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

this annoyed me. i hate it when people confound my expectations and make me feel guilty.

yeah, i have one who whistles maybe a bit too much but otherwise i've yet to work with someone (at this job, anyway) who really rubs me the wrong way. that's what the patrons are for!

but it's true though!

ari up!

When a senior coworker to V1c switched to his shift I assumed she was becoming the new lead so I wouldn't have to include him on e-mails anymore. Wrong. Oops.

V1c has now turned my and 2nd-shift lead St3v3's recent practice of not CC'ing him on every goddamned thing into an HR issue. Oh yes. The story goes, according to him, that we are retaliating against him and shunning him from our discussions because we feel he is responsible for our former manager leaving the contract (a Mr. Ru5H, whom v1c70r filed an ethics complaint against, later discovered to be unfounded but nevertheless enough of a pain in the ass to make Mr. Ru5H renege his promise to stay for at least one full year and take up more worthy employment with a competitor), and he is being unfairly pushed out of his position and his actions are being misrepresented by prejudiced white guys who have an axe to grind.

Meanwhile, our project manager gave V1c a simple task (research and compile feature sets on various content filtering solutions, draw up a comparison chart, and make a recommendation- e.g. Google "enterprise web filter" and open up Word, FFS) and V1c sat on it for a week and then said he couldn't do it. YOU WORK THE FUCKING NIGHT SHIFT. WE GAVE L30L4 THE ENTIRE L*G & **D*T PLAN REWRITE AND SHE GOT IT DONE ON TIME, AND SHE HAD TO LEARN A SHIT-TON OF NEW STUFF ALONG THE WAY. Anyway the result was that S73v3 and I had to write it up and make it pretty in double-time to deliver to the "customer" and NOW, V1c, having been enlightened as to some other old e-mail I didn't cc him on, wants to "get involved" with another project we're working on because he claims it's "one of [his] areas of expertise." Oh go fuck yourself.

V1c, your only area of expertise displayed thus far is bullshitting, stalling, dumping on others and making everyone who works with you hate your fucking guts. And cc'ing senior staff/government officials on internal discussions whenever you don't get your way. You are a perfect business case example of how to be a piece of shit employee. I wish you were just lazy and dumb. Instead, you're lazy, dumb and a huge prick to everyone.

IN DEFENSE of people like this -- I am one of these people. Allergies or something? we can't help it! i apologize for all my fellow HORRRKK NSRRRSTTTINGers, sorry! we know, girls hate it. we're sorry.

" pleas see if you can do somthing with the background . The 1st two pic onn the left side of the page delet th e1st pic and keep th e2nd call me"

It's the "do something with the background" that kills me. Sure thing, chief, as soon as you tell me what you don't like about it!

"Do you drink? Do drugs? Smoke marijuana?"
"What should I get my nephew for Christmas? I don't think I should get him a Dancing Elmo, I don't want him to grow up gay."
"So did you get drunk on your birthday?"
"Do you have any kids? Are you married? Do you hate men?"

and my least favorite:

"You're so quiet"

Aaaaaarrgghhh, does she have to prattle on endlessly in that stupid hippy dippy voice of hers? Still, at least she achieved some kind of record today, she managed to get to 4.45pm without mentioning Buddhism - then she blew it by going on about going to retreat at New Year and doing "various mystical things to see in the New Year". What's wrong with just getting pissed and trying to snog strangers?

if i received this email i'd blow it up to a huge point size and put it on the bulletin board. i'd also reply to it with corrections in red. what is wrong with people?

I do room service in a hotel that shall remain nameless. All of us restaurant/room service/bar employees, regardless of background and variety of previous employment, are convinced that it is the most deeply mismanaged, problem-ridden, and generally doomed organization of which we've ever been a part. Mostly this leads to "horrible boss" stories which I suppose are not especially germane to the thread topic. One particular consequence of mismanagement, though, is that we keep getting horrible new employees. The reason for this is that HR is actually involved in a power struggle with food-and-beverage, going back over a decade to when the current HR manager and the current F&B manager were coworkers in a completely different manager. Basically, the HR manager is out to destroy us. Her recent suspicion that a F&B "conspiracy" (her words) was involved in suppressing the identity of a potential hire (she was related to someone who already works here, a capital one no-no - never mind that the company keeps FOUR different members of the owners' family on payroll for fictitious jobs) has accelerated this. Therefore, in the last year we have suffered the following string of human disasters:

1. Sexual Harassment Guy. This gentleman was hired because he "worked for Disney!" It's not clear what he did there, maybe put the naughty bits on the cover of the Little Mermaid video box. As a server he was semi-competent, certainly better than our usual, but he tended to creep out the customers by touching them and complimenting their looks overmuch. This eventually extended to coworkers. Most amazingly, he zeroed in on coworker C, who is actually dating coworker T, which is not in any way a secret. His strategy would be to wait until T was not around and say things like, "Hello, C...you know, T is not around today....." Meanwhile, he had about a pound of wax in his hair, which was a completely different form of godawful pompadour every day. Note that despite our company's "zero tolerance" policy on sexual harassment, we had to complain, systematically, for over a month and a half before we could successfully get him written up.....for being late.

2. The Incredible Vanishing Coworker. This guy worked there for exactly one shift, because he found it unworkable with his personal life to come in at 3 - he had a kid to pick up from school or something. Fine, but - he knew that before he started, management had told him that he would have to find a way to be in at 3, there was nothing mysterious about it, but he let me put him through an entire shift of training without simply saying, "Um...yeah, I don't think I can actually work here."

3. Dippy Girl. Much hated at the time for her half-baked flirtation, complete forgetfulness, and unashamed unwillingness to do sidework. Her trademark was asking, with total incredulity, if we had some common food service staple in response to a customer request, eg: "They want mayonaise! I mean, we don't have that, right?" However, we have now erased all record of specific anecdotes of her awfulness, because we recall her reign as a golden age compared to her replacement:

4. Dopey Girl. Almost the epitome of slothfulness, she has taken to sitting down on the job for at least three hours out of her five-hour shift. This is not in the kitchen, mind you: it's at the bar, and, lately, tables in the restaurant, where she spreads out schoolwork she doesn't do and books she may not know how to read. Her voice is the love child of Bullwinkle's and Yogi Bear's, stoned. Her signature move is dropping things; in one Keatonesque feat of physical comedy, she carried a large dinner tray of dirty dishes from the restaurant to the kitchen - with a gradual slide of dishes along the way, so that she embarked with approximately six times as many items as actually reached the kitchen. Now any time anybody drops anything the chorus comes from somewhere beyond the sandwich line "(Dopey Girl's name)!!!" She has also developed a number of evasive maneuvers to avoid doing her sidework, which is fine except that when I get stuck serving I do my sidework and there is an ongoing degree of escalating scrutiny into our sidework competency versus the hated AM shift. Dopey Girl doesn't know this, because she never comes to meetings. In any case, I finally get on her one night about getting the sugar caddies cleaned - this is a night, mind you, where she has spent a full four out of five hours seated at the bar, much of it remarking "I am SO bored" - anyway, she comes at me in a rage which would be terrifying except for the Bullwinkle voice: "Why do you have to be lookin' at what I'm doin' instead of what you're doin'? You're not gonna write me up, are you?" I reply that since I'm not her supervisor yet, I can't. Her: "What do you mean, yet?" Again: she doesn't come to meetings...

5. Lazy Girl. Lazy Girl spends even more time sitting down than Dopey Girl, because Lazy Girl was trained by Third Trimester Pregnant Girl, who before these clowns was by far my most stupid, annoying coworker. We won't dwell on her at present. In any case, Lazy Girl didn't really get the picture that TTPG was able to sit down because of the TTP part. She is an avid reader...of Nora Roberts books - and ONLY Nora Roberts books, a different one each day, which would be impressive except that I'm unconvinced she actually finishes any of them. I am in fact unconvinced she can read at all, or understands what reading is, since when I'm getting my dinner and reading in the back, she likes to sit down and start talking to me, despite all body language, nonresponsiveness, etc. She's also one of these people that likes to worm into interesting conversations only to offer bland, platitudinal observations that kill everything, e.g. "Well, I think it's important to keep an open mind about things!" My first shift with her I launched into an impassioned and deliberately conversation-provoking argument in favor of closed-mindedness, which I would repeat here except it's lengthy, and anyway her only response to the entire thing was "Well, I think it's important to keep an open mind about things!" Lazy Girl is new in town and has been taken under Dopey Girl's wing, which is good in that it kind of isolates them to each other's company and keeps them away from us, but bad in that they reinforce each other's destructive habits and also means we have to hear both of them talking about inane topics that nobody else in the restaurant would entertain with them.

Hmmm - probably enough for now, and that's just within my immediate circle of coworkers - if I got into the kitchen or banquet staff, or god help us the layer of management above me, we could be here for days.

She claimed to possess an IQ of 186, know more about programming than the lead programmer (Apparently she used Visual Basic for a couple of days for an Access thingamy), was apparently able to completly trounce my computer knowledge regardless of the fact I was the one that fixed all her computer problems, and various other things. Of her atrocities I can remember:

- She banged away at her computer for almost half an hour trying to get an image into a Word document before claiming that 'Word wasn't working'. She was hitting 'copy' instead of 'paste', if I remember correctly.

- She emailed me a document and asked me to burn it to a CD, promptly saying "It may not fit on one CD, it took me a whole month to write". It was about 400-500 pages, with no images or anything. It was a little under a meg.

- She constantly opened email attachments and whenever spyware was discovered on her computer, she claimed that someone in the office was trying to spy on her.

- She also claimed that someone in the office was planting listening devices around, with no proof of course, because everyone wanted to know what our company was doing. This company never released or even ALMOST released a product in 2 years, apart from a single 'charity case' which left no impact on anyone.

- She claimed we worked 9 to 6 because we got an hours lunch break, but then the very next day sent around a rude email stating she was sick of people taking hour lunches and half an hour has ALWAYS been the agreed lunch-break. Not only that, a lot of us rarely left before 6:30-7.

- She's also constantly used the "You always disagree with me!" ... "No I don't" ... "SEE?! Stop questioning my authority!" line against the most pushover guy in the office. She tried it against me once, but she couldn't respond to "I only disagree with you when I think you're wrong", even though I muttered "Which is basically all the time" under my breath.

- If anyone was doing ANYTHING she didn't like, she'd say it was against Occupational Health & Safety laws, regardless of the fact that she broke them more often than anyone else. This included making us lift heavy objects (Such as a photocopier so old it should've been in a museum) up a flight of stairs and smoking on the balcony which no-one else was allowed to because it was "against OH&S laws". This became funny when someone actually wise to the specifics of the OH&S came in. She stopped that soon after that.

- In one of the last meetings we had before I left, which was supposed to be a 'voice your concerns about the company without fear of reprisal' thing, she constantly interrupted to contradict people. After she left to have a smoke, several people mentioned that she was the companies main problem, to which the boss agreed.

After I left, she withheld my final paycheque for about a month before she finally agreed on a date and place to meet so I could get it (I wasn't allowed back into the office because apparently I'd steal all the ideas on the project they were working on, which I'd already worked on for about 2 months). She failed to turn up, and on my way to the office (Against her 'orders') I saw her going in with several bags of new clothes, fresh from shopping. She claimed she was "Too busy to do it today", so I had to wait while she went up and got it together.

After that, she told the guys in the office that I "didn't exist anymore". One of the guys emailed me saying "It doesn't matter, since you don't exist if anyone asks I'm talking to myself". He was cool, I miss that guy.

(except that she didn't smoke, and we didn't have a balcony)

That sounds horrific, anyway.

Of course, it's probably just me hoping that there's only one of that tart on this planet.

Ugh. I do NOT miss her. At ALL.

She didn't use to be a doctor, did she? Or then try to become a TV producer?

Not that I'm aware of, although sounds like the sort of things she'd pull out of her arse.

My god, there's two of them. I demand permission to napalm planet earth, it's for their own good.

She did get invited to meetings with some of them, I have to admit. However, I don't recall her ever getting more than one meeting with any of the important ones. She gave up after about a year, and gave herself a job with our company instead.

But I can attest all of Pup's stories as true, having lived thru them with the poor lad and having met this insane woman myself several times.

Outside of work she was even more mental. She clearly has some kind of psychological issues - the whole time at a bar we were all at she flicked her hair back in this exaggerated "I am attractive" manner, and namedropped a tonne of important govt type people simply because I'd said I used to work at the foreign office. She is a fscking psycho.

Stop giving parties. Just....stop. They aren't fun. They are painful, sitting around your house with the "no alcohol" rule and trying to pry interesting conversation out of your surly teenagers and other no-eye-contact or social skills engineer-type co-workers. This is why the more-normal and certainly more interesting people don't come to your house, even when you invite us all ONCE A MONTH! And don't come in my office with your Excel spreadsheet of invitees and declinees and who's bringing what and ask me bake something EVEN THOUGH I LIED TO YOUR FACE AND SAID WE WERE GOING OUT OF TOWN!!!

I am currently pissed off with the IT people because the printer in our lab has run out of toner and they haven't got any in stock.
'But we did tell you it was running out like a week ago.'
'Oh yeah, well we don't bother coming out to change toner until someone actually, you know, complains about it'.
'Riggghhht...'

Ladies and gentlemen, the customer service ethos at work.

So we have a department full of students who can't print for the next few DAYS, at least one of whom had all her printing credit used up on 20 pages of illegible greyness.

Mind you, it *is* hard, because it's expensive stuff. Unless you standardise on one model of printer, you're stuck with having a few hundred quid of spare toner stock. And that means buying all your printers at the same time, because the slightest change in model number seems to mean buying an entirely different toner cartridge.

I've started tracking the number of pages every printer prints every day. Originally because one of our managers hugely overestimates* the amount of printing he does, when it comes to costing up the IT budget. It's very handy, though, to be able to say "we can hold off on buying toner for the Model X, because none of those printers are going to run out for at least six months".

* I'm being charitable - "lies" would be a better word.

I am getting fed up with office politics and sleight-of-hand regarding new equipment. One of our department managers thinks she is getting a new server. What is *actually* happening - and has been approved by one of the directors, who is her husband - is that we are buying a new server for head office, and her office is getting the now-spare one freed up. If noone says anything she won't know the difference - but if she *asks* if this really is the new one, I'm a bit stuck as to what to say.

But the *worst* part is that she is trying to blackmail me into doing the job early, because otherwise everything in their department will go horribly wrong.

We are a temping agency. Every week, each office has to spend hours typing in timesheets, so that the payroll can be sent out on time. Payroll deadline for the branches is Friday, or at the *very* latest mid-morning Monday, because the transfer orders have to be with the bank by mid-afternoon Monday.

Today, my manager has a meeting with the responsible director (annoying manager's husband), and they agree that the server switch at her branch will go ahead next Wednesday. They phone her up during the meeting, and tell her this. I'm not there at the time, though.

Immediately, she calls me. "Your manager is already aware about this, but because our clients have changed their shift pattern it now takes us twice as long to get their payroll done."

"Yes...?"

"This new server is coming on Monday, isn't it?"

"No, nobody has ever said that. The new server is still being built. We have not yet been given a definite delivery date, and Monday has never been mentioned as a possible delivery date."

"Well, I'm sure someone said that to me. Unless we get this new server on Monday, we won't be able to finish the payroll in time next week."

Grrrrr. Does she think that my boss isn't going to tell me what she's already been told?

A previous conversation I've had:

Her immediate underling: "Unless we get faster computers, we just can't get the payroll done on time."

Me: "Has the payroll ever been late because of computer problems?"

Her: "Um ... well, no."

(who was it who said, about court proceedings, "never ask a question unless you already know the answer")