingpatronisingbusybody

Geez, I have annoyances in the workplace, but "torpedo tits" and a frat party atmosphere isn't one of them. Among them is organizing and editing and updating the old boss' files - like procedure manuals that are ten years old. Turnover is so high around here that I am one of the few underlings who understands the documents. Work here long enough and you're expected to know everyone else's job...

Relevant to krakow: http://www.askamanager.org/2012/04/my-boss-is-using-my-email-account-to-impersonate-me.html

Wow, what a weird, unprofessional practice. Aren't there laws against this sort of thing? I guess if the business is small enough, people think they can get away with anything.

I can't imagine that happening anywhere I have worked. It is not only harassment, it is bad for general morale and bad management. That boss would be fired immediately!

Background: I'm crazy busy at work. Everybody who has the job I have is almost always crazy busy. Also I used to be a union steward but quit a couple of years ago because this local is run by power-mad idiots.

So a coworker who might be a steward, or is maybe just active in the union, came in to our office yesterday and handed me a stack of 30 pages - a print out of a senate bill and the legislation it's supposed to create - and asked me to read that over and let me know what I thought because other people have read it and she thinks they are reading it wrong. It's got something to do with pension reform or health insurance or something, I don't know or care. I told her I was really busy and probably wouldn't have a chance and she put it on my desk and told me to get to it when I got to it and give her a call.

And I know this lady and $10 says this is just some pointless pissing match she decided to get into with some other ding dong in the union, because that's pretty much all they do - have pissing matches over inconsequential bullshit and misappropriate funds.

I'm not going to read it, but I'm just annoyed that I told her no and she ignored me.

I've posted about this before but I cannot express how unbelievably, massively postal I am getting over the unceasing noise of my boss sitting behind me, open-mouthedly crunching loudly on fucking rice crackers ALL DAY LONG. Like she seriously dips into her little plastic bucket, rattles around in it then slowly noisily munches away, at least 3 times a day. I get uncontrollably tense hearing the noise and have to put my headphones on. Uuuughhh.

OH NO! you'll have to listen to ~music~! horrible horrible music!

;p

quiet you!

Well, I didn't get my promotion after all. I thought I was a shoe-in!

Again, it's not my nature to be bitter, it just seems to be the system that people get turned down for promotions and jobs and it should be "understood" why.

But to be passed over by someone I know isn't that talented and doesn't work very hard and is simply good at calling attention to herself kind of hurts. I actually got told by my boss that it was because I don't "sell" myself. I was taught growing up that you had to work really hard to deserve anything, that it wouldn't be handed to you. That hard sell was arrogant and aggressive and entitled.

Again, maybe I have the problem and need to improve my skill sets.

No, I think any reasonable human has contempt for the person who sends out an e-mail to announce that they've completed some minor task. Unfortunately bosses are not reasonable humans for the most part

showing as idle for literal hours on communicator while working from home.

I've had to explain to my line manager no less than four times what my working arrangement is this summer: "three days a week, Wednesday to Friday." I even sent a little colour-coded calendar to show the days I will work. Twice. This has been going on for like a month now. At one point he told payroll that I'd be working 4-5 days each week in July (I think this was after the second time I told him I wanted to do max three days per week).
WTF seriously. It's not that confusing is it??

Sometimes I with this thread was on 77 and then I realise it's probably for the best that it isn't. I would just complain all. the. time.