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

manager always wants to add exclamation points to the sell-sheets i put together for him

it's like working with a carnival barker

manager: mock something up for the design team

me: ok cool *provides rough mockup*

oh hey look they had to print what i did because he gave the group zero time to redesign anything

me: please dont tell people I am responsible that

Now I have an advertiser forwarding me a 72 dpi proof that her designer had sent her and saying "ok, here's my press-ready ad," and I'm like mmmmmmnope.

leading training for new hires last week and it was great but the materials/demo tools we are given were created in 2006 and haven't been updated well. the demo tool has one key 401k plan provision that has been illegal since 2006 as part of the Pension Protection Act.

they literally have a list they've compiled for three years of things wrong with the materials and are all like "yeah we're getting to it".

I get people who not only send 72 dpi photos they've downloaded FROM FACEBOOK for print publication, but downloaded the THUMBNAIL from the album they were browsing to select it.

(Rarely, once a year or so.)

Oh yes, that is a thing for sure.

I can understand not knowing what dpi is or even that the size of an image in print must be much larger than the photos you see online.

But not getting that a larger image that "fills up the whole screen" would be better than the the preview image to send, I don't get that one.

And they're downloaded, "Saved As"! It would almost make sense if we were getting screenshot.png's.

the *director of quality assurance* parks his motorcycle in diagonal lined space between handicapped spots.

also have come to realize that coworker (whom i usually get along with!) is an irl trump-voting anime avatar.

We used to get cover images for LPs from labels that were actually the HTML source code of the relevant Amazon pop-up window.

I hope you included the yellow 15% OFF arrow with it.

There have been plenty of times that I'll get a 75x150 mug, too little even for our website, but through a reverse image search and an open directory on their own company website, have found a reasonable 3200x4800 version of the same image.

Almost makes me miss the days of those corporate sites squeezing in those huge images into distorted thumbnail slots.

yeah I got blank looks from a coworker who asked me to photoshop a 72dpi iphone photo of her dad that she wanted blown up into a large poster

you're the one who took the crappy photo, don't blame me if you think your dad isn't worth 300 dpi

i handle the staff biography web pages for an organization with which we have a contract, and they are *very intense* about their bios

once every month or two i have to rearrange the order, putting someone higher on the list than before

a couple weeks ago i was asked to put , Esquire after the names of two people in the legal department and i was like are you serious because that is embarrassing, at which point i was told 'nevermind'

last week i had to add that some fucking guy had graduated 'with honors'

Ego tripping.

Does esquire have a legal meaning about owning land anyway?

In the legal profession

In the U.S., the title Esquire is commonly encountered among members of the legal profession.[7] The term is used for both male and female lawyers.[38]

The title Esquire is not allocated by the law of any state to any profession, class, or station in society. Because it is commonly employed by lawyers, however, use by an unlicensed person may be evidence of the unauthorized practice of law.[39]

hey thanks for handing me this helpdesk ticket at 7pm (after we both left the office) on the day before I have the day off as you well know (and you do not)

I know this because the helpdesk system emailed me to say I'd been given it and for some reason I decided to check my work email from home, but I can't look at the actual ticket without faffing about with VPNs and remote desktop, so... not gonna happen

Ah cisco anyconnect, how i hate thee.

lol yes, my standard line to our laptop users is that we can't remote desktop to their computers when they're connected over VPN.

Also, try explaining to people that AnyConnect is the grey circular icon, when it's in a system tray full of grey circular icons...

LOL it looks almost identical to Steam and the Asus update thing on my PC. I never thought about that (thank fuck I dont do L1 support anymore)

I've been entirely second line for a few years now, but where I'm working at the moment our team still has to deal with the calls that the first line people can't manage. Which is a lot, because a) we're cheap so we hire inexperienced people, and b) we promote the decent helpdesk operators to other teams because people are leaving all the time.
Chip facing up, short end goes in the card reader first.

xp I was very confused when I installed a newer AnyConnect and the icon became an indistinct round blob (tbh I am still routinely v confused by this)

also several of my icons at work are a very similar combo of grey, light green, light blue, I still have to stop and think before I click on anything

http://img.informer.com/icons/png/32/5116/5116606.pnghttp://static.filehorse.com/icons/file-transfer-and-networking/winscp-icon-32.png (plus others I don't remember)

btw I am 93% sure that whatever comes in on that ticket tomorrow could be dealt with by someone other than me, and even if it can't it would make more sense for someone who's in the office to own it and say "hi, we're not going to do anything on this today" and then hand it to me for Monday

I have the next three days off, and also many annoying co-workers, but fortunately for me only one of them would try passing a ticket into my queue when I'm not around. Co-incidentally this person is not a manager, but has been recently given a tiny amount of responsibility over other people in the team (for no extra money!), and has turned into Hitler.

I mean if Hitler had been hugely pass-agg.

there's this one dude supervising our training program this week who talks to everybody like it's their first day on the job in a voice that sounds like equal parts Casey Kasem and Mr Rogers

squealing and saying "oh noooo" all day like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl is really not a good sound in your mid 50s.

well, stop doing it then

book me to train week of 3/14, have internal discussions needing it a week earlier, assume I can do it without asking me and send me the invite (giving me one less day to prep cos I had two PTO days this week).

tell me it's 20 people, give me class of 42. find a mistake in the materials, tell me to go ahead and teach the mistake instead of fixing it because it's a "good teachable moment".

swear it's Idiocracy in my place

one of my bestest friends at work does this 1 thing that drives me crazy

he leaves at 4:30, but 9 times out of 10 when I bounce at 5 he's still in the office talking to our boss or the other manager

like, DUDE. you've worked with these people for 20 years, they are neeeevvvver going to promote you, just go home ffs

i want to shake him. quit acting like their pet dog! but he's kind of oldschool sales guy with a heart of gold so i figure it's his journey

but jeez.

corporate america is the worst and i feel like such a fucking idiot rube for not realizing that:

1. people will lie to your face if they have anything to gain (or even anything to not lose) in so doing,
2. no one is your ally,
3. close working relationships may seem reciprocal but they're one-sided as soon as one party stands to gain from throwing another under the bus,
4. the only trust between parties in this environment is the trust built around mutually assured destruction.

mercifully i am moving on from this randian shitshow in a few months when i relocate with my partner for her phd. i now realize i must approach every subsequent step in my career as if i'm entering thunderdome.

poisoning co-workers has its benefits

entire office smells like baby powder

you knew what you were getting into when you took a job with johnson & johnson tbf

ya j&j, accenture, etc, are peak corpo amerika

it's pretty intense

how many babies does it take to make an oz of baby powder? the answer may surprise you...

a foot

listening to a coworker poll the room right now on who is feeling stressed out... because you see, she is so very sensitive to the vibes around her, that she is getting really anxious right now and has deduced that she is picking up on someone else's heightened heart rate.

i use my cell phone for work (no landline) and I guess due to the bad reception in my house due to the trees/etc, if I don't sit in the exact correct position, inevitably my call drops or I become inaudible at some point.

It only happens once or twice a day, but it aggravates me - but then I remember I work at home and all is better.

This department that I've been in the exasperating position of having to email a lot to basically say "hey, you guys did your job incompletely, appreciate it if you could un-half-ass your work so I can get my own work done" has at least been pretty good about actually complying when you poke them awake. And then a couple of months ago, they arbitrarily decided to start pushing back and insisting that every request sent to them requires approval from my manager before they can complete it. Except, again, these are requests to fix or complete work that they did incorrectly or incompletely, requests for which managerial approval is implied given that the initial requests would've never made it to their department in the first place without approval from my manager. I had an exhausting back and forth with their manager, finally pulling my own manager in to affirm that this other department should complete X, Y, and Z every time she sends a request through. I made a point of saying in my final email to the other department manager that she needs to disseminate this info to her whole team.

I sent a request to fix something today and it was instantly forwarded to my manager for approval. It never. Fucking. Ends.

A co-worker regularly says "verbage" instead of "verbiage," and now multiple other co-workers are doing it, too. I feel like I finally understand that William Burroughs line about language being a virus.

Unfortunately, "verbage" has been acceptable usage in the printing biz going back almost 20 years, ime.

yeah, I hear that one all the time

"without further adieu"

argh!

What an embarrassing fo pah.

otoh, perhaps this co-worker knows all the words to 'Hand Jive', so they have not entirely wasted their life

Before I was bourn late one knight
My papa said everything's all write

dunno if this is just a civil service or a politics thing but one thing which drives me bananas is people who "escalate" every fucking email you send them, and seek to roll deep at every opportunity.

like you are having a conversation about a piece of work and you email them and they reply with nine mystery people cc'ed in. or halfway through an email conversation they suddenly add a person in. they never say "oh i'm cc'ing john tediousman in here, he can help us with xyz" or whatever, as would be normal, just this creepy moment like that piratey guy in lost revealing his hundred jungle cohorts by having them light their torches.

the same people will arrive at a one to one informal meeting with like four other people and try and bully you into agreement.

it looks so poor to me, like as well as being rude, it shows a total lack of independence, sensitivity, responsibility, and is just generally wasteful. like "everyone needs to know about everything" is a seriously fucked organisational or team culture.

that is definitely a cya thing in Corp America too, or sometimes it is used to gain leverage (i have had to do this before) w unresponsive parties. when i was first at my job and didn't really have a good understanding of what our dept's scope of responsibility was, i got burned trusting someone, who emailed me directly, not to take advantage of my newness/ignorance. After that i often would kick conversations to my boss to arbitrate bc i didn't want to get fucked over again.

Yes to leverage with unresponsive parties. I try to do as much one-on-one as possible, but after like the second time that I have to remind a person of what their job duties entail, I'll rope a manager or two into the convo.

as a manager, I can say that the obnoxious flip side of this is the person who insists on inviting me to every one of their meetings because they need an adult to supervise. If nothing is actually on fire, learn to manage it yourself before roping me in to your nonsense.

My rule of thumb as an underling was that my manager wanted me to solve as many problems as possible without requiring her involvement. She had enough headaches without that.