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

I would only be thinking of Stewart Lee in such an exchange.

https://vimeo.com/141220204

The solution to every problem in this thread: Get your boss to buy you a fancy pair of Panasonic horse blinders!

https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2018/10/panasonic-blinkers-technology-design_dezeen_2364_hero-1.jpg

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.pastemagazine.com%2Fwww%2Fsystem%2Fimages%2Fphoto_albums%2Fstar-wars-infinity%2Flarge%2Flobot-sw.jpg%3F1384968217&f=1

Friday's one was like a stand-up routine and it's taken until now for me not to be mad about it.

One chap lecturing another about how Hitler was just a misunderstood chap, and did so in the form of a number of 'and I was the teacher's statements that were e.g. "and who had a policy of reducing the price of food for working families? Hitler. You wouldn't have guessed that, eh?" although he let down his perceived logic by ending with "and of course he hated Eastern Europeans and Jews".

The reason you don't know all his good points is because Thatcher covered it all up so you wouldn't find out he was a good guy.

The Valleys are fkn weird (in addition to being massively racist - the second week I was here there was a discussion about the Solihull murders as the guy was being sentenced and one of the women in the office said it was "kind of sad, but it's not as if they were real people, is it.").

This isn't even the racist part of Wales, you have to go to Oswestry and all points north for the places the people here would describe as racist.

Ive never understood this Del Boy falling thru bar thing. ILX was the first place I'd even heard the phrase so I googled it, found the scene in question on youtube and was utterly baffled. Had to be there I guess?

I assumed it was a poll result winner for funniest scene in funniest show ever or something to that effect. It triggered Stewart lee doing an extended sketch illustrating it as something going into popular culture on a ceremonial level. Showed it as an Up Helly Ah like event that would be celebrated for centuries, become a tradition in itself. Which may be why it's in the list consciousness more than it would be otherwise.
It was kind of funny in its original context cos it showed a pretentious idiot having a momentary comeuppance. Thought it was one element among many that would probably be mostly forgotten if teh show it was from hadn't got further circulation through vhs sales and endless repeats.
Much like the chandelier thing being the funniest thing ever. Was quite ribtickling at the time but should fade into the public memory if that and not always be thrown up as the pinnacle.

A quick googling reveals it to be the perennial runner up in actual polls, but it's a mainstay in the innumerate recent-era nostalgia circuits as having become the consensus pick.

If we're going to pick apart Stewart Lee's take as a curmudgeonly middle-class metropolitan lefty elitist, it's because this is a very minor part of the episode in question which is all about attempts to game Right To Buy in order to exploit the forthcoming inevitable gentrification of the area - a last hurrah of self-immolation sacrificing working class lifetimes of struggle in the pursuit of a brick-sized mobile phone. Or is it about 20 seconds of physical comedy? OFaH itself plays with the class struggle never acknowledged by The Guardian, that working classes (particularly London) completely buy into the the aspirational elements of Conservative mythology and vote accordingly, and Del Boy is a Thatcherite poster hero using his own guile and abilities to better himself. Or does Trigger do a face? Perhaps it's even a commentary on the soundbite culture and lack of attention span in today's society - the series reduces to Trigger calling Rodney Dave, Del Boy falling through the bar, Trigger's broom, the chandelier and hahaha they think they're shagging in the van after the auction. Fuck the rest, it's not important. Who dares wins Rodders.

how could you forget del boy and rodney as batman and robin ffs

Oh yes Del Boy and Rodney as batman and robin (in an episode that flirts with a future of the Baby Damien basically becoming a hybrid of Murdoch and Trump, debates whether Del Boy actually cares about Rodney beyond obligation, plots the breakup of Rodney and Cassandra's marriage and the 'unfairness' of fertility Vs wanting children and ends up being about council corruption and behind closed doors deals based on favours, even to support obviously bent schemes).

XP I thought nobody could, or was allowed to forget about that.
Probably caused a lot of people to go to fancy dress parties as them since too.

KInd of funny how decontextualised the public memory of certain things becomes really.
When you're talking about the actual background its contextualised to in the original.
Seems to happen a lot with things 'in public knowledge' dunnit?

aldo, you're skirting dangerously close to me advocating for you to do an exhaustive episode-by-episode breakdown of the entirety of only fools and horses

Probably caused a lot of people to go to fancy dress parties as them since too.

Going to a fancy dress party dressed up as someone going to a fancy dress party explains a lot.

Actually since Trigger's broom is from the same episode and the auction is from the third of those Christmas specials there's an argument that nobody remembers anything except the concluding trilogy (and let's not go near the sequel trilogy).

To return to the Class War subtext, the rights were one of the big investments for UK Gold and repeated indefinitely to exploit the expenditure back in the days when a satellite dish on a house was like a Right To Buy graffiti tag; this makes the populist viewers the del boys and the curmudgeonly middle-class metropolitan lefty elitists the nostalgia pundits, ignoring generations of aspirational behaviour because do you remember the Chartists Stew? The Chartists with their 'votes for all men over 21'? They Chartists Stew? They had a march, didn't they, eh? Joseph Rayner Stephens with his 'votes for all men over 21'? William Lamb the Viscount Melbourne did a face.

Thing is, these comedy bits enter the common parlance, often shorn of the actual conclusion.

The falling through bar bit - OK, th "David Beckham" one was funnier, but mainly because on that Comic Relief thing, I was doubting that any thing about it was going to be funny so it was unexpected. A bit.

The Chandelier thing: "Well, I wish you'd told me! I was doing that one!" is the funny. Not the crashing to the floor bit.

A different one, less cited, is Del doing a "Why Ask?" routine, based around "Where have you been all night? Been down the pub!!" which finishes off with Trigger going "Yeah! .... Why Ask?" and you just know he hasn't understood a word of it.

xpost! (Lols)

common parlance was what I was referring to as public knowledge.

Funny that a lot of things will take on a life of their own when de-anchored from their original context and in fact themselves become normative. Not sure how beneficial the end result is.

"It triggered Stewart Lee doing an extended sketch illustrating it as something going into popular culture on a ceremonial level. Showed it as an Up Helly Ah like event that would be celebrated for centuries, become a tradition in itself."

Del Day:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x32cwns

one learner's favorite phrase:

"I promise I was listening, but..." then proceed to ask me to repeat the entire instruction I already stated 3 times.

Now that we're probably nearing a triple-digit number of instances where I've forwarded an email to a particular coworker (because it was meant for him) only to have him inexplicably send it right back to me without additional comment, I think I've moved all the way through irritation and into deep concern for his well-being. Like maybe he has a gaping head wound we've all been somehow overlooking for months.

I've just done the Unconscious Bias online training at the place I'm currently placed in.

Maybe it's my unconscious bias showing but I think the person who drew it up is a fucking idiot and anyone who considered paying for it is even more of a fucking idiot.

It genuinely recommends that, so you're not biased against candidates, the following information should be redacted from CVs prior to conducting an interview:

Name and gender
Date and place of birth
Marital and family status
Home address
Education history
Work history
Hobbies and interests

Also:
Words
Whitespace
Printed matter/electronic files

A CV is more a feeling than anything else, really.

Education and work history was the bit they were most focused on. Apparently there's a real danger that you value experience you know about rather than experience you have no idea about, or that mutual acquaintances can give you an opinion that you might consider as part of a decision.

i'd be inclined to give that a whirl tbh, lots of ppl's education and previous work history is irrelevant to their job. I'm not convinced the correlation between experience and competence is v strong. recruitment is such an appalling business. I know plenty of ppl who are excellent at their jobs who'd never have got them through applying/their CV.

I agree on the below being redacted, unless the job requires specialized education to be listed or if you don't have very much work experience, are a newbie to the work force.

Name and gender
Date and place of birth
Marital and family status
Home address
Education history
Hobbies and interests

if this is internal hiring, that's mega crap re: work history. external hiring, a bit more nebulous - I had zero call center work experience, at a time when that usually was something held against you during interviews, and lucked into getting the job and parlayed it into a 14 year career.

but even then - they still weren't "ignoring" my work history!!! they were very much looking at how what I did mapped into the role I was applying for.

I started to leave out the year I graduated college just because I was annoyed by terrible interviewers feeling obligated to ask about the 3 year or whatever gap right after college where I didn't list employment because it was well over a decade ago and i literally can't put "fucking around" as my job.

The Trigger's broom joke was common parlance before it was Trigger's; I'd heard my dad say it many times before it appeared on OFaH.

Was your dad Plutarch?

Trigger's brom a thing about whether a brush that you replaced the head and the handle on several times remains the same broom?
I've seen that come up in different circumstances too. THing about identity or object constancy that has cropped up in some philosophical stuff i've studied.

Otherwise know as the Ship of Theseus... (Eyeball Kicks otm)

I have an unconscious bias course to do but have to do it "face to face".

All removing those things from CVS will do is mean that you do more interviews of unsuitable candidates, wasting more time. And the moment you set eyes on them in reception it all goes out the window anyway.

Job interviews should be one question long: Do you shit at the office?

(The correct answer is NO, barring a life-threatening emergency.)

Bollocks. If i held in a shit at the office all day then everybody would be bitching about my flatulence all day

wtf, getting paid to shit is the only reason to go to work

next you’ll be tryna tell me that embezzling six figures from my employer each year is wrong too

If embezzling shits is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

So imagine you have a department in your company whose job is putting together peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And you send them a request for one of their delicious sandwiches because you need it in order to do your own job, and they send you back a slice of bread. And you say, well, no, I actually wanted a whole sandwich, so y'know...send it back once you've corrected the problem. And then they send you two slices of bread. And so you say, ahem, maybe you forgot something? And then they send you a peanut butter sandwich with no jelly. And then you basically have to walk this other department through an entire process whose details you really shouldn't have ever had to think about. This has been my morning. This has been my morning. And I assume my afternoon will be centered around the fallout of an embolism or perhaps a stroke. Some sort of stress-related brain event, for sure.

we're probably nearing a triple-digit number of instances where I've forwarded an email to a particular coworker (because it was meant for him) only to have him inexplicably send it right back to me without additional comment

This is just a single email that you've been mailing back and forth for years, right, its meaning long forgotten? And he thinks you're as defective as you think he is? Good old work.

And the entire company is copied on it, and we always reply all.

Please note: regardless of how many parties you may have previously contacted about your issue, the first email you send to me in particular is, in fact, a first request. Not a third or fourth or fifth, but a first. No matter how large a font you use or how emphatically you employ caps in insisting that this is a SEVENTH REQUEST!!!!!!!, it will not retroactively generate the emails that you didn't prior to this, the first request which I've received. Thanks so much for your kind attention.

the hot water from the taps here is too hot to put your hands in (why?). but they are mixer taps and you can control the mix using the lever on the top. move it anti-clockwise, all the way away from you, to get cold water, move it clockwise, all the way towards you, for scaldingly hot. simple enough.

only the tap in the other kitchen is on the other side of the sink so the positions are reversed.

people here also don't know not to try and flush paper towels, the idiots.

one of my colleagues recently switched spaces with another colleague, and although the one that was in the adjacent cubicle had her own very annoying habits, the replacement gets on my nerves even more with her frequent loud drawer opening and closing. like closing the drawer loudly against the divider between our desks. she's forever getting something out of her drawers! Snacks, some sort of stationery, you name it, she will retrieve it from the drawers. she's not a particularly sensitive person. she's one of those kath from kath & kim types that gets her little sachet of whatever, idk creamer? and will stir it really loudly and furiously into her mug at her desk. there are certain kinds of people in my office, let's call them bogans, that are terrible for the furious tea and instant coffee stirring. no thought of how annoying their presences are on a daily basis.

thank goddddd she is leaving us soon

It has taken our whole office a number of days to realise that whenever someone uses the kitchen toaster, it flips a safety switch which kills all our computers. This has happened about a dozen times, and yet nobody who turned on the toaster just as everything died thought to say anything.

At what point did confidently asserting one's abject ignorance come to replace competence? And can we switch things the fuck back already?

i didn't like it when someone dumped a battered chair behind desk but i figured it was a wide aisle and not exactly in the way.

but today someone is using said chair as a clothes horse. there are damp jackets and socks hanging from it.

can we get back to aldo on Fools & Horses? Or, it may deserve a dedicated thread.

This is more my stupid, possibly future co-workers.

I'm supposed to give a presentation at a job interview (the second round!) this Tuesday. But it seems like they've forgotten to give me the brief on what to present.

I sent them an email today, and an email Wednesday when I got the offer, and they still haven't sent me a brief. I called the HR team and they didn't help at all.

Not sure what to do next! This doesn't exactly reassure me about working there, if they expect someone to make a presentation based on a brief given to them just the day before.

Maybe they'll give you the brief when you get there? Give you ten minutes to prepare something. I've heard of interviews like that, but like you I would be wary of working somewhere that did them.

What kind of job is it (sector?)

my new boss is starting to annoy me. so, I went on a business trip a few months ago. All of the expenses were filed and reimbursed. However, I was a few days late per AmEx's standard, so I was charged a $39 late fee. That late fees are my responsibility is fairly unambiguous, so I paid it myself. However, there was also a toll charge that came in a month after the trip from the rental car company.

I had stayed over the weekend on said business trip, and decided to take a trip to Virginia, 4 hours away. As the rental car mileage was unlimited, and this was not expressly forbidden by the travel policy, I opted to go, but I decided to use only my own money for the duration of that escapade, to err on the side of caution...meaning all gas, food, etc, that would have normally been paid by the business card, I paid for myself. So, naturally, when this toll charge came in...I also paid it myself.

However, these things still show up in your electronic Wallet, and we're moving systems in Jan, so I opted to file an expense report to 'clear' my Wallet. I did so, marking everything non-reimbursable, and informing my boss that I was owed no money, and that it was just to clear my wallet. She approves it, but asks curiously where the charges came from.

I was transparent and told her, same as I've written here. Radio silence for over a day. Now, I'm on PTO this week, and just logged in to send that email, so maybe she's trying to wait til I get back, but there's no easier way to spike my anxiety than not to simply write back "oh, ok, makes sense! thanks". besides, if she's doing it out of respect to my vacation, well, now I'm sitting here anxious about finding out if I'm in trouble* or not.

*I don't see how I could be, as I used zero company dollars for anything that wasn't eligible, but my boss is kind of a ditz when it comes to the travel policy.