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

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

I called up Facilities to report a strong smell of decay in the tap water from the men's toilets yesterday.

Me: there's a strong bacterial / decay smell, etc
F: You need to log a ticket online and we'll look into it
Me: That's fine, but the new ticket system says it isn't available at HQ yet and to call you
F: Well it shouldn't say that
M: Ok...
F: You'll need to get IT to change the system
M: That usually takes a few days and it's not really my...
F: IT will need to fix that
M: I think something has died in the water tank and it could be a health hazard
F: If you tell IT they might do it more quickly

Needless to say I just started using a different floor's bathroom.

Omfg that is ridic. I hate when people try to make you solve a problem just because you're the one that discovered it. How hard would it have been for that dude on the phone to just follow up for you. Esp when health risks are involved.

Yeah, conscience got the better of me in the end and i got it fixed but it's not great.

heh probably what i woulda done too but still....

did they find out what the scent was?

I hate when people try to make you solve a problem just because you're the one that discovered it.

At my previous job, the developers spent something like two years prepping a new document management system. The new DMS was set up such that, once a client's record was closed in our system, that client disappeared from the live DMS. Which would be fine, except that closed client records were often reopened at some point, and I noticed very quickly that reopened clients didn't reappear in the live DMS. I, of course, made the mistake of alerting people to this problem that absolutely positively should've been a consideration at some point during the aforementioned two-year development process. And guess who the CIO asked to compile a fucking list every fucking day of every fucking reopened client and send to the fucking developers?

I have noticed this so many times!! It is insane that so many ppl operate w/in frameworks where they are in essence punished for excelling

otttmmmm

I've curbed that whole 'excelling' thing to a pretty great extent after my last job.

Where I was ultimately doing the job of 3.5 people for basically the same pay I made when I did the job of 1.0 people. So when my current job is all like 'these are the challenges we'd like you to undertake in the new year' and they only want to give me a $0.30/hr raise, I'm all like 'nah, I'm good, thanks'.

I hate when people try to make you solve a problem just because you're the one that discovered it.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

xp I'm at this place where I'm in a rut bcz I'm still kind of on the ground floor in my field, and I want/need to be ambitious and expand my skillset and learn new things, so there are many instances where I've taken on projects and volunteered to do things outside of my job descrip and then gotten fucked in various ways. Once I got screwed out of a bonus bcz I didn't meet the metrics for my actual job position, bcz I spent so little time in the bonus period doing it (phone support) and so much doing other things (developing training materials, helping migrate the intranet, etc). Both I and my manager were PISSED and the bumbling HR dept was basically like "yeah that's such a shame, it's too bad we can't do anything about it"

hey man you have a seat and everyone else in your section has gone home, sit in your damn seat and talk at a normal volume instead of pacing up and down right outside the door to our section bellowing down the phone

also that sucks, sorry Stevie

There was a small group of people relocated to our (previously pretty quiet) aisle a couple of months ago, and MY GOD do they talk. Constantly, about any banal thing, and at a volume level that suggests they want everyone in the office to listen in. One dude is particularly egregious. I honestly don't know how he can possibly get any work done. On a day like today, when he's out of the office, is glaring.

totally with you Old Lunch/Stevie on being punished for excellence. On several of my last projects, because I watch things very closely, I've identified problems where somehow, even though I wasn't the person who knew how to fix it , I got tasked with owning and watching over it, and re-explaining the problem to all of the groups. which then takes me away from what I'm supposed to do.

I tend to be the type that won't ignore a problem that he sees, but the problem is everywhere I look, I see problems - lots of people tend to cut corners these days or not pay attention, and I have a keen eye, so the problem becomes ok, I don't want to create extra work for myself and make my life hell, but I also know xxx is wrong/broken and I wouldn't feel right seeing it and not saying anything about it, but at the same token, if I keep doing that, are the people who are responsible for it ever going to learn how to do their job and keep a watchful eye on these things or will they defer to me?

I learned that I should just stop looking, keep my purview to that which I am responsible for, and quit peeking at other things, or just outright "playing dumb" if I do see something. my scruples don't like that, but when you consider the hell I got put through for two years having loads of work thrown on me simply because I find and spot things easily, I can't handle that any more.

it has on the other hand lead to a lot of one-time bonuses and huge raises, so it's not like they haven't compensated/recognized me, but it becomes where the moment you take the reins on one or two things, suddenly people just think you're always going to do it and stop doing their own jobs. today, I got told to leave the help chat as a result (they told me I was babying people too much and the people who are taking over the ship Monday wanted to just do it themselves and give me a break, which was nice).

I just don't get the mentality though because if someone brings me a problem that they spotted and I know they aren't the person to fix it, I take it out of their hands and let them go on their merry way.

I've gotten to the point now where I don't even bother pointing out any of the (numerous) technical issues that I encounter within the proprietary (read: cobbled together by people who know just enough to trick technically-challenged people into thinking they're competent) software that our company uses for everything. Because if you report it to management, they expect you to be the point person who constantly follows up with helpdesk and the developers. And if you report it to helpdesk directly, you may as well have written it out and flushed it down the toilet. They just resolved the last issue I'll ever send (wherein single-quote characters were being replaced with the corresponding escape character...I'm fairly certain I understood the problem and the potential solution better than they did) after nine months of doing nothing outside of attempting on numerous occasions to close my ticket.

I hate that too, when you know the answer but you have no ability to see for certain, they ignore your suggestion, go about it differently, and then in the end you find out you were right and their refusal to take your guidance (which they shouldn't ahve needed anyway) led to an unnecessary delay

the other thing I hate is that our seasonal employees are typically garbage - often many of them only care about lasting through the end of their seasonal period, have questionable skills, mouth off, etc. and because they're outside contractors, *we* have to go through their employer to discipline them.

there are plenty of good ones, but the bad ones are so bad that it just causes a lot of noise. in prior years, leadership kind of understood "you get what you pay for", but this year, they've started making noise on the quality of the representatives, but it's like...I can generally tell 2 hours into a training session if someone is a lost cause, because they aren't paying attention, they're asleep ,they're on their phone, etc. and yet I get told I can't take them off of our project because you simultaneously demand we cut our staffing by 6% and start whining if we don't have enough people on the phones.

it gets to where I say "you're going to shit on me for the quality issues the resources have, yet you're giving me people that should never have been let into the building, who are being given shoddy equipment to take calls on, and are treated like cattle....and we're given an abbreviated timeframe to train them, but I'm supposed to achieve perfection with that?". Even after all of the extra refresher sessions I scheduled, the extra attention given , they're still lousy and I've just given up and am moving onto the next project knowing I did the best I could rather than taking it personally.

also the people they gave me to train in december were supposed to be the "high performers", the people that got retained due to doing well in Oct/Nov, and yet at least 5 of them have been terminated for poor performance since then and another 4 are on the chopping block next. THESE are the best people?

logged 200+ hours of training from Oct-Dec btw. facilitating. often alone. that's a lot.

When I was temping, I was regularly baffled by the praise I was given by employers for demonstrating what seemed to me base-level competence. But after a while of being exposed to other temps, I kinda got it (one assignment ultimately involved doing my own work and then correcting fully half of the work that the other temp had fucked up). In part, I think you can blame staffing agencies for paying more attention to their $$$ earned per head than to ensuring that their staff actually has the competencies they claim to have.

logged 200+ hours of training from Oct-Dec btw. facilitating. often alone. that's a lot.

logged 50+ posts of complaining from oct-dec btw. whinging. often at great length. that's a lot

i got the same thing when i used to temp. sometimes i occasionally become the lord of the temps, simply by being the least lazy/dull. i wouldn't get paid anything extra because i was still a temp – but I was expected to heard all these underpaid/dipshit cats on top of the regular work i was supposed to be doing.

so it's basically like IDiocracy then

my boss asked me to schedule a meeting for 1pm. at 11am, she asked me to reschedule for noon. at 11:30am, she asked me to reschedule back to 1pm. she showed up 25 minutes late to her own meeting while we all just sat there. this happens basically every single time i have a meeting with her.

is this anywhere near normal? it seems bizarre and rude as fuck to me but i guess i should be used to it

Wait... she asked you to reschedule her own meeting?? twice??? what was she doing at the time? it's something that takes about 15 seconds in outlook, for fuck's sake.

not to mention how incredibly inconsiderate of everyone else's time.

yeah that's horseshit. for one, if there's an emergency meeting you have to call in less than two hours, you need to make sure to cascade it broadly (ie walk-by) so everybody knows since one could easily just get lost in work for a few hours and not see it. and you never adjust it backwards. and then if you're going to be late, this needs to be communicated beforehand.

former head of my dept used to do this, yet if you did the same thing, it was 'instant feedback' for you.

i never quite got the 'having other people schedule your meetings in Outlook' thing unless you were like such a high level executive that you had too many meetings to keep track of.

she does this all the time, and although she's my boss' boss, she's still several hundred layers down in the overall hierarchy

All of the lawyers I work with ask others to schedule things in Outlook. Sometimes partners ask junior attorneys to do it, and juniors in turn pass on the task to support staff. It's a contest to get as far away from Outlook as possible.

i lost the plot at my boss yesterday.

[ridiculously long and boring post redacted]

after 35 years of owning this business, she still has no basic system for managing inventory, and every time i come up with one, she decides it's not working after a few months, but this time it was a couple of weeks. so i basically yelled at her that she should have this shit figured out by now.

so – are you posting this from work, or...

nope i decided to take the day off! she won't fire me - she can't. there is no one else who would do all the shit i do for such little pay. also it's not the first time (nor the last) that we've lost our shit at each other.

Long term and entrenched member of another team has a history of being disrespectful & unprofessional to coworkers blew up for the nth time yesterday at one of us. she went to hr because historically these incidents were brought to his supervisor who is great at doubletalk and could always assure you that "things will be different now". last i heard, several svps were going to CEO to discuss this, and the lady that went to hr has refused to work with the jerk any longer. i see it 50/50 at this pt whether anything concrete comes out of this or we end up w status quo. never worked with a more needlessly abusive dude than this one, so i sincerely hope they boot his ass. literally could poll anyone on my floor and they'd either have an unpleasant story, first hand or witnessed, of this dude blowing up at someone for a minor disagreement

Whoops strike either from last sentence. Anger gums up the works

lots of intelligent people here doing all sorts of complex things.

but none of them have figured out yet that if you fill the sink with dirty crockery then it stops being usable as a sink. twice today i've cleared bowls and mugs out of it so i can use the taps.

Sounds like they've figured it out.

i see it 50/50 at this pt whether anything concrete comes out of this or we end up w status quo. never worked with a more needlessly abusive dude than this one, so i sincerely hope they boot his ass.

question – have you considered going to hr yourself, or maybe with a few others to back-up the offended coworker? if you want to see this guy gone, it might help to put up more of a united front.

xxpost Intelligent people are some of the dumbest people I've ever encountered.

i haven't yet been actively involved but my understanding is that this has escalated and some kind of 'investigation' will likely involve me in some way as i was cited as a witness in a letter to hr. i am letting things develop and organizing my thoughts at this time, and anticipate further developments soon.

the front is currently united by people a step above me in the hierarchy, it seems ranks are being actively closed around this guy

xp

that's not good (if i understand correctly)

yeah i should have modified it a little to say the usual ranks are closing but there is a breakaway segment of upper management that it is actively trying to get him terminated. his boss is influential and utterly dependent on him and has handled these events in the past. i suspect the ultimate resolution will be at the ceos discretion and i don't know how he will decide. this guy has been here a decade and has a lot of special knowledge that some might think protects him. my fear is that the ceo buys the argument that he's required personnel