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

I feel like I have to establish that we are employees in a law firm, working on litigation.

I recognize this surreal feeling. I'm at school, but our lab has no lab manager and lots of undergrads helping out, so the grad students do a lot of admin and managing people's work. The worst offender is a fellow grad student who has been in a lab an entire year. Next time she says 'I'm confused right now' I might start with 'We are grad students, running a lab'.

Backing Karl here, good call imo

the state of toilets in offices really is a damning indictment of human behaviour

I honestly thought he was fucking with me when he said "Which exhibit?" I thought he was joking. It was hard not to get exasperated and whiny.

Karl, when things got really fucking stupid I said, You know, I think it makes more sense to just make it a separate exhibit, but I still had to finish explaining what we had been talking about THE WHOLE TIME.

FUCK what a way to start the day. Looking forward to the actually complicated discussion we have to have soon.

Thanks, thread, for letting me blow off steam.

who the fuck stands up and pisses into a toilet that has the seat down? for fuck's sake, you can kick it upright with your foot if you really have to.

we have a thread where all u inaccurate pissing worriers are wrong on this already

then again, I did that once and it failed to stay up, I leaned down quickly to catch it with my hand so there wouldn't be a huge CLUNK noise, and the seat somehow hit me in the dick

I am the world's most coordinated man, though

naccurate pissing worriers

NO ONE CAN DEFY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS
(except for j.c., RIP)
there's gonna be splashback unless your piss has superpowers

I leaned down quickly to catch it with my hand so there wouldn't be a huge CLUNK noise, and the seat somehow hit me in the dick

braggin'

:/

fucking lol'ing at my desk at that story.

personally, i don't care if the seat hitting the toilet makes a sonic boom so loud it will blow out all the windows in a three-block radius and permanently deafen several innocent bystanders; i am *not* touching the underside of a work toilet seat.

i had a pang of sympathy when i thought maybe he was preventing the world from seeing something weird about his junk.

but nobody was at the urinals. and why did he leave the stall door open.

https://cdn2.scratch.mit.edu/get_image/project/16112046_144x108.png?v=1398475700.0

On a similar kick to VGs muttering workmate, the guy opposite me (who is actually a v close friend outside of work - I got him the job here) has these weird tics I've never noticed in my 15 years of knowing the guy.

He constantly makes water-drop "poik!" noises with his mouth, and blows raspberries, and sighs and sniffs... and today, he has taken to *growling like an angry dog". I'm... more than a little perturbed.

― I checked Snoops , and it is for real (Trayce), Wednesday, September 23, 2015 4:29 AM (14 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha.

the guy i mentioned above that talks about everything he finds on the intarwebz does a lot of these things. he made a joke about me once and we're not even on friendly terms, so i was taken aback by it. anyway, i couldn't resist and i said, "okay, tourrette's" and it stuck for a long time. a few laughed and i felt bad. i actually don't talk to him anymore even though the "creative team" works in my area, so i still see him.

anyway, this dude must be really young and have a really tough personal life, because out of nowhere in the lunchroom he starts telling me that his brother is in prison and he doesn't know what to do. then he continues to tell me all sorts of personal things about him and his family.

so yeah, this guy does loud, short moans at his desk, says "HA!", talks to himself, picks his nose, pretends he cracks his neck (by moving his head sideways and making a cracking noise with his mouth), and is always taking some type of "brain power vitamin."

there's always a nutter

7AM and some complete wank has chosen to microwave what I assume is fish but what smells like hot cat food in the kitchenette that's thirty feet away from my desk. It socked me in the nose when I went for coffee and now I'm noticing the stench radiating slowly out into the office proper. Nauseating. How do people not know that shit like that isn't okay?

because they are stupid and annoying

Oh yeah.

Certain people have 'stopped smoking'. What this means is that they've stopped smoking their cigarettes, and are now smoking mine. This hasn't yet reached the level of annoyance that merits posting it to this thread, but at some point it will, so I'm posting pre-emptively. For now I am caring and sharing.

Boss puts her gum in the office's garbage disposal. B/c she's "an old hippie" and she doesn't want it going to a landfill.

She once put a whole box of barley in the disposal for the same reason, which completely stopped up the drain pipe.

she has an intriguing idea of how the sewer system works

smdh

she has an intriguing idea of how the sewer system works

― μpright mammal (mh), Friday, September 25, 2015 3:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Her concept of public utilities in general is a topic of great fascination to me, cf the time she could not fathom why her home internet would be out when the electricity to her home was still on.

Sounds like the annual confusion I sometimes hear of why the gas heat doesn't work when the electricity goes out.

I heard an interview with a Chicago sewer and water* guy who said that it was slightly greener to put biodegradables down the drain than in the trash, esp b/c they're starting to re-use sludge as fertilizer. But I don't believe she gave it that much thought.

*"Metropolitan Water Reclamation"!

She also puts teabags in the disposal. Why not use it to shred documents?

i'm surprised she doesnt put her tampons in the disposal

I had to explain the difference between astrology and astronomy to my teaching assistant on at least 2 different occasions during the previous school term. Now I teach online.

heavens!

resident SACW earlier -

opens the fridge
rummages around
shouts
"L... L... L... L... FUCKIN LIMA!"

now I love this woman dearly but she has a reputation for being a bit of a slob, and there is this thing that she does where she microwaves food like hash browns or eggs or something but instead of using one of the plates that we have in the plate cabinet, she uses a paper towel (!)

for like kinda moist things!

and then puts the v apparently greasy/wet paper towel right on the counter

bleuch

had to talk to my boss abt desk-whisperer bcz i'm kinda worried about his mental health. dunno if it will go anywhere but i feel better about being on record that his behaviour is unsettling

i like him but no-one should have to deal with his pent-up nonsense

mr veg said "if you hear a sound kind of like a staple gun just walk straight out of the building immediately" lol but also O_O and :/

http://i.imgur.com/kfbteCz.gif

yep

Yeah not funny at all TBH :(

OMG I have just seen that someone who used to work for me is one of the four in the new 'Driving to Oz' Fosters campaign.

Erm... better not post why he stopped working for me in a public place.

just tell us in pig-latin. (also this thread may have been de-indexed?)

I had him fracked for saud (and getting anyone fracked in the sivil cervice is nearly impossible, but facts are facts and is you sign your own clexpenses aims it's difficult to deny you did it deliberately). He went down the route of a clarassment haim and I was minorly old toff for not entirely following porrect crocedures but nothing to orry wover.

minorly old toff, going to nick that

I cannot share but I have some baffling stories of really blatant, how on earth did you think no-one would notice, saud (not in my current job I should add)

he claimed it wasn't him but the forms were covered in his saudi prints

i have always felt like our "test plans" in a QA environment are designed with the flawed assumption that everything will work, and no considerations are made for what to do if certain tests fail - not enough buffer time built in, or clear chain of command for how to fix the situation.

There've been multiple times where we reported unsuccessful tests of a component in QA, where instead of pulling back the migration and devoting the extra hours to rectifying it, they've just ignored it and migrated to production anyway. On one such occasion, this was done and then the application legitimately did not work in production, which cost us 10+ man hours (including weekend time) to fix - while I waited 8 hours for the opportunity to perform my 5-minute test.

This has happened again this week and boy will I be ticked if this thing now does not work, since we've been reporting the test failure in QA since 10/5.

(note the problem with the application not working in Prod was less the man hours to fix, which would have been needed anyway, but the fact that we had a pretty displeased customer).

dunno if any of the ilx civil service lol crew have seen this:

A CIA manual about how to sabotage productivity in offices, made for European spies during WW2.

“Insist on doing everything through channels. Never permit short-cuts to be taken to expedite decisions.”

“Make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.”

“When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.”

“Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”

“Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, and resolutions.”

“Refer back to a matter decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.”

“Advocate ‘caution.’ Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.”

“Be worried about the propriety of any decision. Raise the question of whether it lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.”

I know these kind of articles prompt an easy slide into "lol that's my office alright!!" stuff - but the above honestly is like deeply held tenets of people I've worked with about how to actually do their job.

oops, forgot the link

http://fortune.com/2015/09/30/workplace-bureaucracy-simple-sabotage/

Had you not posted the link, I would've swore that was some made-up list someone put together on Facebook. It's too perfect.

Because it's so darn true! So darn true.

haha...damn, that cuts a little close to the bone,i'm guessing I must have some ex-CIA in my company then

because of the ass backwards way we do things, I got told the only time I could train this one group of temp folk was the weekend (when we're normally off). basically that's asking a bunch of temporary contractors, w/ wife/kids and all, to work forfeit their weekend and work a 60 hour week (time and a half sure, but hat's a big ask). Me, I didn't care cos I could just move my days off, but they don't have that luxury. also, the weekend is when almsot everybody is off, so when things break down, there's often nobody you can reach.

so how shocked am I that stuff broke that we couldn't fix during training and that several people left training early (ie not returning from break)? you mess with people's days off, that happens.

We might have the causality reversed. It seems likely that the CIA just spent some time in workplaces where nobody knew what the fuck they were doing and codified their asinine practices.