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

My desk is in no way quieter than the break room - Im surrounded by people and barely even have cubicle walls. TBH though I often just go out all together, its a good headclear.

But see, all the loudmouths in my office go out to lunch leaving me in there for the only hour it's quiet.

In a situ like that I'd prob stay at my desk to tbrh

People who knowingly disrupt your lunch are shitfucks.

If I see food on a desk I wait a half hour yo approach.

Today my project lead scheduled a debrief at the same time my training went to lunch. Result....i didn't eat.

Its like she thinks I can train, eat, and meet at the same time

irritating foodie-obsessed coworker brought in potato chips that have crickets (insect) in them, has been pushing them on everyone all day & thinks it's the funnest most endearing thing ever

FUCK OFF WITH YOUR STUPID FUCKING DEAD BUG SNACKS

lol I hope I haven't been food novelty dude like that

there's been an ongoing -- like, over years -- discussion in my office re: would you rather eat a jar of mayonnaise or one live cockroach

i like mayo, but a surprising number of ppl are conflicted

a whole jar? do I get some sauce to dip the cockroach in, or do I have to chew/swallow it dry?

on a coworker note, some entomology dudes ordered some madagascar hissing cockroaches and offered a bunch up to whoever wanted via in-workplace classified ads. someone i worked with got one and had it living in his desk drawer for a long time. not sure how long it lasted, but it was pretty chill. i called it "hissy"

glad i don't know any entomology dudes

I feel kind of bad they use them for "eat a cockroach" challenges, hissy was pretty chill. lived in a little container in a drawer with a moist sponge and a fresh piece of lettuce dropped in a couple times per week.

having a bug as a pet is much better than eating a bug

i am firmly anti-bug eating

Crickets are p tasty

shut up

The international publicists' lair around the corner had an innocuous freebie ice-cream cart next to its front doors one day this summer. Upon closer inspection, the ice cream being given away had all kinds of grubs and locusts in it because: 21st Century protein.

Nope. NO NO NO NO NO.

There was (still is, I assume) an edible bug exhibit at the Insect Museum in New Orleans, and the waxworms were tasty enough.

Only bugs I eat in New Orleans are mudbugs.

i must be a freak – i eat at my desk maybe half the time, and totally don't mind people coming by and asking questions about things. i just take a little longer to eat/surf the interwebs. sometime i'll even do work!

i sometimes eat at desk. in some jobs any of the local cafes or places were so shit that my desk felt more calm and familiar.

My thing is that I'm trying to plow through my day as quickly as possible. So I don't leave and take a full hour walking someplace for a leisurely lunch when I can sprint through 20 minutes at my desk and gtfo of here asap. P.S. I kinda hate my job.

My thing is that I'm trying to plow through my day as quickly as possible. So I don't leave and take a full hour walking someplace for a leisurely lunch when I can sprint through 20 minutes at my desk and gtfo of here asap. P.S. I kinda hate my job.

I don't understand this. Your job has a "you can leave when your work is done" policy? Cause every job I've ever had has been "you're here until five, or six, or whatever time." So take a long-ass lunch if you can.

lots of jobs are like that, where you're supposed to work a certain number of hours, and lunch doesn't count toward it. the longer the lunch, the longer you have to stay at work.

Yeah, start and end time is flexible (one of the only things I really appreciate about this job). So I show up early, put in my 8, and jet.

Ah, weird. At my job I'm here from 8 to 5 (except for once a month when there's a meeting that starts at 7), period. Somewhere in there, I get an hour for lunch.

We have to take 30mins but after that you can come in from 8-7

yeah supposed to take 2 (unpaid) 1/2 hour breaks at my work. I take none and work 7 1/2 hours straight through then leave.

having a bug as a pet is much better than eating a bug

bought mealworms for then-live-in-partner's pet turtle once; turtle didn't eat them and we felt bad about just dropping the things in the pot repeatedly to go uneaten and drown, so we left the rest to live in their plastic box and topped their food up and so on, most of them died eventually but one of them hatched into a beetle and so we moved it to a bigger box and tried to feed it various kinds of leafy vegetables as that was what the internet said iirc (it didn't really eat any green things we put in but it ate the kitchen roll we put in as a mat)

it lasted for ages, was a nice little guy

perhaps not the best pet for explaining to houseguests tho, "oh that cockroachy-looking thing that lives in the big plastic box full of rotting salad and shredded, decaying kitchen paper? yeah he's my pet"

The international publicists' lair around the corner had an innocuous freebie ice-cream cart next to its front doors one day this summer. Upon closer inspection, the ice cream being given away had all kinds of grubs and locusts in it because: 21st Century protein.

They pulled that stunt here recently too - something the Economist were on. Everyone was FREE ICECREAM oh wait.

Yes, it was an Economist promo (I am jaded about free local promo ice cream because a trolley inevitably parks outside the Fashion Week venue two blocks away during the shows). People here were 50/50 split on yes please/EW BUGS.

"oh that cockroachy-looking thing that lives in the big plastic box full of rotting salad and shredded, decaying kitchen paper? yeah he's my pet"

person in charge of my project made yet another royal blunder, and when questioned on it, instead of owning the mistake, wrote that "HSB and I didn't know about xxx at the time of the meeting, so we missed providing this information to so-and-so".

Excuse me...WE? That was your job, not mine. That snip sound you're hearing is me cutting your cord, you can navigate this shit on your own now.

(I'm in no trouble, mind you - she's been in hot water for months, but to get dragged into her mess was still infuriating nonetheless).

apparently she got in some trouble for this but now due to her failures we have to train 6 extra people and they seem to be expecting me to add them to a training I'm already doing for experienced people meaning I have to change my training plan last minute. once again, her screwup screws me over. but she's not likely to emerge from this one undamaged - there's been a lot of noise and complaints sent her way from people all over the company.

I'm working skeleton during the office closedown over xmas/nye break, and the guy opposite me is running skeleton for the helpdesk of another company brand. The co does this stupid "if you were last hired, you can cop the xmas break days no one else wants" rule, which if you ask me is fcking stupid if someone's only been on board a few months and isnt quite up to speed yet. Sigh.

This guy seems flailing and clueless. He speaks in a rapid, quiet spanish accent that must be throwing the customers. He whinges all day long about how he'd rather be at home and why the heck do we have to work on xmas anyway, how can they make us workkkkk, bla bla.

And Ive told him 3 times now that if his phone display says [mydept] to not answer it as [hisdept] but hes doing it anyway arrghhhh.

skeleton shifts are the worst. I used to work em voluntarily until I realized how much more aggravating it is to be trying to get shit done with who is left in the office than just leaving it for another day.

but not everyone even has the option!

Yeah, this is in my case covering 2nd/3rd level support for a major, national mobile phone chain. That shit dont stop just cos its xmas. Luckily its been reasonably quiet.

xxp I work for an in-house IT support department and it's ridiculous. Only a third of IT are in, and practically no-one else from other departments. So it's basically impossible to get any actual work done.

Nothing to do with my co-workers, who are all perfectly fine people, but I just found out that my office is not closed tomorrow, as I had previously believed - we're open until 2 PM. I am...displeased.

All workplaces that don't have actual customers walking through the doors need to stop pretending that anything important or undelayable happens between Christmas and NYE.

Otm

THIS

every email i sent came back 2/3rds out of office auto replies

my own goddamn customers are closed ffs

During our last team meeting, someone asked our manager whether the office would be closing early on NYE. And she hemmed and hawed and was all well um okay technically I don't have an issue with anyone leaving early but we have to consider, like, what if someone contacts us about sealing a deal at the last minute on NYE, we definitely don't want to lose the business because we don't have coverage. And my logical progression from that was that technically she doesn't have an issue with people leaving after working a full day or taking a weekend off b-b-but what if some procrastinating dipshit of a client decides to contact us at 3AM on a Saturday about something that needs to close first thing Monday morning, OH GOD WHAT THEN?!?!? WHAT IF SOMEONE CALLS US WHILE WE'RE PEEING?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

yeah at some point you have to just be a fucking human being. tired of this cattle call "let's staff for the unlikeliest of situations even though we could probably figure something out if this happened anyway" bullshit in the workplace.

here's why my (work) life is living hell at the moment:

*Since late October, I've logged 200+ hours facilitating training. I can count the number of days I wasn't leading training on less than ten fingers

*This is largely because after our open enrollment period ended, they took away 25 of my 41 already trained reps and replaced them with brand new transfers

*I was forced to train these 25 people all at once in three days, while simultaneously training 4 people on the phone in Puerto Rico who often couldn't hear because the class in my room was disruptive and loud despite my efforts

*The person leading my project is a moron and basically asks me to do her job for her ("What should I say in this email?", "What should I do now?", to the point where her boss had to ask me to stop helping her, even if I was asked to

*The reps I was just given to train are supposed to be the "high performers" from open enrollment that were retained for their good performance. Several of these "high performers" are actually near termination for poor performance. If this was the best of the best, I shudder to think who was cut.

On the flipside, it's all over in January.

It's been such a culture shock since we transitioned from being a small, independent company to a subsidiary of a huge corporation that siphons money like an addict gobbling pills. We just lost the last manager from the old company so I expect things to go properly down the toilet very soon.

I'm with you there. we got acquired years ago and the culture that was there when I started 11 years ago is gone. everybody's nasty, vitriolic, and while the work hasn't changed, the means of doing it has gotten harder cos so many people keep leaving.

nothing beats working for a smaller private company that does its own thing and doesn't have to appease shraeholders.

The only real positive these days is that I work with literally zero day-to-day management. I mean, I have a manager, but I never see or hear from her outside of meetings and she displays no interest whatsoever in what we're working on unless something breaks. So I go out of my way to make sure nothing ever breaks. The downside of no management is a lack of clear communication and difficulty getting any kind of response from the top, and an increasing lack of accountability among those employees who probably frankly need to be micromanaged. Dude across the aisle from me was asleep and snoring loudly at his desk for at least half an hour yesterday. Not for the first time. But it's cool becuz his aunt is his boss, iirc? And don't even get me started on the other dude who's taken regular 45+ minute toity breaks (usually several times a day) for the past three years without it ever being noticed by management.

Gah, I successfully avoided posting ITT for so long.....

company we take calls for refuses to print insurance carriers' actual phone numbers on the ID cards their employees are given. they demand that the carriers instead put the phone number for our call center, and force them to navigate the phone menu and pick the right prompts to then route to the carrier.

problem is - this is the same number, as previously stated, that they call to reach us to enroll in benefits. so naturally if they pick the wrong option (or pound out, or don't pick anything), the call has to go *somewhere*, and it goes to us. So 70% of our calls are people actually trying to reach their insurance company and being aggravated when we have to transfer them (and then we give them the direct number anyway).

our main contact, we provided the radical suggestion of printing the actual insurance company's phone number on the insurance company's ID card and they scoffed, saying "we only want our employees to have to remember one number".

idk I mean generally doing your employees a "favor" is supposed to mean they don't complain angrily about the decision you made on their behalf while you ignore their pleas, but ymmv