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

A colleague of mine almost got one of our client's employees fired once. I don't remember what it was about, but this employee was suspected of something or other, but they insisted they said something on this call that absolved them. Again, don't remember what.

So this colleague goes to pull the call but pulls the wrong one. Doesn't notice that the company the caller states she works for is wrong, gave a name completely different than the employee, DOB doesn't match. All these obvious clues. So she reports to our client that the employee didn't say what they alleged they said, and almost termed the person until they insisted our rep must have listened to the wrong call and begged our client to re-review.

Fortunately someone else did and almost immediately it confirmed the employees' version of things, and our relationship with the client was damaged by the ordeal.

One of our classes I teach has a set sign-up process. We rarely have issues with it.

However, this week, a bunch of leaders who don't typically get involved in the sign-up process decided to stick their noses in and gum up the works. Working with the team managers, they came up with a huge list of employees who need to be trained, but somehow botched the communication on who was supposed to sign them up.

So yesterday, one manager asks why six of her employees didn't get training invites, only to find out nobody actually signed them up. We fixed that and got them enrolled. No big deal.

Then, one of the Operations Leaders kept telling us throughout the week that she was going to submit more names, only to not send any. So we finally message her on our chat client on Wednesday to ask "look do you have names or not?". She then gives us five names, but tells us they will come over on the sign-up sheet that night, so to hold off signing them up until then, just in case plans changed. Rather than letting us just do it right then. Of course, nothing comes over that night, so I don't know if that means if they no longer need training or if someone just forgot again.

So I ask her yesterday "hey, these specific five people, do they still need to be signed up?", only for her to give an answer that was neither affirmation or denial, just "anybody who is supposed to attend should have been signed up already". Given the previous fuck-ups, I wrote back and asked her to please confirm if the *five people I specifically named* needed to be signed up, yes or no. Day goes by, no reply.

So naturally, the manager of one of the five learners who I've been trying to confirm needed to be signed up for a day and a half messages us asking why this student didn't get an invite. so the week is out and we still aren't clear on the official final roster for a class that starts Tuesday.

they also laid my friend off today, one of the few members that was able to keep one of our most difficult clients happy. the other managers on that client have all but given up home on retaining them.

you'd think that might have saved her job, but nope.

A coworker who isn't stupid or annoying forwarded me an exchange between her manager and the stupid annoying fuckstick I've bitched about 315 times itt.

Manager: Why did you, a person we know is a full-on moron who always does shit he shouldn't do, do this thing you did and that you shouldn't have done?
Fuckstick: Hmm, I don't know why I would have done that thing I very clearly did. You should ask Coworker about why I did that.
Manager: Coworker, why did Fuckstick to this thing he did and that he shouldn't have done? P.S. Absolutely nothing in the file indicates that you've ever had anything to do with this account. Not sure why I'm asking you about it at all except that Fuckstick said I should. Sure hope he never tells me to walk into traffic!

They find new ways to surprise me, every day.

i used to be the 'subject matter expert' on a couple of things where I worked and people would always unnecessarily add me to random meetings on completely non-relevant to me things. And then they would totally call me out to ask me questions about someone else's department, of which they were the subject matter expert, while that person was also. on. the. call.

We are forced to run all of our programs through a remote connection, for some reason. The remote install of Acrobat just stopped working about half an hour ago. 99% of the work files I handle are pdfs. I was already hustling to make up for the three hours of work time I lost yesterday when our systems went down completely (not unusual, as I understand they went down for a cumulative seven hours when I was out of the office on Friday). I am going to sit here and twiddle my thumbs until my workday is over. Because, y'know, fuck this absolute joke of a workplace.

(I guess this is an indirect indictment of our stupid, annoying IT personnel, who I only really know from their exemplary reputation as dick-tripping tech wizards.)

one of my coworkers was using both printers to do huge jobs while also having a bubble tea sitting on one of the printers yesterday. very confounding

(the two long jobs were non-urgent, nobody has beverages in the printer room ever)

Instant beheading for that

I swear to fucking god. So, I order some civil rights A/V material for a program the students are putting on, and this bitch who is not even my boss was overheard throwing a massive tantrum about it. Because, uh...the material made her uncomfortable. And rumor has it had to do with an alleged discrimination complaint against her, and my association with this group makes her look bad.

Then another faculty member asks me to buy an expensive Japanese CD, and some other asshole disrespects me and asks me why I bought it. Because I was ASKED to buy it, you unprofessional dickface. Just because you play in some band no one cares about doesn't mean you have the right to condescend.

Did I mention that Mr. Condescension and Ms. Ill Temper are friends?

Did I mention that Mr. Condescension and Ms. Ill Temper are friends?

Why am I not surprised? Anyway, godspeed to you for working with two such "prizes", and I really hope someone local to you treats you to some potent potables (or whatever else makes life better for you).

Thank you. The faculty seem to hate them, but every time there's a bad apple at work, the people in the immediate vicinity do nothing.

It just dawned on me that maybe they're just jealous because I know a lot of the faculty.

Omfg we hired a guy a few months back. I can’t begin to describe how awful he is. Basically doesn’t do jackshit. And what he does, he does all wrong. Have to correct his mistakes. Fucking awful. And just disregards all the rules.

today I had one learner in my class who started interrupting me every 2 minutes, then took 30 minutes to do an assignment correctly while not listening to my instructions.

put me so far behind. but....all of us are stressed, so I just pretended it was no big deal.

and then asked my boss for Wednesday afternoon off to just....decompress.

ffs now the office is closed, my email is just constantly pinging with idiots emailing the entire fucking company with their witty anecdotes about working from home. FUCK OFF

Dear fellow employees I am overhearing in a conversation right now about not wanting to follow anyone's orders about sheltering in place re: Covid-19, with your "not being afraid" and "it doesn't matter to me, I'm healthy and young": do you want what's happening right now in China and Italy to happen? Because that's how you get what's happening right now in China and Italy to happen. I am not going to confront them about this because to do so would be exceptionally unprofessional and create an antagonistic work environment, so thankfully there's this thread wherein I can vent. BTW, if we do end up enacting a San Francisco-style "shelter in place" order in my city, you better fucking believe I'll obey it because I'm not a dick and would actually like the whole "flattening the curve" thing to happen.

wait til next week when this will just serve as a thread about seinfeldeaque observations about all of our partners/families/housemates

I'll prefer that to the dire daily news

xp and pets, don’t forget those of us beset by small cats crying because they want to get into the attic

my home coworker, who is a cat, has now been exposed as a food grifter. if i am working from the dining room table and see you snack on food every half hour, i am no longer going to believe you're starving when you yowl at me at 5pm

I’m not looking forward to the one benefit of this, not having to get up at 6 anymore, being taken away from me by the attic-crier kneading us both until one of us gets up to feed her. Sometimes she does this and suddenly isn’t hungry!

My coworker today (18 year old with cancelled Uni classes) is awesome. He stayed in his bed all morning then made me a coffee.

again

thats not unlike my normal routine tbh

Guess I'll just comment on my co-workers then since I seem to be in the increasingly rarer numbers still going into work. Except work hasn't been that bad lately and the execs even sent us lots of coffee and doughnuts this morning to boost our morale. (in a quiet voice) Plus I'm in a supervisory role here so I feel awful about bitching about my co-workers for all but the most boneheaded reasons. (exunt quiet voice mode)

I can tell my trainees are distracted today. I'm being friendly and nurturing as I can, because ultimately, this thing I'm training them on just doesn't matter in the scheme of things

Plus it's for a client that is an evil financial institution

My company, a UK based high street clothes retailer, is launching a sale on Thursday in an attempt to drive footfall and profit. Wildly irresponsible.

God I am trying so hard right now with all that is going on. I'm not getting mad when people don't listen. Or when people interrupt me or don't follow directions.

But at a time when my nerves are already shot...when this one learner who is supposed to be a VETERAN is CONSTANTLY stopping me to ask things that I already answered. Or to insist things aren't working for her even though they are working for everybody else, and after you try three times to get her to coherently explain what's happening, she can't.

Can't remember her Skype password to screenshare there. Can't figure out how to do it in WebEx teams even with me literally giving every instruction in ridiculously overexplained fashion after three times.

I can't use my virtual session to do it because then I have to take down the instructions that I'm sharing.

It took everything to say JESUS CHRIST I AM FUCKING AT MY WIT'S END AS IT IS AND YOU'RE MAKING MY WAKING HOURS HELL!!!!

This is a class that normally lasts 24 hours and I was given fucking 14!

My company, a UK based high street clothes retailer, is launching a sale on Thursday in an attempt to drive footfall and profit. Wildly irresponsible.

I've been getting more vouchers than I have for months! Today's vouchers: another one for a free eye test, or 40% off lunch at the not v appealing Beefeater on the other side of town. I feel bad abt places seeing a reduction in custom but, no

I suggested to my boss last week that we encourage online shopping by doing an online-only sale. She agreed. I got the draft of the email announcement, and it said something like “we don’t want to discourage shopping in store” and I was like, please PLEASE take that out, it is bad and also makes us look terrible. Amazingly, she agreed.

The email went out yesterday morning and then the shelter-in-place came just a few hours later so our stores are closed for at least 3 weeks.

Our online store is not popular so I’m not sure I’ll still have a job in 3 weeks. My boss is trying to sell the business to the PM and the PM let me know she found out after looking at the books that business hasn’t made any money in YEARS. My boss has been loaning the business money (she owns rental properties, remortgaged her house multiple times) to keep it going.

ouch - good luck, just1n3, but also good job and good timing talking her round re the mailout

I typically do well at annual review time, have consistently gotten an "Excels" rating for 9 consecutive years. Began reading the annual review summary my new boss was sharing with me during the one on one, and it appeared I was well on my way to a 10th. Comments were mostly raves, there was no actual negative feedback or specific area of improvement.

Get to the end, it's the lowest rating I've ever had in 15 years, only the second time I got a "Meets Expectations". I was baffled. I got an "Excels" last year despite doing much less impressive work in 2018. Last year I voluntarily traveled to the Philippines to oversee 12 concurrent training classes, San Juan (on less than a week's notice for an impromptu two week class), voluntarily learned and immediately began teaching a new platform (becoming only the 2nd person licensed to teach it), acquired the access to update internal system materials that had been needed for TEN YEARS but had never been done, and was one of the most prominent participants in the training material redevelopment project.

it was, as is always, bureaucracy. our bosses can't give us direct ratings, it's calibrated at the leadership level, so all bosses in our division present their employee and recommended rating, and leadership either approves or denies it, and they also set caps on how many people can get each rating in each division, so I'm fairly sure they saved the "Excels" for other "more important" roles.

so that was the only chance of me getting any incentive pay which would have been helpful given what's going on. so the message to me is "do the bare minimum from here on out".

OK! will do!

a fairly pointless thing to get worked up over rn but w/e. i'm going to pretend the only reason I got the lower score was for saying "motherfucker" on a hot mic, that's easier to live with.

When I was a manager doing ratings, we were only allowed a minimal number of excels vs meets. Definitely forced us into a position where people doing good work got penalized for no reason other than available budget.

yep same thing here. I can tell having friends in higher places in past years before I switched depts probably played more of a role than I realized.

so I'm wondering how I managed to get the higher rating at all last year, considering I did not get along with the boss that did that review at all, to the point where we had to have meetings to clear the air.

they also set caps on how many people can get each rating in each division

It sucks. I had a colleague quit over the finer details of the review process.

I guess our developers are real real bored sitting at home because they went in on a whim overnight and completely overhauled the layout of one of my essential work apps such that a search function that used to display all information on a single handy screen like so:

Business Name DBA
Street Address
City State Zip Etc.

Now displays everything like this:

Business Name



DBA



Etc.

Forcing everyone to scroll endlessly to find information that we used to be able to see at a quick glance. This is a thing I have to consult dozens, sometimes 100+ times/day, and which has remained the same for years, which allows for a lot of mental shorthand and eliminates a lot of cognitive effort on my part. And my work is already slowed way down, working at home on a tiny laptop screen (down from two big desktop monitors). I'm fuuuuuuuurious.

JESUS CHRIST STOP REPLYING ALL ON EVERY FUCKING EMAIL YOU MORONS

CC: All

After yesterday's fiasco, my class seems fried. I feel bad subjecting them to my braying today.

I've been working with one particular freelance client for 20+ years and something happened today that beats all for unprofessionalism. She hired this livestock photographer to shoot all the year-end award presentations for a nonprofit she runs; the awards section runs 20+ pages in the May issue of her magazine. This goddamn dumbass photographer moved all the pics he shot to his laptop and then overwrote the SD cards with subsequent jobs rather than putting those cards aside; AND he doesn't have any data backup protocol for his laptop. Of course, he lost every fucking thing, including official backdrop photos for 2 or 3 other shows and pasture shots from a couple of ranches. ugghhhh so mad right now

Geez. So does that mean the magazine article is scrubbed?

No, we'll do the award recipients without pictures, and the rest of the section will be as usual (sponsor and donor recognition mostly). But the nonprofit is a junior livestock association, and the parents who bankroll their kids' participation like to see their babies' pictures in the glossy color mag. It's going to hurt signups for 2021 after a year that's already full of lower turnout and cancelled shows. My client went ahead with publishing this issue instead of doing a 1 or 2 issue hiatus based on the photographer's assurances that his computer guys were hard at work getting that data back. If she'd gotten the straight dope from the photographer a month ago and gone with a hiatus, I could have been getting some of that independent contractor unemployment. But what was a 72-page issue last year will probably be 32-40 pages this year, and my billing is tied roughly to issue size.

they pulled me from my 19-day class with another person to have me lead a 3 day on my own. I was afraid this person would lose track of the clock and put us further behind, but she'd taught the class several times before, and I had no choice, so w/e....

she lets me know end of day today where she left off, which is about 6 hours behind, and tomorrow is the last day, with no sense of concern that that leaves next to a zero chance of finishing tomorrow, and we can't extend class, and the time to have raised the alarm to leadership was like 3 days ago.

I had to spend an extra half hour mocking up a schedule that cut several unessential things and gutted the time on others and hope like hell we can meet it, which isn't a given.

thankful I'm taking Friday off.

I've become a more peaceful person in quarantine. Being removed from a situation where some think lying is justifiable or even an art form has done wonders for my self-esteem. Not to mention I'm sleeping better at night now that I don't have to spend time around people who have no sense of boundaries.

I reported a server error in our QC environment on December 17th, 2019. Aka, something that usually took 5 minutes of scanning the error logs in GUI, and resolving whatever issue. Except this time, they claimed the logs were clean. So they told me tell them next time it happened, which was early January, and this time they found something in the logs, and said they were looking into it.

It is now May, and they have nothing to report, even though we've been consistently reporting a QC environment that barely works for six months, which keeps wrecking our training classes. The QA environment also started developing the same problem, basically meaning we don't have a working test environment to use in class for hours/days at a time

what....the....fuck? I about had enough today and said I was tired of getting bitched at by trainees who aren't willing to accept "they're looking into it" day after day for three weeks.

lol i just got a comment on a jira ticket filed in june 2018

'because we're now migrating to a new cms, we will not be devoting resources to address this issue'

fair enough! sometimes if you ignore a problem for long enough, it ceases to matter

haha somebody was psyched to be able to close that ticket with a clear conscience