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

i would just eat yr food with my hands :D

I want a new mutual adoptee.

;_;

How long was the microwave set for? How much work could you get done while lunch was heating? Walking away from your microwaving food and relying on someone to come get you has always been NAGL in every place I've worked, but the main one of those was a warehouse with a lot of employees, most of whom only had a 30-minute lunch break. And your phobias are not your co-workers' problem.

85 seconds. Seriously, it would've taken me less than 10 seconds to hear the microwave beep (it's within hearing range, obviously) and to walk over.

I think it's not cool to take it out without waiting 30 seconds first, but going back to your desk if it needs less than 2 minutes seems odd to me too

but then both feelings come from having the luxury of being in a job and a country where it's generally ok to take time for lunch, so I guess this doesn't necessarily translate (and my sympathies to anyone who does not get that luxury)

Why does this professional psychologist not have the ability to open Word files? Or Word Perfect or Open Office?? Instead of editing her own affidavits, she prints the PDFs we send her, hand writes edits, and scans and emails them back to us. This is not reasonable!

And why am I reading my work email on Saturday.

And she can't open PDFs either!?

If you leave food in the micro and walk away, I figure you're lucky if it's even sitting on the counter waiting for you when you come back. I say this in high dudgeon since I work on a floor with only 3 microwaves for like 100 ppl.

Yeh, you leave your food in the microwave, it's gonna get touched, and that's reasonable.

food touched touched, or the dish was moved touched?

Our floor has fewer than 72 people with 2 microwaves and this is probably the second time this has happened to me, but the first time by someone whom I know firsthand who leaves the restroom straight from No. 2 without washing his hands.

More the reason to stand watch to protect your food from that savage!

my boss lady occassionally flirts with me, and the way she does it is like she's totally desperate for positive attention. like, it's not the kinda flirting where it's like it's "yeah, I find you attractive, it's cool" and more like "DEAR GOD PLEASE FIND ME ATTRACTIVE!!!! CHECK OUT MY TITS, CHECK OUT MY LEGS. I GOTTA NICE NECK, YOU SEE????" i have to regularly hand in projects to her, and this is making me want to avoid her like the plague.

double down is she's my boss, so i don't wanna just go "ughhhhh". guess it could be worse.

Bizarre. How do you feel about facing the problem head-on?

i couldn't help reading your comment like beavis & butthead. i'll probably just be polite, don't know what else to do right now other than remember to find a new job at some point.

aha! i have a plan. normally i chew on an altoid when i have nasty coffee mouth and have to talk to people, but next time i talk to my boss won't. maybe my crypt-keeper breath will do the trick.

Are you in the US?

yes

Then you're fucked.

hahaha no I was going to say that her behavior is pretty straight foward sexual harassment and suggest that you go talk to your HR department or whoever is responsible for this kind of thing. Hopefully you work for a decent employer who will take these kind of thing seriously. Then you can turn in your work without fear of getting an unwanted facefull of boobs. This is not legal advice. I am not your lawyer.

But if you're feeling direct, you can also say something like, "I really prefer to keep my work relationships very professional, so I don't think I'm the one to ask about that." (If she's saying things like "How do my gams look?" while waggling her eyebrows and lifting her skirt to reveal a garter belt or whatever she's doing.) Might shame her into being less of a dingaling.

"I don't think I'm the one to ask about that because I'm more of a buffalo hump man."

haha, i'll be alright, i was just pissed off today. i need to chill the fuck out.

Man there is so much I want to post on this thread but never do

Dear person who sits 2 feet away from me,

Was there no better time to start noisily bundling up the scrap brown paper that came in your Amazon parcel than just as soon as someone on the other side of the room had started to answer a question I'd asked? I mean you opened the parcel this morning and hadn't touched it since, and have resumed not touching it now nobody's trying to talk to me, but even when I asked them to repeat themselves you kept going so I basically had to just pretend I had a vague idea what they said as if we were making inconsequential smalltalk at heavy metal gig night

(my hearing or my auditory processing or sth is not v good, maybe normal people can deal w/this)

I mean prob. normal people would just have made it more obvious that you should stop but apparently I can't be normal people and can only whine on the internet instead.

i shush ppl all the time, and make it perfectly clear that functioning adults shouldnt need to be fuckin shushed, it works

sometimes i feel like a diplomat crossed with a therapist trying to juggle different co-workers who are unable to communicate or be rational or act like adults. and i actually like all these people! the trouble is a lot of them don't like each other.

I just shout IM SORRY I CANT HEAR YOU OVER THE NOISE PAPERMATE OVER THERE IS MAKING SPEAK UP.

But then again everyone at work thinks I'm a nutbar, so I dunno.

"Even though scientists have studied the ocean’s water for more than a century, they still have a lot left to find out about it."

"Pure iron is fairly soft so it is often converted to steel before use."

"Gas is all around you. It has no shape, size or colour of its own."

"This wiped out most dinosaurs but also caused an existing type of plant, the tomato plant, to change its genes. This change of genes is what turned its fruit a bright red."

otm

Read that as all one sentence - ie, the mysteries of the ocean, soft iron and gas being all around you wiped out the dinosaurs and turned tomatoes red. obviously.

That would make as much sense.

i'm getting the stupid part, not sold on the annoying bit, this co-worker sounds quite entertaining. also, where the hell do people get ideas like that tomato one ?

These aren't just random things someone's saying at their desk!

I guess I didn't make this clear, but those quotes are from written work that is supposed to be part of an educational product. The annoying bit is I was supposed to be doing a brief final edit before sending this stuff out - only to be confronted by this gibberish.

(The tomato bit comes, it seems, from this http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/18/why-are-tomatoes-red-blame-the-meteor/. But it's just so badly explained.)

haha ok makes things a bit different then. as random office talk it sounded quite amusing, but if it's for an educational product the annoying makes sense.

wtf that's a biiig difference

Seems to suffer from the misconception that if you write it like a 4th-grader's summary of a science lesson rather than the teacher's original lesson plan then you are "aiming it at their level" and they'll decide science is "super cool"

The whole paragraph from which I took that gas quote:

"Solids are formed from atoms that do not have much energy and that prefer to stay in one place. Liquids on the other hand are much more fluid because their molecules are not entirely pressed together. Liquids don’t have a definite shape – they take the shape of the container they are in. Gas is all around you. It has no shape, size or colour of its own. It appears when you heat a liquid to its boiling point as this allows the molecules that it contains to move faster."

that's like an uncanny valley of wrongness. its proximity to the truth is what makes it seem even worse than something straightforwardly incorrect.

if you weren't listening carefully you'd be nodding, poisonous stuff

What about former co-workers?

So...I'm cleaning out some file cabinets for the holidays and what do I find? Print-outs of e-mails from someone who was fired, buried in one of the filing cabinets. Now I know why. Little bitch talked about co-workers in e-mails....to people outside our workplace. Nothing cruel - just petty and trivial, especially since it was to complete strangers. Petty shit, like whether someone is gay or not or what food people eat.

Although it was sad to have this come up now, it's a bad memory.

why is it the squeaky dork who's on the phone all day has a voice that carries all over the office?

Like this is the second person to make comments expressing oblique discomfort with black people. The other one actually came up to me and said, "I can tell you don't like black people either." His / her evidence was my disdain for barbecued ribs. I don't like ribs, okay!! I said, "where I come from barbecued ribs is not "black people food." It's not like a told a watermelon joke.

I went to the supervisor about this kind of shit and there are social pressures against it but I couldn't be the only one because they were both fired.

I love a story with a happy ending.

Not even close to being the same, but I took umbrage at one of my managers who would not shut the fuck up about that "stuff white people like" website a year ago. I go over to her desk and she's all "have you heard of this web page?" I say yes, I've heard about it, but I don't think I've delved into it as much as she had.

And she says, "I think you'd like it. I can say that because [en soto whisper] we're both white."

I once went to an all-black college for a summer camp where everyone called me "Mr. Bentley", but that doesn't even compare to how offended I was at her stereotyping me as a potential fan of really shitty web humor just because of the color of my skin.