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

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.

isn't that a good thing if he wants you to be on payroll for four days, while you work only three?!

STOP CORRECTING HIM IMMEDIATELY!

^^
"Oh, I figured after our second conversation it had been cleared up. I don't look at my paystubs closely"

"... or go ahead, it's not like you'd notice anything."

Some kindly mod deindexed this thread a few days ago, so while it's not on 77, it isn't searchable if that helps.

This afternoon I went to have coffee with a coworker who is neither stupid nor annoying and of whom I am quite fond. On the way back, we tried to catch an elevator (as I've mentioned before, the elevators in our building are notoriously slow and awful so people go to great lengths to grab one when it's available) and she stuck her hand between the doors at the last minute and the door shut on her hand. She was so laid back about it, I thought she was just fucking around. I'm all "Haha you are funny!" And she just smiled and really calmly said, "No, my hand is actually stuck." I had to grab her wrist with both hands and give it a good tug, but I pulled her hand out. She shook it off, literally, and we got in the next elevator and went back to talking about whatever work bullshit we had been talking about when she nearly lost a hand.

She just now showed me a nasty red mark on her arm and said that she's weirdly calm under pressure and that she probably won't freak out about what happened until sometime later tonight.

Like, I didn't really get how stuck she was until I saw her hand. She was really stuck! But she was so fucking chill about it.

With the addition of this incident, in the last couple years I've seen somebody get hit by a car, somebody fall face first into a stationary train (and lay there dazed and bleeding at my feet until the ambo came), somebody who fell face first into a revolving door, and somebody who got his foot stuck between the train and the platform (mind the gap, motherfucker!). Those last two happened in the last two or three months.

I need people to stop having near-horrific accidents in my vicinity. It's making me jumpy.

stay away from me!

I want to stay away from me! After the last two, I am so careful about watching my feet I'm probably going to walk into a pole and die of a closed head injury.

I walked into a pole once. I was perving on a guy at the time :/

Ugh everyone at work seems to have the dumb today.

boss: "can you guys make sure you dont leave the meeting room in a mess when you leave it? Theres tissues (?) and mess on the table and the TV is all out of place bla bla"
workmate, bafffled: "we didn't move the tv at all, and we didnt bring anything into the meeting room to have been left a mess, huh?"
boss: "just dont do it again"

lol wtf

then 5 mins later
workmate: "please send me the list of customers affected by the migration"
me: "what, the list in the document i just sent you in the email you're replying to?"

*head goes on desk here*

chinese food at your desk? Srsly?

Someone in our office microwaved popcorn this morning and I feel I now have an insight into the pain jon was suffering for so long upthread. Thankfully it only stank out the kitchen and not the office itself, but yeuch if I had to smell that 3 times a day I would probably have to quit.

Summer interns are getting on my nerves. It is a design and photographic publisher and they are two stereotypical child psychology major types. Academically, their background is a little lightweight for what we do. We don't edit children's textbooks.

Either their academic advisor plays golf with HR or HR felt sorry for them for their lack of qualifications.

chinese food at your desk? Srsly?

where do you expect me to eat it when it's 3.30 and has become apparent that I'm not going to get an actual break tbh

I'm a regular desk eating offender, I admit, but so is my office mate so I assume we're all good.

a guy two cubes down is in the middle of an expletive-ridden 5 minute+ monologue rant on a hypothetical situation that he invented. we're in the midst of workforce attrition - for every 2 people who leave, we can only hire one new employee. angry guy says "you know what's going to happen? 5 managers leave, they fill their 5 positions and fire 10 staff! and these shithead managers will have no one to manage! they don't actually do any fucking work themselves! they...etcetcetc"

COWORKER WALKING DOWN THE HALL WHISTLING THE ANDY GRIFFIN SHOW THEME SONG AS LOUD AS YOU CAN: THAT IS NOT CUTE. IT IS DUMB AND ANNOYING. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU SUCK.

Maybe s/he is still in mourning, jeez.

COWORKER WALKING DOWN THE HALL WHISTLING THE ANDY GRIFFIN SHOW THEME SONG AS LOUD AS YOU CAN: THAT IS NOT CUTE. IT IS DUMB AND ANNOYING. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU SUCK.

this is me.

I hate to tell you this, but you suck.

tbf I'm trying to finish writing a thing that has been annoying and elusive for a couple of days and shrill whistling that continued on for far longer than necessary sent me a little over the edge.

My dog loves Andy Griffith for some reason. He watches the whole show. But what is up with obsessive compulsive.

Aww. My Grandparents' cockatiel used to whistle that theme all the time; I've been trying to teach my own bird for the last year but he's having a lot of trouble.

I would never whistle at work but people hum at work all of the time, which doesn't bother me, but some people think it's low class.

When I was a kid my best friends' parents had been in a concentration camp as a child, and they said the guards used to whistle. After they told me that, I developed a huge complex about being a white Christian American.

I don't think I ever whistled again, it would conjure images of work camps and chain gangs!

One of the janitors at my last job used to whistle "Patience" by Guns 'n' Roses all the time but he would always mess it up!

My family would have whistling contests when I was little. Italians hum, sing, whistle around the house all of the time! But to this day I'm scarred by whistling!

I'm not opposed to whistling in general. This unknown coworker was whistling SUPER LOUD while walking down a hall lined with offices where people are writing things and it just struck me as an affectation, plus it was rude.

usually i just hum, or go "do-de-do de doooo"

i usually clap my hands way above my head like i'm at a U2 concert in Europe in 1989

<3 ZS you are amazing

That's true, whistling in an office environment is a bit chirpy. I guess I've heard janitors or delivery people do it, but I'm not class biased. But if you're not doing manual labor, you're a desk jockey it's a bit weird.

One co-worker just asked another co-worker why her headphones are labeled "left" and "right" and if it mattered which ears she put them in. The response was that it's "personal preference".

Responder went on to explain how "some studios manipulate it so that certain sounds only come out of one of them."

HOLY SHIT NO ONE CARES THAT PARTS OF FUNNY FARM WERE FILMED IN THE TOWN YOU GREW UP IN SHUT UP

The coworker that I bitched about for bringing me a 30 page senate bill to read and interpret for her so she could win in a fight with someone in the union who insisted I read it even after I told her I didn't have time to do so? She came back today before I got in to find out what I'd thought, and told our admin to tell me to come by her office and tell her what I thought about the senate bill.

That's damn nervy, sister.

What does anyone think of people who think you need to "sell out" a little bit in order to bring in a sensible amount of money?

I'm finding this argument less persuasive as I get older. And yes, even I have tried the "sell out" thing.

I guess it depends on the definition of sell out? I feel like I sold out by going to work for the government instead of working for a nonprofit or legal service agency, even though I make shit money and still ostensibly am advocating on behalf of workers, albeit in a quieter way than I had hoped.

omgomgomg

We use Lexis as our subscription database here and as an attorney, I use it ALL THE TIME like all attorneys do. It is a famous program. It, or its competitor Westlaw, is a piece of famous legal software. For some reason, when I try to search, I get routed to a Google 404-ish page with a weird text string in the search box. So I called our New! Improved! computer help desk center, waited on hold for ten minutes, and the guy who answered had NEVER HEARD OF LEXIS. Never heard of it. He actually said, "Well, I've never heard of this program so I'm not sure what I can do."

Finally got him to escalate a ticket (instead of just saying, "Oh, okay, I don't need this critical application anymore, thanks"). How long will it take, I ask, because I've got some deadlines and need to do some research. He has no idea. He just couldn't say. Can he make it high priority? He can, but it might take awhile, depends on how busy people are.

There will be blood.