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

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.

what happened?

"i just ran out of time on friday"

oh well... that's ok then

that needs context.. was it something expected to be finished then no matter what and the person just peaced out and went home? (if so, fuck them)

No

Fuck "no matter what"

depends on the culture. people shouldn't have to stay after the hours they're paid for, but i know in a lot of careers, eg architecture, maybe journalism, it's considered a bare minimum.

in t3l3v1s10n, I had to deal with staff who would sometimes go home on Friday having "run out of time" to actually schedule programs for Sunday afternoon in the system

Don't run out of time to do stuff that's on your radar that you have plenty of time to do. Don't stay after hours ever except in dire emergencies. Don't be a dick, don't work for dicks.

missed deadlines happen, I think though there is an expectation that if you are going to miss the deadline, that you give a head's up in advance about it, rather than waiting for someone to chase you down to ask about it. def agree tho that people shouldn't be forced to work 18 hour days to meet a deadline

I'm fairly obsessive about not missing deadlines but if one looks in danger, I usually give notice indicating we're not likely to finish on time, indicate some kind of root cause as to why we're behind/if we need something additional, and a new estimated complete date that is conservative enough that I can meet but aggressive enough that it's not putting anything else at risk and fair to the person who assigned to me.

if the deadline's ridiculous to begin with, I'll say so from the onset, and ask for additional help if they won't budge. fortunate that my boss is sympathetic to those things, cos other people I know have told me theirs tells them "well tough, get it done, I don't care how long it takes". fuck that

someone just lets a major deadline pass without comment, though yeah, fuck that.

in t3l3v1s10n, I had to deal with staff who would sometimes go home on Friday having "run out of time" to actually schedule programs for Sunday afternoon in the system

Yeah this is what i was angling at. There are some jobs where you just have to Get A Thing Done because it has a deadline/other people relying on it.

I worked in the PS for years and "this isnt my role" or "its home time now eff off" was incredibly common.

PS = Public Sector or PS= Private Sector or PS= something else?

sorry, public service/sector. Govt work.

But yeah if some dick boss throws a massive job on your desk at 4.50 on Friday and says THIS MUST BE DONE READY FOR MONDAY MORNING, I think murder is an acceptable angle.

The boss is incrementally making changes to my design of a safe-using-of-illict-drugs brochure which started off looking like a parody of a certain well-known self-help book (as I was instructed to make it) so that it no longer looks like said book, rendering the current design inexplicable, and also now makes no sense

I'd try to make sure the boss leaves verifiable fingerprints on the original instruction and the subsequent changes.

coworker gets in these weird moods where she just hums to herself allllllll day long and I want to drown her

co-worker today on a call that I was merely observing kept stating her confusion on this one particular item over and over, and the host kept restating his reassurances and next steps (follow-up meeting) over and over to where I began to wonder if I was in a time loop.

coworker gets in these weird moods where she just hums to herself allllllll day long and I want to drown her

Oh quit being so whiney.

lol took me a sec

OH. lol.

idgi

battle of the egomaniacal, pan-genre overproducers w/ albums of shimmering genius that i want to drown in '10

actually oops it's this one:

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=77&threadid=67985

Thats a 77 thread.

THEN NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW...THE ANSWER

co-workers are now on their second day of arguing about whether sports should honor full-season champions (like the premier league) or have playoffs (like north american sports)

decided to listen to tubular bells instead

My office is dog friendly. And I hear all of you. AW! YOU GET TO HANG OUT WITH DOGS ALL DAY! WHO'S A PRETTY BOY?

Well. I've got this one behind me who lays at his owner's feet and gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws gnaws on its fucking chew toy ALL DAY LONG.

I will say that it hasn't barked today, like it did Friday whenever someone would, you know, walk through our area.

You didn't hear me say it.

Dog friendly

Fuck off

some places need to just be for adults/humans.

All places tbh

jfc

i have enough trouble with these ppl without introducing their animals into the equation

nope nope nope

We don't have a dog-friendly office, but we do have a tradition of, whenever the dog-hating boss is away, someone will bring in their dog and sit them in her chair, and we photograph it.

You have to make your own fun round here.

That doesn't sound terrible. I couldn't stand a workplace with a dog unless it was a junkyard or something outdoors.

I think one of the few things worse than being a person made to go an office every day is being a dog made to go to an office every day.

^^

this is a bare-bones summary of a broken-record convo I heard the other day. I was laughing for probably five straight minutes.

Doofus: i wanna talk to you about <platform>. you told our client we might have <platform> go live 7/1 despite delaying <other platform> to 8/1. we can't do that.

Leader: I don't think I said we were considering having <other platform> delayed to 8/1. We were just talking about sending specific files later.

Doofus: Ok because <platform> can't go live if <other platform> doesn't go live.

Leader: Understandable. I don't think we're talking about that, though. We are just talking about possibly changing the date certain files are sent.

Doofus: Ok - just so we're clear that we can't have <platform> go live, if <other platform> doesn't also go live. That isn't even an option, we need to not offer that.

Leader: I don't think we're going to. So - assuming that, could you create an order to have your team start working on <assignment>?

Doofus: That's going to depend on you all. As long as <other platform> goes live at the same time, we can do that - but we can't have <platform> go live before <other platform>.

Leader: Ok, ok, ok. Assume <other platform> going live 8/1 is off the table. Assume it's going live 7/1, like <platform>. Can you guys create the order to get the ball rolling on <assignment>.

Doofus: Well, it depends. I just want to make clear to you that <platforms> have to both go live at the same time.

......

I hung up after, I was giggling so hard and yet at the same time I knew if I listened to another second I might ping said person and say "OMG STFU ALREADY".

I'm really tempted to run a practical course on the fine art of how to eat an apple or bag of crisps without being overheard from a distance of 6 rows of desks.

cube neighbor SHOUTS HIS PHONE CONVERSATIONS IN A BOOMING VOICE ALL DAY

For a long time I thought he had a middle ear issue bc he is a loudtalker in general

the other day he placed an apologetic phonecall to a customer in a low normal speaking voice & i wanted to run over & shout J'ACCUSE! So you CAN talk in a normal volume motherfucker WTF

Cube neighbor SHOUTS ALL OF HIS CONVERSATIONS IN A BOOMING VOICE ALL DAY. Like, all day. Every day. I don't know how he gets work done. Or why no one has acted on the many complaints they've received about him.

There are about 8 million things about this dude that irritate me on an almost cellular level but I think the top two at the moment are 1) his "laugh", which is uniformly this completely fake and weirdly forced wheezy exhalation that would seem to indicate that he's never actually heard a human laugh before (and I'm certain that I have yet to hear an actual laugh come out of his face) and 2) his apparent wish to slowly kill me by using 'yadda yadda' in every third sentence.

But seriously. I could absolutely swamp this thread with an array of fascinating details about Blabbermouth.

I genuinely think Kutcher is gonna jump out any minute and tell me I've been punked, such is the voluminous and unceasing stream of stupidity hitting my inbox this morning. Like, deep and profound, 'I have suddenly forgotten the most basic functions of my job' stupidity. I'd suspect a gas leak or some other freak incident that was impairing cognitive function en masse but this is coming from multiple offices so I'll just blame Obama.

I had to test our phone lines this week on a specific platform (one I'm new to). I read the SOP - they have three platforms (including mine) in the same SOP, but this platform uses an entirely different system than the other two. SOP is full of info that's completely irrelevant, and missing instructions that I need because of this.

Asked around for a solid week to fill in the gaps - some of the answers I got in bits and pieces, some of them nobody could answer after going to five people. Just finished testing and I have no earthly fucking idea if it's done correctly.

*throws hands up*

SHOUTS HIS PHONE CONVERSATIONS IN A BOOMING VOICE ALL DAY

Yes - there's someone in my office space who does this - and she's says 'know what I mean' every 10 seconds. The whole purpose of these conversations as far as I can tell is to communicate to the office "Look! I'm doing all this!".

Even worse is she likes to get up and do a self-satisfied lap of honour around the office after a round of calls, obviously energised by calls that have achieved absolutely nothing in practical terms.

if you can be heard more than like a row behind your desk, stfu, is how i see it

Everyone one phones and in browsers watching football
Send mail to the team leads pointing out we're not blind
Mail was just forwarded on to team
Pandemonium and outrage

Im not displeased tbh