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

worth considering bytimes but TBH I find oversharing entirely made-up and uncomfortable content usually puts a stop to insistence on oversharing

hurrhurrhurr. good point d-mac, i need to kick my own oversharing habit.

I'm seriously running out of things to listen to in my headphones. I've been wearing earplugs at times, but this is kind of an asshole move on my part too.

Yeah I wish headphones worked. Ive had people talking at my back for minutes, me not hearing a word of it or reacting. They're over-ear cans and everything, cmon you dolts. I'm not responding and Ive my back to you. Doesnt that tell you something?

this is why I'm glad I work from home. the banalities of the contractors who used to sit next to me in the office used to drive me up the wall. because they'd have these conversations at volume 11.

Oh well nobody talks to me unless they've got a specific question.

I have to say, I've worked for small and medium businesses, non-profits, government agencies, and big corporations (or their law firm equivalent) and the corporate gigs were by far the least dysfunctional. Which is not to say that you're not working in a dysfunctional hellhole, Spectrum, because holy shit you clearly are, but just to say that you shouldn't turn down an otherwise good job if it happens to be in a corporate environment out of fear it will be equally terrible.

That said, I've worked in some spectacularly dysfunctional work environments so it's possible I don't have a completely balanced perspective on it.

I work for a small company and they just fire you the moment dysfunction is sniffed.

I like it

That's true about corporate employers, although I have found that the difficulty lies in maintaining high standards and composure in that corporate culture. Got an aging relative? Cousin behind bars? Forget corporate life!

With some unreliable family members to deal with, I've avoided those jobs - because I need a more liberal env so I can drop everything and head home, if need be.

dear ppl releasing 'important' information (which could have been done at any time this week, and which i now have to write about, and which you hope will attract notice) at 4:30pm on the friday of a long weekend

fuck you and your stupid fuckin faces

I have a co-worker who will only ever schedule meetings at 4:30 on Friday or, barring that, between noon and 1 so that everyone gets to skip lunch.

a few years back, our company brilliantly decided that teams would no longer be allowed to have administrative access to their own case management tools and would have to instead request updates to the system through a special team that would do them for them.

Most of the tasks took anywhere between 15-30 minutes when the team was allowed to do them themselves. The 'special team' requires a minimum of four business days to turn them around, and rarely if ever are able to do it quicker, citing that they are 'too busy'...even in urgent situations.

When informed they had made things 1920% slower in the process, they responded by essentially saying they didn't care and that it's going to stay this way.

Are you in spec, ILX?

I've been looking forward to working in a corporate environment b/c it will have SYSTEMS and PROTOCOLS and RULES. Not to mention other staff to cover when I'm out. In my current job at a tiny law firm I'm the only one who knows how to do a lot of essential shit (e-filing in state courts, cancelling a print job, adding a footer on a PDF) so taking a couple days off in a row requires tons of advance notice. Plus, despite my best efforts, everything is ad hoc - no protocols means we reinvent case management for every new case.

Like carl, I've worked in some exceptionally fucked up workplaces, and the worst (IME only, of course) were the small ones. I hear accounts like Spectrum's, of corporate hellscapes, or Neanderthal's company's paralyzing bureaucracy, but then sometimes carl tells me about "teams" and "departments" ("document solutions"!) at her Big Law law firm and it sounds like a fairy tale.

Sunny's worked for a few dysfunctional small businesses since she came to the U.S. Many an evening where she'd pause after recounting a bad day and then say, "That never happened at IBM."

I'm about to start work for a large corporation (where I've worked before) where everything moves glacially slow. To the point where the person who I've been hired to cover for has already been on leave for 2 months. Also no-one ever makes a decision, and even the problem of departments not communicating has to be brought up at a special inter-departmental meeting (which was called by a senior manager who later quit, probably partly in disgust at this).

I can't decide whether the cheap, paranoid, prolife solo practitioner attorney's office, the redneck bar owned by unapologetic racist sexual harassers, or the state of Illinois was the most dysfunctional work environment I've experienced.

There's so much to choose from.

My sister has worked at 80% of the corps in Chicago...all she talks about is getting back into Leo Burnett. Go to lunch with Leo Burnett people, they go, "I laugh at your miserable office from a great height!" Perfect location, too.

You should hear her small office horror stories!

I used to be a waiter in the Leo Burnett building and those people drink at lunch like...madmen.

A fellow server got a job there and said it was all creativity-tents and Razor Scooters in the halls.

At the restaurant we worked at we stocked Budweiser beers but kept them hidden and off the menu b/c one of LB's big clients was Miller and they would take umbrage at our selling Bud.

Once a year the restaurant put up enormous prints of LB ads in one dining area so for a few months this was one of the first things you'd see when you walked in

http://files1.coloribus.com/files/adsarchive/part_864/8645055/file/tourism-brookfield-zoo-small-50771.jpg

wait, that's credited to JWT, not LB. idk. it was in the dining room. and that's been everything i have to say about Leo Burnett.

associate today put his phone in 'unavailable' five minutes prior to close because there were 3 calls waiting in the queue and he apparently wanted to get home on time. then logs out right at quitting time, leaving his colleagues to pick up the slack.

pretty stupid move considering I could see what he was doing and the process of disciplinary action began before his car hit the driveway. all to save himself ten minutes.

ha!

wow. that is a hardcore disgusting savage

If anybody reported me for leaving 5 minutes early i'd point out the thousands of times I'd stayed late / worked through lunch etc

Yeah, unless he does that every day, there's usually an understanding among co-workers that you get to do that kind of thing if you need to leave on time, and you'll cover for others when it's their turn. Reporting him seems extraordinarily shitty.

It tends to even out over time. There's nothing like the feeling of picking up the phone five minutes before you're due to leave work and realizing "oh shit, this is going to be an hour" and having to abandon your social life/dinner plans with your partner/sporting event/whatever else just because some shithead customer decides to call five minutes before the end of the day.

Generally I find that groups of similarly phonebound colleagues tend to have a degree of solidarity around this point,

As someone who works on the phones I do this from time to time when I NEED to be out on time (doc appt, show I have tickets for, etc) though I usually don't because I don't mind staying late for overtime.

Also we're open 24h and have at least 150-200 employees so it's not like I'm dumping shit on other people who will have to stay late

God now that I think of it I definitely wind up working past 5:30 more often than not

Used to know a guy who claimed to have been fired from his last job for doing this.

But he was a 9-1-1 dispatcher apparently.

IMO concentrating on how ppl need to fuck with yr system in order to get out on time is missing the point about your shitty system

A couple of jobs ago I generally stopped taking calls 30 minutes before the end of my shift. My calls were screened by an associate who texted me the nature of the call and I would reply Y or N.

Publicly, I said this was because I wanted to ensure that any last-minute high priority items could get looked at and that a customer phoning up with a "How Do I..." question would not end up taking priority. Really, I just wanted to get the fuck out of there on time.

This system ended up working well and being ultimately well-perceived by my employers, since I legitimately did end up catching a lot of the high priority off-timezone issues that would have had to wait 24 hours otherwise. For the one day in 10 or 15 shifts that I caught a bad one at 4:56pm, I ended up saving us a ton of money and grief.

It was worth it, and I felt it was a fair compromise to stay as late as necessary for "high priority" only.

Yeah, unless he does that every day, there's usually an understanding among co-workers that you get to do that kind of thing if you need to leave on time, and you'll cover for others when it's their turn. Reporting him seems extraordinarily shitty.

― Eyeball Kicks, Wednesday, 10 September 2014 04:39 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

actually, there's not - if there is a personal need that needs to be tended to, the associate needs to report it to their manager and make arrangements. not deciding "hey, I'm going to screw over my other co-workers who now have to stay longer". it's part of their job description that they agree to when they accept the job. they also know when they accept a later shift that this expectation is in place.

srsly, have you ever worked in a call center? I worked late shift before and never pulled a move like that once. It can be grounds for immediate termination.

IMO concentrating on how ppl need to fuck with yr system in order to get out on time is missing the point about your shitty system

― nakh is the wintour of our diss content (darraghmac), Wednesday, 10 September 2014 07:37 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, you're right, everybody should feel free to log out whenever they feel like it, and all of the customers that call prior to close should just have their calls sitting in limbo forever, that makes sense.

srsly what the fuck are you guys even on about

for the record, this was at the end of the day, when the center closed. the associates have to clear the queue before they can go, and they are made aware of this expectation upon their hire. This associate decided he didn't feel like doing that and screwed over his fellow co-workers who then had to stay later as a result. if he isn't ok with how it works, he should have asked for an earlier shift. simple as that).

I worked five years in a call centre and it's bullshit to not have elasticity built in to your end of shift procedures to allow for transitioning. if it was the end of day without further shift cover then pay ppl til 5.15 and roster them for same.

nb I had friends and colleagues but never associates so YMMV

everybody who stays past their time to clear the queue gets overtime pay. Proactively staffing people to work past close even when the demand isn't there is a pointless overcorrection to an infrequent problem.

So his colleagues being left to pick up the slack wouldn't have mattered to them because they ended up getting overtime?

actually, there's not - if there is a personal need that needs to be tended to, the associate needs to report it to their manager and make arrangements. not deciding "hey, I'm going to screw over my other co-workers who now have to stay longer". it's part of their job description that they agree to when they accept the job. they also know when they accept a later shift that this expectation is in place.

srsly, have you ever worked in a call center? I worked late shift before and never pulled a move like that once. It can be grounds for immediate termination.

Sorry never been in a call centre but you sound like a dick.

I've always worked in call centres and really I'd say this is all down to the nature of the internal rules and contracts of the workplace. In all I'm in the 'If someone usually works hard and needs just this one chance to leave early so s/he can catch a train for an important personal appointment, then cool' camp - but it would depend if it impacts significantly on their co-workers.

I feel like this whole thing could have been remedied if the guy had asked if he could leave early or right at 5 pm instead of leaving his colleagues in a lurch. Then a good manager will say yeah, okay this is a good employee who works hard so I'm going to give him this leeway. But you need to have a certain amount of coverage for the phones, and if people can just leave as it suits them, you can't schedule the coverage that you need. It's a pretty basic precept of call center employment.

I've done call center work and it really is an expectation that you leave at quitting time or whenever the last call you take before quitting time finally ends. Hence the many nights sitting there praying that nobody decided they really needed to balance the past six years of checking withdraws at 9:56 pm (I worked second shift). But that's just part of the job, and it's an expectation that's laid out when you first start and is generally something that's reinforced every day that you work.

If your job is not one that requires scheduled shifts/coverage, then I am 100% in support of letting people pretty much come and go as they please as long as they get their work done. It's gross to treat professional employees like elementary school children. But for stuff like call centers or retail or reception, you just can't do that.

otm. there are other people's workloads tied to yours and if you pull what to all intents and purposes reads like a dick move, then you deserve to be written up.

I tend to view people with suspicion who voice the attitude "working in a call centre is a choice and you chose to have a less stable home life than your friends and family who do not work in call centres."

Call centre work can be low-paid and grindingly awful. We're not talking about medical students who trade 24/7 availability for the promise of eventual riches and the high esteem of society at large. It's often a "choice"—if you can call it that—people make in response to economic circumstances not entirely of their own control.

(To be fair It can be a lot of fun also, I made a lot of great friends during this time. But did I choose it? Not exactly.)

One thing I can also say is I worked with a ton of clock watchers, dog fuckers, and other assorted lazybones. I can also happily say that some of them are still exactly where they started.

Call centres have their own internal karma, whereby if you put in a little extra, cover for someone who's lazy or disengaged, and stop whining about "so-and-so left early yesterday, they deserve a reprimand" sometimes good things can come to you. Depending on the call centre, management might take an interest in you and that's your ticket out.

on the other hand life is too short to prop up other people's shitty behaviour

if shitty behaviour is on one day needing to make sure you leave on the dot from a shitty job then jeezo what a life

So glad I've never had to work with dog fuckers.