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

Office twats who preface statements with 'I'm not being funny' should recognise that everything following the phrase comes with its own virtual kill file.

My other suggestion would be to canvass other coworkers for a pizza delivery one Friday and exclude her blatantly.

I work in a room with two people. Person 1 said to me all the stuff I wrote above. She thought nothing of saying it to a stranger (the assumption, I guess, being that I would think the same). Person 2 laughed along merrily. Also, I have come across numerous people in Glasgow who tell me they get scared in London because there are so many black people around. Again, the way they express themselves implies they feel no sense of shame whatsoever - they just don't see there's anything wrong in expressing obviously prejudiced opinions.

I'm not denying for a second that racism doesn't exist elsewhere (and I'm not forgetting that the survey found 3 in 4 Scots aren't racist) but this is the only place I've encountered bigots who have the expectation that my opinion must be the same as theirs.

reply from me: "actually, on Friday we both determined that we had the wrong CD and would have to special order a new copy. On Monday."

reply from my boss: "There must have been some miscommunication here."

yeah, between your ears and your brain. moron!

What the fuck?

Despite the fact that she's obviously still pregnant.

However, I AM authorized to purchase them, however I want, whenever I want.

What does that even mean?

SUBJECT LINE: I gotta get outta this place
...if it's the last thing I ever do (feel free to hum along.)

After a delightful morning spent discussing why someone:
1. Shouldn't open a printer paperfeed drawer, while the printer is printing;
2. Shouldn't send emails to everyone on their mailing lists about Church-related emails;
3. Should let others know when they need the printer instead of deleting documents in the queue;
4. Shouldn't tell someone "this is urgent" so they work really late to get it finished, when really, it isn't urgent at all and in fact, doesn't need to be done at all; and
5. Shouldn't take someone else's lunch from the refrigerator and leave it on the counter to make room for "extra drinks in case we have visitors,"
I have now experienced the conversation to top them all (and really, you have to laugh at this one. I did. Once I calmed down, imbibed chocolate and nicotine, and thought "well, at least it's not quantum physics?). So....here it is:

A Dialogue between "M" (yours truly) and "S" (Otherwise known as Scarett/Princess/Arch Nemesis/The Scarf Lady/etc.)
S: Hey "M"!
M: Yes?
S: You know how to work that digital camera yet?
M: Yeah, figured it out last week.
S: How long does it take to get those photos developed?
M: What?
S: I need some photos really fast, so I can photocopy them and make notes on the back. And get duplicates too, in case they get messed-up.
M: What? What pictures do you need taken?
S: I need to you take pictures of my computer.
M: Why?
S: I need to know what's on my computer.
M: (sigh) You are looking for a file?
S: No, I need to know what is on my screen thing.
M: (dawning awareness) You need screen captures?
S: No, I need pictures of my computer.
M: For....?
S: I need to know what's on my screen, 'cause these instructions don't make sense and I want to make notes.
M: Okay, then you need a picture of the information on your screen, that you can print and add notes to?
S: Yes.
M: Okay, we don't need the camera for that. We can just do screen captures. It's easy.
(M walks over to other office, taking deep and soothing breathes all the while, and explains how to "CTRL+ALT+PrtScn" - runs into trouble with explanation of holding down all keys at the same time. Eventually resolved and screen is captured.)
M: Now open Word and set the page to ?Landscape.?
S: My computer won't do that.
M: What? Yes it will.
(M goes through brief discussion of "portrait" vs "landscape" and how to perform operation in Word. Discovers part of problem is that S doesn?t know how to open Word because the icon isn?t on her desktop.)
M: Now just hit "Shift+Insert" and your screen shot will be inserted.
M: No, you need to hold down both keys at the same time.
M: I don't know, that's just the way the program is designed.
M: Yeah, it is find of frustrating.
M: Okay, now you have it. Just insert a new page for each of the next screen captures and then print the file.
(M returns to own desk and gets back into rhythm of formatting proposal.)
S: M! It isn't working. I want you to take the pictures for me.
M: I don't have time to take the pictures right now, I have to get this back to _____.
S: Well, I don't have the time to use the camera, so I guess this won't get done and _____ will be mad.
M: Yeah, I guess ___ will be mad, but I'll explain the problem to him.
S: Can't you do these thingys for me?
M: No, not right now. I have to get this done.
S: You know, it's your job to do this.
M: No, actually it isn't. I am sorry, but I really can't do it right now. If I have time later I'll come over and see what we can do. In the meantime, why don't you look under the "Help" menu to see if those instructions are better.
S: Oh, my computer doesn't have any "Help" on it. I keep telling ____ he needs to fix it, but he won't.

(M decides, for sake of sanity, to not try and figure out what that last comment means and returns to her editing, swearing all the while.)
End of original email.

And here are additional interesting tidbits about ?S?:
She claimed on her resume to be ?Microsoft Certified,? but was unable to explain what that meant;
She wrote all of her correspondence in Excel, because she didn?t know how to open Word (the icon wasn?t on her desktop);
When she came into work each morning, she made herself a pot of tea and sat in her cubicle reading household decorating magazines and drinking tea for the first two hours: and, best of all
She was once asked to provide a file that she had finished working on to another co-worker. The file was not on her hard drive for, as she explained, she ?didn?t want to fill it up with things? (and it was a 20 G HD!) File was eventually determined, by her, to be on a floppy. But floppy was blank when co-worker opened it. Eventually ?S? showed supervisor where she stored all of her floppys containing important info. She was attaching them to the metal parts of her cubicle with large magnets, so she ?could always find them.?

~ Laura (who is thankful that she can claim to be a happy rat, that abandoned the sinking ship in time to move to a much cushier and affluent ship, and is now ridiculously happy with things)

I've met a few people who have done basic "computer literacy" courses at colleges and Adult Ed. places who do this. What seems to happen is: the college says "don't store your files on the hard drive [of our lab computers], use a floppy" and the person absorbs this without understanding *why* they're being told it.

These sort of courses always seem to produce people who can't do anything except exactly what was on the course, and then only if their computer is set up exactly like the college ones were. Hence, not being able to start Word if it doesn't have a desktop icon.

(of course, the other stuff shows that this person seems to be a fuckwit regardless of that)

The ex-receptionist at my office once printed out an email so she could type it up in Word.

it's a sappy day.

1. "What does agriculture mean?"

2. "I was so annoyed. Someone threw themselves under my tube yesterday. People that do that must be mad."

3. Me: "Just tell them to put the web address in and it will take them straight into the site."

Her: "What address? Their address?"

Other things he did: worked at his cube standing up (making everyone around him very tense), unbuttoned his shirts halfway down his chest, commented on every phone conversation I had (work related or not), talked to himself, and played horrible CD-Rs of cabaret tunes he wrote and produced. I think the whole experience inoculated me against ever being annoyed by co-workers again.

Unfortunately something this stupid is uttered in my office at least once a day...

An old japanese woman wearing a baby dress and pigtails jumping and down in front of me at the desk. I just came in. Please, let me wake up a bit first. Or am I still dreaming?

we have a 'mega important meeting' scheduled today that we're told we can't miss under any circumstances, even if we're teaching a class. I had massive sleep disruption and drastically needed to take a half day, so I inform them I'll be joining at 1 so I can attend this meeting. I get to sleep (thankfully), log in to find out my boss has inexplicably moved the earth shattering meeting to 3/25...when I'm on PTO, and they know I'm on PTO, for my brother's wedding. and he's on PTO all next week so literally the only time we can all meet is today through Friday.

Hey, how about we actually have the meeting today and if there's something that's still in flux, you just fuckin tell us?

(I'm already anxious that it's something like 'layoffs are coming' or 'so and so won't be returning from LOA' or that our dept head is leaving, so I don't like waiting anyway)

and no, I will not call in on my PTO, esp since I Have no fuckin clue what i'll even be doing throughout the day

hi GUI programmer, I know you hate it when people report to you things don't work, but waiting three days to respond only to ask "oh hey is it still happening" and hope it went away on its own is not a solution. or simply not bothering to check the error logs to see what caused it and snidely responding "idk it works now, try again", as if the screen caps and error details I pasted were faked.

Currently sitting in a Teams training course where my supervisor wanted to make sure that we are actually watching the session. She got the admin assistant (who is on camera throughout) to hold up a sign at random intervals telling us to send her a private message. If we don't send the PM within 30 seconds of her holding up the sign, we don't get a certificate of attendance.

that's the worst thing I've ever heard

Yeah, that's astoundingly awful.

Fuck you if u gotta pee, sign might come!

I too enjoy when my employer treats me like a toddler.

that’s when i quit my job

nine times out of ten people aren't paying attention in meetings, it's because someone's sharing a poorly written, cluttered powerpoint and the presenter is taking 20 minutes per slide and it's something any idiot could have figured out via an email.

i used to have this monster of a director who any time an email thread had more than two responses, she'd immediately demand we created a meeting for it, so I'd be side-messaging people follow-ups to obscure this because then I'd have 8 hours of meetings a day

Still waiting on that follow up from Swen.

nine times out of ten people aren't paying attention in meetings, it's because someone's sharing a poorly written, cluttered powerpoint and the presenter is taking 20 minutes per slide and it's something any idiot could have figured out via an email.

Of course I also had a friend/colleague at work who knew I used to tune out and do other work in pointless meetings, she used to throw to me for a comment when she could see I was doing it, just for the joy of watching me try to tapdance around it!

i call bullshit on that, sorry

the lecturing comment, i mean

To simply blame the speaker is ignoring a huge number of variables, from whether the course is required to whether the student thought it would be a gut when it isn’t to the ability of contemporary technology to distract and consume our attention more than what is actually important and right in front of us. The speaker isn’t always at fault, and the listener or student isn’t always innocent. In a sense, your scenario places all of the onus for education on the educator, and frankly, that’s horseshit

I too enjoy when my employer treats me like a toddler.

Whole lotta low-paid working class jobs where that's the rule, not the exception.

It is on asserts own lecturing though, table. It is admittedly harsh on the speaker (I had a nobel lecturer who stupidly had his class scheduled to clash with Champions League games, though I would note he also didn't win his nobel for lecturing)

It is good for any lecturer to see that as a challenge to raise their game though. Focusing more on delivering your message well will be better for those who want to pay attention. Even if you don't win.

The general principle I operate on is that under no circumstance can I make everyone listen.

But...if I begin losing half of the class or more, including people who had previously been focused, then maybe I need to change gears.

Not even necessarily my fault that it happened, but my responsibility to try a new strategy.

Of course the big wild card are cliques or people who manage to distract other people. If you have one or two people repeatedly distract well-meaning students, or a group of friends who can't focus when they're around each other, them sometimes yr only option is to be the grade school teacher who separates the T-Birds

yeah table my view is more like Neando's there, I was exaggerating because I worked with people who would self-immolate by demanding people switch off their phones and pay attention. I was / am a very good lecturer (no point in false modesty, I've been told enough) and my view was that the material was interesting, I'm putting in the work, the students are paying and I'm getting paid, so attention is up to the listener and I'm not going to demand it. Not pitching it right in the lecture, that's totally on me, and I made a contract with students that they could just make a kind of "uhh" noise if something didn't make sense, and if I heard that I would go back and elaborate. Takes the heat off raising a hand to say "I don't get it". And of course that's useless now because it's all online with a sea of black rectangles containing student names.

working from home, in meetings where my camera is off, I sometimes close my eyes and lean back to better concentrate on individual speakers. just try doing that in any other context

is my 7th work anniversary tomorrow so i was going to post on the work message board along the lines of '7 years, eh? you get less for $crime'

looking up 7-year sentences here: https://www.thelawpages.com/court-cases/maximums.php and it gets really dark and nsfw really quickly

for this project at work, to identify candidates for pilot groups, teams have to answer a questionnaire so we can tell if they will fit into the pilot as well as knowing what things we should focus on in training. we discovered that three of the teams omitted a shit-ton of information, so I went back to them weeks ago and listed all of the things to focus on in training, including the things they'd left out, and asked them point blank - are we missing anything?

today, I discover they failed to tell us about this script that their agents need to read on a call that quite honestly should have disqualified them from being part of this pilot group. now we're having to figure out if we can make it work or not.

So there's been an ongoing issue at my office that is relatively minor and probably petty, but opinions are very sharply divided and I'm wondering where folks from the outside land.

Short version - we have several student workers that work with us over the summer and throughout the year. Our leadership is constantly doing nice things for the student workers. Which, on the face of it, is totally great and a nice thing to do! They throw a monthly pizza party just for the student workers. They take them out to a big lunch three times a year beyond those. They bring in donuts for the student workers twice a month. On their birthdays, they decorate the student workers desks with balloons and give them gift cards.

All nice and decent things to do, right?

Well, here's the catch. They don't do any of those things for full time employees, ever. We are specifically excluded from the pizza parties and the donuts. The total number of pizza parties they've thrown for all employees in the five years I've been here? One, when a coworker retired. The number of times they've brought in donuts for the general office in five years? Never. The number of times a full time employee's birthday has been even acknowledged, much less celebrated? None. The number of times we get gift cards? Zero.

Opinions are sharply divided here - some folks are extremely bitter and vocal about it ("oh, look at what they get NOW"), others don't think it's a big deal at all.

You can probably sense that I lean more towards the former than the latter. Don't get me wrong, I realize student workers are very likely underpaid and under appreciated, so I'm glad we do nice things for them. However, I also feel that unless you are going to make even token gestures of appreciation to all employees, maybe don't make a big public deal about it? Like it shows that leadership is entirely capable of employee appreciation, they just choose not to do it for everyone.

I guess my question is do they get paid, cos all those things sound like the stuff people who don’t get paid get.

xp Something is ringing a bell here--is this the same employer who is weird about holiday gifts?

gyac - oh yeah, that would have been good to include. they do get paid. in fact, since I just learned this yesterday, they get paid $1.50 above minimum wage. yeah, to be clear, if they weren't getting paid I would absolutely have no issue with any of that.

throw your own parties and don't invite the students or the people who organise their parties!

(our release manager was trying to get people interested in a curry in town one day next month. tumbleweeds... (same manager suggested we just divide the bill evenly the last time we were out when the juniors down my end of the table had specifically chosen the cheaper options))

Good point koogs, though we tried that twice last year and it fizzled out. We requested just enough funds to cover ordering pizza for our group and got denied both times. Problem is, morale is so shot to hell right now that no one was willing to chip in their own money to pay for it, so.... here we are.

funny thing to me is that pizza parties felt like a punishment, outside of the 'food' part. I hate mixers at work. sometimes I'd grab the food and go back to my desk and hide lol. everybody at my company was always boring and stodgy and I'd feel like if I revealed 15% of my actual self they'd be alarmed.

but that's not the point, obv, the point is it helps to have consistency and be recognized in similar fashion as others. so i getcha!

I spent 14 years bitching about the same boss and the last year bitching about the new owner who bought the business and Monday night, after my husb said “hey you hate this job why don’t you quit”, I finally quit. My hours were getting cut every few months and she is running the business into the ground (quite a feat, considering the old boss sucked and still managed - barely - to keep it going for 35+ years), struggling to make payroll (the numbers are the same as the last few years so I don’t know why), and honestly just gives off very shady vibes.

I feel like a weight is off my shoulders. Watching someone just fuck up the most basic things in running a business for 15yrs is exhausting. Offering workable and simple solutions and just being ignored, is exhausting.

Congrats! Youre gonna do great things!!

big congrats for pulling the trigger. never an easy decision to make but mental health is so important and also when you see troubling signs like that, always a good time to get out.

Congrats just1n3! No doubt you'll end up in a better situation and enjoy that weight off your shoulders!

congrats that sounded rough.

in a moment of boredom yesterday i googled a project i left a job over to see how they got on..... only so badly that some of the players had to testify in front of a tribunal in Washington DC (another country) so.... gonna say that call was for the best. Not that i really should have wondered.

lol always fun to look back to see the mess you escaped

I finally managed to extract myself from a horrible freelance ghostwriting project yesterday and man, that felt good. The client disappeared for an entire year, making it impossible to keep up any kind of creative workflow, and the subject matter was repellent anyway — I didn't even want to be writing the book. It would have made me about $10K by the end, but it was just depressing and awful and as fucked up as this is to say on a board where a lot of people are struggling, I didn't actually need the money.

each of our clients has a legally binding security document with us, outlining call security protocols. There are mandatory updates that must be made whenever one of our practices changes or new features rolled out. it's fairly easy to keep up with.

I access said document for a client today, one I actually brought on board in 2007-2008. Find the document is dated 2011, and has our prior company name/logo on it. Not a good start. Read further, full of references to features we no longer use and processes that we no longer follow. ugh.

I dig deeper, and find it was actually last updated in 2020, but the morons editing it ignored all version control protocols and never documented date of last update each time they updated the doc. Likewise, whomever was in charge never updated the document to the newest version in over 13 years.

so this legally binding document is essentially a useless pile of shit, that could get us in trouble if the client ever took legal action for any security-related disputes. tempted to send this Legal's way and wait for their screams.

Xps thanks everyone!

I’m signing up for Rover as my next career. I don’t have any skills that I could use to get into a “real” career - my job was mostly garment dyeing and managing an online store, and my prior jobs were waiting tables and retail (both of which I will do anything to avoid).

nice. walking pups is cool!

i admit that i am actually okay with my life at the moment, tho it’s because the job that isn’t that great money-wise is really where i wanna be personally… which, yes, it’s the climbing gym. i am one of the oldest employees. i don’t care, it’s great, all my co-workers are super friendly and most of the people who come in to climb are friendly, too.

plus, yknow, i just clean and climb and ring up clif bars

I've spent most of my working life without or barely seeing my coworkers. It's an odd feeling.

once again, my boss takes impromptu PTO and then in his OOO email, lists me as a backup on something I had zero involvement with, and he didn't speak to me once about before going on PTO. he's been given feedback on this and keeps doing it - fortunately in this case, unlike previous times, I'm unlikely to get a lot of questions and things are slower atm. but it's the principle, come on dude.