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

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")

This party business is something I didn't count on, moving here. But seems to be an expected thing in this small town where everyone works at the same place. The problem with lying (saying we're out of town) is the very real possibility of running into someone. So we'll be hiding out. We're well stocked for food and entertainment. This situation does point up how desparately we need to move back to a city though.

[ /glee]

(this is step one to see-ya-later status for that son of a bitch. He yelled at the rest of the night shift last week. And his usual shenanigans, but that was the kicker, I think.)

(He's apparently infamous, some engineers came in to do an upgrade on one of our terrifically expensive systems, noticed his firstinitial+lastname in the user list and were like "oh dude, that guy sucks!" with stories and everything. Plus apparently one of OUR engineers who we hired post-v1c70r has mentioned that on an old contract where they both were working v1c70r had to be escorted off by govt personnel. Real winner this dude! Check some goddamned references ppl!)

you may have a point about stinky though. but that is because their waste paper baskets are full of yesterday's thai curry and last week's teabags (they don't seem to believe in binliners of any kind so whilst the contents are removed on a weekly basis, the bins themselves are pretty skanky).

accounts guy: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!!!!! fucking endlessly, loudly, droning on about poker or novelty songs or sports (which YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND) or anything just to hear yourself talk, jesus. and you are obese and pungent and if you keep drinking entire 1.5 litre bottles of coke every day you will be dead by 30 or less. you repulse me.

tech support guy: you are the most useless cunt on this earth. I understand you have a disability of some sort, but when it means you IGNORE any request unless you are followed up and sheperded through it and have your hand held, so that it takes a month for a simple swapping of e-mail access from one PC to another... words fucking fail me, except for "you are the most useless cunt on this earth", obviously, that sums up the situation pretty succinctly.

marketing girl: you seem quite a nice person but your propensity for shifting work onto other people, specifically the over-stress head of department downstairs, is wearing very thin very quickly.

head of company: a good bloke, but on here since I found out about the jaw-dropping double-standards he displayed on a certain matter.

Previous examples have included complaining that a report I set up to automatically email him a spreadsheet each week was blank, when he was looking at the wrong sheet, TWO WEEKS IN A ROW.

Today he emailed me 3 times and then requested I call him regarding several reports which I told him I have never heard of and have nothing to do with, the first time he emailed me about them.

Now he has asked me to change the email address on another report (which by some chance I do actually produce) to some garbled version of what I assume was the address he's asking me to change it to. I was tempted to change it to sjdhfdhjk.com like he asked so I could say "but that's what you asked it to be" when he complains he hasn't received it, but that would be a little too petty.

Luckily he doesn't work in this office so I don't have to put up with him in person.

Resident Smart-Arse "No, he isn't dead."
Me: "yes, he is. That might be why he isn't playing T in the Park"
RS-A: "He's not dead"
Me: Yes, he is. He died in a hotel room in Vegas. It involved drugs and hookers."
RS-A: "You're thinking of that guy from Big Country"
Me: "No, really, I'm not."
RS-A: "You're too young to even know who the Who are, you must be getting confused"
Me: ***bangs head off desk, googles report of John Entwistle's death, shows it to RS-A, waits for apology, doesn't get one, looks for other job***

RS-A: "They won't be playing, they're rubbish"
Me: "Yes, that's why Barcelona signed them"
RS-A: "Barcelona are good, they don't need players from Scotland"
Me: "Yes, that's why they signed them, because they don't need them. I presume they play them for laughs as well"
RS-A: "Yes, but Larsson's missed loads of games for Barcelona"
Me: "Aye, he was injured. He's still in the first team squad now though"
RS-A: (floundering for arguments) "yes, but ironically they didn't even sign van Bronckhorst from Rangers, they signed him from Arsenal. What does *that* tell you?"
Me: "Er, that you don't know the meaning of the word "ironic", perhaps?"
RS-A: ***finds something else important to do elsewhere***

One time, he said aloud "why's it called the WestGate Bridge anyway? It isnt even in the west".

It is, and he then spent ten minutes arguing with me that it, and the whole inner western suburbs, was actually north. Jesus.

He also used to eat the entire loaf of bread bought by the morning tea club that was meant to be shared among about 10 people. He claimed it was because he was poor and going without meals, even though he was on the same salary as the rest of us and also a single man living in a cheaparse flat.

DON'T FUCKING TALK WITH YOUR MOUTH FULL. It's disgusting and no one can understand a word you're saying.

Thank you, goodnight.