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

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.

tbh I always cc my manager in but it's not because I'm escalating anything, it's so she knows I'm spending time on an issue that she may not have been aware of, in case it impinges on my scheduled work.

Aimless, yes, that's exactly what I'd want

CP, if the people I managed CCed me on all their emails, I'd lose my mind.

She only manages 4 people. Plus people are not supposed to email me with work directly anyway, she is supposed to decide what we work on, which I realise is probably not the case for a lot of people.

I typically write "+ (name)" if I am adding someone to an email because they are better equipped to answer, sometimes even with an explanation of their role. it's just courtesy, otherwise the other person is left wondering "who the fuck are all THESE people?"

when people CC someone purely as a 'gotcha', fuck that. we had one big project manager guy who freaked out and overreacted about everything, so we'd only CC him if he needed to know it. but there was always someone who felt he needed to be included on menial emails and would CC him us in their responses to us and then he'd interfere and muck things up.

I had a boss who was so paranoid that not cc'ing him on an email to a client was a firing offense.

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that.

I had this one co-worker who was CCed on an email where I was asking for updates and indicating the urgency of needing a response for testing purposes. It wasn't at the "sky is falling" phase and I prefer not to go running for leaders immediately until I need them, so I left our project lead off. She took it upon herself, without asking me first, to forward it to the project manager, who then stuffily said I should have told him and then dismissed the urgency of the issue, telling me my dept's needs weren't as immediately important. (some leader).

then 30 minutes later, on a status call, calls me out in front of the entire team for not CCing him on that email. the same lady tried to do the same thing months later where she complained loudly about something one of my direct reports hadn't done and CCed him.

this time I emailed back and said 'WOULD YOU KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF' in business-friendly speak.

I don't know if I'm the annoying co-worker, or if everyone else I work with is.

We had our retreat this week. I've got a bad attitude about the retreat, but try hard not to "poison" the two-day activities. We had all taken a personality survey and this highly-paid consulting group affiliated with a non-denominational church show up and explain how our group of lions and otters and beavers and golden retrievers need to get along with each other. Somewhere along the line, upper management said they were seriously thinking about adding an icon of the animal we were labeled next to our desk, so other co-workers would know "who they were dealing with."

So maybe you're wondering what kind of animal I was? Here's a funny thing: me and this one other guy weren't assigned any animal. He had matched 100% in all four categories and I had answered "c" to every question.

Afterward, we were in the lobby and I said the only icon I would accept next to my desk would be a Crucifix, which would show my devotion to JESUS CHRIST, MY LORD AND SAVIOR. My company president appeared at my side about halfway through that sentence.

The next day, he appears at my side again. "That comment you made about the crucifix... was that a comment on the group being from a church? I was concerned about some of what they were saying not being appropriate."

I said, "Nah, maybe what I said was appropriate. My comment was more about how weird it is that someone's going to go around the office and put beaver pictures on people's desks."

He seemed hurt, so maybe I poisoned the proceedings after all.

<3

honestly I think whatever the good intentions, labeling your staff as some kind of defined personality type based on a sketchy test is a bad idea, and having a non-denominational church behind it woulda felt weird to me too. kinda seems like that's a "know your audience" thing for the President.

that's the type of shit (minus the church) that my old (now defunct) dept did that made me find excuses to skip meetings.

Pplains, your job sounds like purgatory

More like lmbo

There Is No 'I' In Team Lmbo

I remain thankful that my current workplace doesnt seem to be into all that retreat and corp team building bullshit. Ive worked at other places thatve dnoe it. It is without exception a monumnental waste of everyone's time and money.

I mean ffs one year, we had one whose theme was Survivor (like the TV show). This, mind you, mere days after my entire team had been told we were all being let go in 3 months time. THANKS FOR RUBBING IT IN GUYS.

And what did the day involve? I couldn't tell you anything useful. At one point, we bashed on african drums. Then everyone else in the hotel we were in called and complained about the noise. At some other point I recall having to come up with an ad jingle. I discovered at this point that every single person I worked with had ZERO sense of rhythm or melody. they could not even hold a simple 4 4 beat. It was hideous.

I mean ffs one year, we had one whose theme was Survivor (like the TV show).

If next year's theme is Survivor (like the 80s band), ya know, I might just quit my whinging.

All workplaces should have team building yacht rock karaoke tbrh

our teambuilding involves the occasionally 2-hour lunch, picked up by the company. I can live with that anyday.

Hope my team icon is the guy who wrote "Vehicle" by Ides of March.

I remain thankful that my current workplace doesnt seem to be into all that retreat and corp team building bullshit. Ive worked at other places thatve dnoe it. It is without exception a monumnental waste of everyone's time and money.

a few years ago, i was doing fairly mind-numbing editorial for a telecoms company, and they got taken over by a us firm and fired most of my team. in the immediate aftermath, they moved me to a new team on a new floor, despite me having no work connection with this team, and my duties shrank to p much nothing, there was no editorial because i had no writers. i was basically kept on because i knew how to update their homepage quickly and use their awful cms.

anyway - the new team had a lot of recently promoted managers who were highly enthusiastic, and so they organised an away day at a conference place in covent garden. this was like my first introduction to this entire department, all at once.

for the first task, they covered the entire floor with photographs, like random photographs of a hundred different things, and we had to take one that symbolised "where we are", another for "where we have been" and a third for "where we're going". we then had to discuss this in front of the entire room. i picked a killer whale and said i was an endangered species in an ocean full of toxic waste.

there were other sessions in which people had to, publicly, say how happy they were, with their entire life (it was made clear this about your whole life) by picking a number between 1 and 10. there were at least three hour-long presentations from new boss types, and a final 90-minute session with a life coach from new zealand, which was essentially a long, long, fairly unstructured pep talk with a lot of stories about his life and his children.

the thing about team building is, if you actually need to do it, or if it's done to as a remedy to a lack of team spirit, it doesn't work. might as well be putting logs on a fire that's gone out.

where i work now my boss is constantly organising team events in an almost sweet way, like "you were away for your birthday, the team needs to have drinks!" - that probably sounds awful except that we all like each other, we all work well together, and we like working here. so we just go for drinks and it's fun.

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.

So OTM, and it does seem quite civil service - I think we've had to take steps to stop one particular bit of it (clue: you pay tax to them) doing this on our ticketing system. It causes chaos and slows everything down.

it's a sort of group paralysis. like stasis by committee. some of the examples people gave upthread made a lot more sense to me, and seemed fine, but there's a kind of passive aggressive silence to this in the civil service,

Thanks for the update to this thread, I've cc'd in your boss to confirm it's inline with what she was expecting

i picked a killer whale and said i was an endangered species in an ocean full of toxic waste.

That's what I'm talking about.

lolz. took redundancy about a month later. it was p cool as apparently the inanimate carbon rod they put doing my job had an absolute nightmare trying to update their homepage, the cms was really weird and shitty and i hadn't really thought about how difficult it would be for somebody with no editorial skills and no knowledge of its quirks to update the page. like it took a fucking age to preview anything, so knowing the exact character limits that fitted, instinctively, and basically the 30 types of headline that worked well, meant i could do what was a day's work for him in about an hour.

i picked a killer whale and said i was an endangered species in an ocean full of toxic waste.

I tip my hat to you, good sir.