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

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.

Wait..."stuff white people like" is for white people? I'm not sure. I was so turned off by stuff like "only white people go camping or drink Starbucks" that I never visited it again.

Again, I don't live or work in a heavily white area. Maybe it's received differently depending on where you're from.

I'm pretty sure it's meant to be "self-effacing", like that Martin Mull book in the 80s or Jim Belushi rapping on Saturday Night Live.

Also "black people love us" is major hilarity where I work, but I understand that in some places it's "offensive" and "racial".

But there's black people in the photographs, playing along!

Gonna start a blog called white co-workers I hate.

Would leave race out of it, but I've got no beef with the three persons of color who work here.

Yes, it's probably a regional thing. My brother works in a super corporate "type A" ("black belt" accounting) place but they are urban, have AA, etc.. They were passing that page around whether they were black, white, hispanic...but he told me the e-mails went out to some more rural offices where the staff were more "sensitive" of that being used on work time.

looks like a coworker may be updating HOOS' FB statuses right now

just conducted a few...interesting...job interviews

"i love editing! i make sure that everything is grammatic!"

"i helped out with the budget...but nothing with money. i hate working with money."

also, she puts masking tape over all of her light switches at home because she prefers lamps.

"time. I budget time, mainly. and cookies."

xpost wow

what a treat!

when asked about her computer skills, she said that just last week she wanted to order a subscription to the Weekender (local newspaper) and found out she had to order online. she wasn't going anywhere NEAR that, not alone at least, so she called up her top "technical friend". they spent over 2 hours online and could not locate the Weekender. they ended up looking it up in the yellow pages and a nice young man told her it would be at her house the next day. stupid computers, what are they good for?!

actually, this is probably the wrong thread for this. i'm not bitching at all, she was hilarious! if she was actually my co-worker though i guess i'd get annoyed with her really quickly. that's why she's not getting the position.

http://i0.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/002/686/Deal_with_it_dog_gif.gif

O_oh my Christ.....

also, she puts masking tape over all of her light switches at home because she prefers lamps.

How did this come up??

TBH I'm 100% behind her on preferring lamps over overhead lights, but I also prefer not having ugly ass tape stuck to my light switches.

There were many uncomfortable moments so it was definitely an opportunity for me to agree that I, too, prefer lamps.

I have no idea how it came up. It was non sequitur city from the second she walked in.

oh she just gets more and more hilarious and awesome. the Weekender thing sounds like mother-in-law.
how old is this woman?

I don't know...65 or so probably

ah. not to be ageist but say no more, lol

but please, if you have more, say it. I find her fascinating!

when i walked in she was sitting down. she stood up to shake my hand but fell back down when our hands met.

"wooooooooo! ooops!"

^^^all-time great opening line for a short story right there

"i love editing! i make sure that everything is grammatic!"

http://www.sptimes.com/2003/12/09/images/large/C_1_gramatica_174762_1209.jpg

xpost lolol

wish i could remember what else she said. for 30 minutes straight, she just said ridiculous things.

one strange thing was that she was originally scheduled to interview yesterday and requested that it be rescheduled - because she accepted a job elsewhere in our Agency and yesterday was her first day! (?!?!?!?)

omg

maybe she was like well i just accepted this other job, so i might as well go to the interview and be weird because fuck it yolo

ha

yeah, i mean i sorta get the reasoning, maybe she wanted to accept the other one just to make sure she had it, but was more excited about this one or something. it might fly in the private sector or something, but when you all work as part of the same organization it would be kind of weird. like, i can't imagine if we hired someone and then two days later found out that another part of the Agency had hired her away!