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

my least favorite is when a co-worker monitors my IM status to know the exact moment I'm online so that they can start bombarding me with questions. Dude, I just logged in, give me a few minutes to get my bearings.

also, your projects are not so important that you need to schedule multiple status meetings every week that you invite me to along with several other managers and force us to sit through your excruciatingly lengthy and repetitive status updates. Just send it to me in a brief email and we should all be good, k? thx.

yes my project IS that important, moodles, and there have ben some fundamental shifts in our direction over the last week that i just need to bring you up to speed on so if you can go ahead and accept this invite for tomorrow from 1-3 i think that should be enough time to cover it, thanks

haha, karl

yeah, sufjan, that's the first thing i did. this one in particular was sending me fb messages so she can see when i read it and when i was last active and some some cryptic/nonsense message. incidentally, she is also the one looking at my monitor at work and eavesdrop on just about everyone. she can hear whispers from across the room. everyone goes to her for gossip, which is disgusting. the funny thing is with just a little bit of information she feels she knows exactly what's going on and makes assumptions, then goes on to tell others or whoever asks. when she's proved wrong, she says, well so-and-so said this so "I ASSUMED" blah blah blah...my goodness...

xpost

ha, it's less "here's a shift in our direction" and more "tell us how to do our jobs", over and over again

karl, i thought i of you yesterday, as i was reading a piece about john beale and the epa - it reminded me of all the insane bureaucracy stories you used to tell

the other day i was browsing for cool c-span footage (my life has turned downhill) and i stumbled on one of the john beale committee hearings. brutal. what a fucking nightmare.

My department's number is the first one that comes up on Google UK for the company we are part of so we get all sorts of strange calls. Today someone phoned up in a complete panic saying that their husband is on secondment to the parent company doing IT work, that he'd been sent to Africa on Saturday and he hadn't been in contact with her since he left the UK. He wasn't answering his mobile, replying to e-mails or on Skype. She didn't know which hotel he was staying in so didn't even know if he'd made it from the airport to the city (a notoriously dangerous journey).

I managed to track down one of his colleagues who's also there and the MIA guy is not MIA at all. His response was apparently "oh, i've been busy, can someone phone her for me?".

Husband of the year!

lol, what a dick

the more i work the more i'm bemused by the range of people you'll get in any team whose contribution is a net minus. ie all they actually do is sow confusion by misinterpreting emails or other communications, have personal issues with being corrected or even helped that mean they demand more attention, break any process no matter how well it works, and basically just fuck things up.

it's not even always determined laziness or malice (though it can be) just like a mismatch of whatever skills they have - like a situation where it would honestly be better if there was nobody there.

Ahaha that is so true

Stupid co-worker #459: Asking the security guard who works on the front desk out on a date with the line "My girlfriend split up with me because I'm a sex addict" is a) very probably sexual harassment and b) carried the risk of a can of pepper spray in the dave.

dave = face

i like dave better

Davebook

daaaaave

Dave's not here!

waterdave

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Today I had to fix a computer in a conference room. The main door has a keypad entry system, and I don't have the code. But 'luckily' the back door to the room had been propped open with a chair, so I was able to get in anyway. Inside, there's a sign on the locked door saying 'DO NOT PROP THIS DOOR OPEN'. But there isn't any such sign on the back door. So someone obviously thought that it'd be OK to prop that open.

i am feeling intense rage toward my shitty co-workers right now.

one thing i'm not good at is sending polite follow-up messages to people who have just fucked you over. i've been trying to draft a 2-sentence email for the last half hour and i can't manage to write it without passive-aggressive tones or straight up "YOU WANNA GO?! YOU WANNA GO!?!?" interjections

When I'm in that situation I've trained myself to stop and make myself do the deed in person. Is the stupid annoying coworker actually in your office, or elsewhere?

who knows where the hell they are. i was holding a kickoff meeting for a interagency presentation we have to do, and several of the key people were no shows, and finding another time where we can all meet in the next 2 weeks is pretty much impossible. so i can meet with the 4 no shows separately and explain the same 1000 things to each of them, or write an epic-length email to everyone, summarizing all the things i already explained earlier today, which they probably won't read

i could just quit and go drink margaritas somewhere in the sun, too
i like that option

excerpts from the (white) work chat channel

"Talking of mysterious strangers, who is the (black) guy who keeps pausing by our desks and writing on his clipboard?"

It'd be tacky to mention the guy's race, but it's a legitimate question though, right?

http://www.theonion.com/article/totally-unknown-guy-strolling-around-your-part-of--38335

haha - i guess i'm in a less corporate environment than that - the majority of the building services staff are black here - this feels like an inane to unpleasant question based on that (and the fact the guy was clearly measuring desks)

it reminds me of working in bbc in tunbridge wells about 8 years ago - there was this loudmouth but fairly well-meaning producer and another researcher had just started and was a bit confused about who was who - and i think she had got say, a victoria, and a vicky mixed up. and the producer was like all matter of fact "oh well don't worry, victoria is the secretary who works in the second room on the left by the editor's office, and vicky is the producer who is black"

*echo*

we send out welcome/introduction e-mails when a new employee is hired. Head of HR just sent out one for this new German dude we hired incl this juicy little tidbit: "His friends in Germany claim he has an American accent; his wife claims he sounds British – stop by his desk, introduce yourself, and feel free to weigh in on the matter!"

ya thx hr person for the great suggestion of "let's accost the foreignner and make him feel weird abt his silly accent!!", wtg

Don't mention the war

But do mention 'dinner for one'

Someone sent out a mass email this week about ordering supplies and to see him if we needed anything, the Director wrote back 'We are terribly low on gin' but replied-all, even the Executive Directors.. no bitching, just bragging, I kind of love her.

^^^rare example of extremely appropriate use of "Reply All"

boss: here are jan-may sales reports, lets think about cutting the bottom sellers
me: *spends several hours going over reports and making a spreadsheet* here are the ones we should cut
boss: (tl;dl) NO*

boss: what do you think we should do about the windows
me: get rid of all the clutter and dust, stop putting boring old stuff on display
boss: (tl;dl) NO

boss: what do you think we should do to make the store look better?
me: get rid of all the clutter and streamline
boss: (tl;dl) NO

wtf she keeps asking me all the time for my opinion, i have no idea. she shoots down 99% of my (tbh perfectly great) ideas, with long rambly nonsensical explanations.

*i show her we've only sold 16 of this particular garment in 6 months (a good amount would be around a min. of 80) and her response is "well i sold two pairs the other day so we should keep them" !?!?!?!?

"well i sold two pairs the other day so we should keep them" this really tells the story. ugh.

It reminds me of a restaurant where I worked in NC that took a popular shrimp dish off the menu because it was popular. Managers thought customers should try something different.

Was that our restaurant?

Yes. That fucking place.

lol

'you guys always order the same thing, as the people selling it to you we are not totally comfortable with that'

at least uncle julio's perimeter wouldn't pull any of that shit

i respect the shrimp decision

i work on a db of org data. one of our attribs is a normalized legal name of the org. we call it a "canonical name". someone pinged me saying their search was throwing an error.

the search string:

cononical_name:capital records*

i think i understood that

conanical_name:Conaco*

i think they owe you some kind of free sandwich for that waste of your time

they were chipper enough when i sent them an email with two iterations of the phrase "i think it's spelled..."

was it shrimp & grits?

Yup.

smdh

so this week, the project lead goes on vacation, which was fine. But on Thursday I stumble across this transition plan which has several assignments for me and other people to do that she'd never shared or discussed with us.

Fortunately, the tasks were very small so we got them done quickly, but I gave the lead the head's up to explain why they were done late. She apologized, but said she thought I knew about it since she'd sent an email saying I was her backup.

The email was sent to a whopping two people telling them to come to me with any urgent questions. No mention of the plan/tasks at all.