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

true of most work,

but inside the context of the current world economy some things become significant because of how they operate within said economy.

In my profession, I sometimes make jobs for people. (As in, like, they previously didn't have one and now they do. Or they had a job and now they might have a slightly better one? I dunno.)

Of course I would rather they did not have to have jobs, of course. And I would rather those jobs not be soul-sucking clusterfuck meaningless office jobs.

But, until utopian fully automated space communism exists, people mostly have to have jobs, to like, live in buildings and eat food and wear clothing. Hence, what I do feels... at least a little bit helpful? Maybe?

Or maybe I'm just moving people from one terrible choice to a slightly less terrible choice. I don't know. But I don't think my purpose is to burn the system down, merely to function compassionately and thoughtfully within it. Because I also need to live, eat, feed my family. Which likes to eat food and wear clothing and live in a building.

Or maybe I'm just moving people from one terrible choice to a slightly less terrible choice. I don't know. But I don't think my purpose is to burn the system down, merely to function compassionately and thoughtfully within it. Because I also need to live, eat, feed my family. Which likes to eat food and wear clothing and live in a building.

true, some of my work involves improving the conditions of buildings where people live, or making it so people can live in buildings they can afford, so they can both live in a building and eat food ... or something like that.

xp yes it's helpful.

map and table otm

I think it's great that people here have interesting and meaningful jobs, but my outlook is that less purposeful make work jobs are good as well, and that shouldn't be stigmatized.

I had no intention of stigmatizing anyone for having dumb jobs tbh -- I feel like map and tables, two ilxors have much <3 for, have good reasoning and healthy attitudes towards theirs.

I absolutely do not think you were, just meant that as a general comment on this attitude, particularly in the US

Moodles - totally! Just doing your thing at work and leaving it there (so your real - and presumably meaningful - life exists elsewhere) is totally cool and should not be stigmatized. Full agreement.

My job looks important, but pretty much all I do is drive mentally disabled people places and watch them do stuff.

Which likes to eat food and wear clothing and live in a building.

which is on fire

too soon

lol eephus and sarahell, great sequence

there's a learner in one of the classes I'm supervising whose father is dying, and doesn't have long left.

she's missed a little time to go to the hospital here and there and wanted to know if she could dial in from the hospital to listen on those days (since she has a desktop, which she can't bring with her).

her manager kind of callously just says "no, not unless you have a tech issue", and she was rightfully upset that he was insensitive, so he came to one of our teachers, and I offered to escalate for her. tried to see if a) could we move her to a class that starts later so that she can spend the time with her father now, and still know she has a job waiting for her, or if b) on a limited basis we might be able to let her dial in from hospital, and work with her to keep her caught up (which the teacher offered to do).

instead, they're basically non-committal saying "no, she can't do that, and we may have to remove her from this assignment and reassign at a later date", instead of actually earmarking her for a specific class. worst, they loop in the team lead in question and he butthurtedly states he was disappointed to see this was escalated above him.

well maybe don't act like a dick to someone whose father is dying next time. I know there are rules and parameters but maybe you could have offered to look into some alternatives or at least been less David Spade-y about it.

*she came

I will admit, before I was on my anxiety meds, and when I was younger and more naive, I was pretty callous to a lot of people as a manager back around 2006. it took getting called on it many times to actually cause me to change my behavior (so maybe this guy needs to be called on it too)

there's "pretty callous" and there's "making desperate people choose whether to spend time with their dying father and risk losing a job" - this is horrifying.

yeah, and quite honestly, it's a bit horseshit because we already have people miss ENTIRE DAYS due to:

-catching COVID
-going to a funeral of someone who died from COVID (or something else)
-not having equipment shipped to them on time
-just literally not showing up and asking the next day "lol can u stay late and catch me up"

her boss said he "had to adhere to the attendance policy". this is a third party who regularly doesn't give a fuck when their employees miss one or two full days of class for reasons that are legit bullshit. NOW we're going to put a line in the sand?

If she gets reassigned to another class quickly, at least she still has a job but usually they tell us what class they're moving the person to, not merely mentioning it as a possibility.

all this is probably why I never cut it as a higher level manager, because I couldn't take the toxicity those assholes spewed.

Find out if the people with ‘acceptable’ but bullshit absences are all or predominantly men, and if so, your colleague has been discriminating against the female learner.

I know it's not going to change anything and I'm not going to get the job but you're very much mistaken if you think I'm not coming after you for lying, you deceitful HR fuck.

So uh maybe if you wanted to do literal construction in each of our cubes you maybe should have had us work from home instead of coming all the way in to find out our workspaces were going to be inaccessible for much of the day?

today my boss's boss said this of a partner manager who is extremely over the top and teaches her reports extremely incorrect things: "We appreciate you, but you're hurting us".

I want that as a bumper sticker

xp - that is fucked up and totally not common practice for any construction work I'm familiar with (and I am familiar with a bit). I mean, on the construction crew side, I'm sure they would have preferred y'all were not needing access to your space and that they could just do the work they've been contracted to do without the awkward interactions and accommodations.

update to Frank Mills from the Hair sequel

lol sic

xpost - it's just a shitshow of communication. they are lowering some of the built-in workstations in our cubes that were installed at the wrong height years ago. my boss told us they'd start early morning today and be done with all five of them by mid-morning, so we should come in late. well, no. they are still on the first one and it's been a mess but fortunately he wised up and sent us all to work from home.

yr boss sucks at managing construction as well as communication

manager today asked my boss's boss (again) why the training said 9 am - 12 pm, as she thought it was a morning training.

I'm going to hope she doesn't actually think 12 pm means midnight buuuuut.....

are 15 hour training days normal?

definitely not!

the one with Denzel was 2 hours

Lolz

yes, it's a good idea to plan a virtual surprise birthday party for the head of our division at 7:30 am their time, and when they're not online at that time (like usual), to text that person and try to call them telling them their boss is looking for them.

because the heart attack they have is going to be worth the momentary 2 seconds of excitement when we shout "happy birthday".

so we're rolling out new software and my team is leading the training on it, and we got told that some of the teams we trained created their own custom Powerpoints to go over topics people were struggling with, and that it included things that weren't covered in the Training page. We got asked to look at the custom Powerpoints to see if perhaps they had a lot of content we were missing and we needed to improve our training materials.

All but two of the Powerpoints were stolen directly from our training modules, right down to the screenshots. they literally just copied them. and unlike the training module, which will be automatically updated periodically as new version releases go out, these Powerpoints will have to be manually updated every time.

some people must really love Powerpoint because how fucking pointless, lol

people love filling up their time with manual tasks because it makes them look busy.

I have a coworker who has to track status updates on about 140 accounts each week. He goes into a tool and looks each one up and takes notes on ones that have had updates. He spends many hours each week chasing down these updates. I created a process to dump all status updates into a small spreadsheet, it takes less than 15 minutes to refresh automatically, and it turns out that there are maybe 10 updates per week. But he still wants to go into the tool and look up every last one, just in case, so we don't get blindsided, you know.

nothing made me more proud when like ten years ago, we had a pompous department head who was full of attitude and bluster, but not good at leadership, and he lead this initiative to remove "waste", work that didn't add value. but paradoxically, he and the other managers scheduled more pointless meetings than anybody I knew.

so one day he was rattling on about waste and a friend of mine just blurted out directly "this entire meeting is WASTE", getting shocked silence from everybody else.

(the whole Muda thing: https://www.process.st/muda/)

Howdy new co-worker, I understand you are new and our processes are a little different than what you might be used to doing. I get it, I was there once too. But, uh, you have now thrice rebuffed my offers to walk you through things and show you how to access the files you need. Yet you still insist on tagging me onto pre-existing email chains with various consultants and asking directing me to do them for you. Please don't do that, you not being willing to learn the ropes does not make it my problem to bail you out. And when I do decide to help you, because it is in the best interest of our department, it might not kill you to toss me a simple "thanks".

"beginning in a few weeks, you won't be able to enter the password in anymore, even in the training environment. it's not live yet, but it's coming."

"actually, I'm seeing that it's already been deactivated - I can't enter it anymore. do we need to quickly update our materials, some of which still involve using this feature, or was this done in error?"

"Once this goes into effect, we'll update materials, don't worry."

"I'm literally telling you IT'S ALREADY BEEN PUSHED OUT. as in, I can't do the thing that I could do two days ago. should this be out there early, or do we need to update our materials??!!"

our class schedules are always static, and for this one particular class in Canada, 7.5 hours plus lunch (so 9 am - 5 pm ET). someone who was editing the class agenda made a booboo and deleted a topic by mistake, so the agenda showed class ending an hour earlier by mistake. it was a fairly obvious mistake, as you can see a blank where there used to be a topic, and the teacher knew our schedule was 9 am - 5 pm throughout training, so rather than ask someone in charge about it, they just incorrectly assumed class was ending early that day and dismissed everybody an hour early.

so basically they all get one hour less of pay now (though I'm lobbying my boss to look into it with someone higher up to pay them for what was clearly not their fault).

fucker really basically needed to use a car analogy for every business decision. go fuck yrsen

like

"right now, we're a Kia Sedona, but we need to grow until we're a Lexus. and unfortunately, with that comes sacrifices, so some of you will have your pay go from being a stretch limo to a Hyundai Veloster"?

exactly. a manager i have always using car analogies. driving me mad!

i see what you did there.

one of the managers in my department must have a few lugnuts loose. he apparently told somebody that I'd be leading a training class Monday, but I think he put his foot on the accelerator too fast, as he never gave me the turn signal to tell me he needed me to lead that class. also, I can't, because I'm going to be in the shop on Monday getting repaired.

so now I'm here pumping the brakes on a Friday, until we can get it figured out. what a week, my spedometer has gotten a workout.

you must be gassed after all that!!

This co-worker is actually a very sweet person and I think she's a good teacher, but she played an April Fools joke today that still has me irrationally annoyed. We usually get doughnuts in the staff lounge on Fridays; they show up around lunchtime and people drop in at their lunch period (there are several) or their free period to grab one. I don't usually bother with the doughnuts because they're not very good and the staff lounge is all the way across the school from me, but when I do get one it's in the middle of the day.

So today this coworker sent around a morning email saying she'd got us all Krispy Kremes instead. Then she put a Krispy Kreme box filled with veggies in the staff lounge, and taped a note inside the lid saying to come to her classroom for the actual doughnuts. The idea presumably being that you'd be briefly faked out by the veggies but end up getting a doughnut, and a superior doughnut to what we usually get.

Which probably worked fine before school started. But I showed up at my lunch period as usual, found the note, went to her classroom, and of course there was a class going on in it, and I wasn't about to invade a teacher's class to ask if there were any doughnuts left. So the April Fools joke ended up being "haha you don't get any doughnuts this Friday," and I don't even like doughnuts that much but I still feel that was a Lucy from Peanuts move.

I don't know if this is the right thread, but how do y'all handle periods of being inundated with extreme negativity and anger at work without losing your minds?

Essentially, my position is construction-adjacent and I often find myself as the face and contact for projects that can be sometimes intrusive or annoying, given that construction work itself is by nature something that cause inconvenience even at the best of times. I do all I can to minimize it and spend a lot of time clearly communicating with those impacted and trying to ease it as much as possible with the limited influence I have. But ultimately, the decisions about the extents and timing of construction work are made well above my head and I just implement the work as best I can. Complaints are par for the course and I'm used to dealing with them, I get it - it comes with the territory. That said, something seems to have flipped in the last year or so and the anger and outrage is just off the charts. Where I used to see maybe 4-5 complaints over the course of a 2 or 3 month project, I'm now seeing dozens a day. And just pure angry, frothing rage in many of them. Not even for the usual targets like noise or disruption, I'm talking multiple paragraph screeds about a temporary door that "sticks a bit" or having to travel 35 extra feet to a different suite exit. I've racked my brain for weeks to try and tease out if I'm doing something differently than I used to do, or if there is something I'm doing wrong, but I can't put my finger on it. It just seems like people are either much angrier lately, or just way more vocal in expressing their anger. It's wearing me down and I'm finding it increasingly hard to get out of bed when I know I've got another day of nothing but negativity coming my way.

tl;dr - increasingly surrounded by negativity and it's overwhelming me

I think that's a general trend, with multiple causes, including the Trump Presidency and the pandemic. Anxiety, anger, fear are all significantly up, resulting in higher incidents of violent crime and lesser incidents such as confrontations on airplanes.

It just seems like people are either much angrier lately, or just way more vocal in expressing their anger. It's wearing me down and I'm finding it increasingly hard to get out of bed when I know I've got another day of nothing but negativity coming my way.

For the past year, I've been in a similar position to you, and yeah, it can feel like your job is to be yelled at and beaten down, with little consideration for the fact that you are a human being and essentially, the messenger. My position differs in that the people complaining are essentially my org's clients, as opposed to my co-workers, though the arrangement is fairly informal, so I am viewed as a co-worker rather than a consultant.

But, to give you an idea of where I'm coming from (and to see if our work is similar or not), I have had to contend with: frustration over missed garbage pick-ups; complaints about roof leaks in one part of the building that implied that I was too concerned about the roof in other parts of the building and not their part of the building; a vacuum cleaner that did not effectively work to clean a wood floor; enforcement of safety and code concerns being a tool of white supremacy; and could I personally deal with a burnt-out lightbulb. The person who asked me to change the lightbulb was nice about it. (At first I had thought it was probably an overhead fluorescent, and some of those are 8 feet, and that is perfectly reasonable and legit ... but it wasn't ... but at least the person was polite and grateful.)

Coping mechanisms ... it helps that I have a co-worker who does the same work I do and we can commiserate about it and support each other. I also have gotten better at mentally putting the work stuff in a box and ignoring it when I am not at work. I also try to interact more socially with the people who are complaining? Like, ask them what they are working on, try and reinforce my humanity to them, as opposed to being the person who can get the guy in to blow out the roof drains and patch the leaks, etc. ... and I don't want to get into the white supremacy issue here, but needless to say, that one is not as easy as changing a lightbulb and the people aren't as polite.

the policy for our trainers up until now has always been "you may have up to 5 hours per week without pre-approval, IF the overtime is needed to do actual work". and it makes sense, you have to show up early for class to get things ready and ensure it starts on time, and there's usually administrative stuff to do after class. Usually only adds up to 30 mins or so, but it's OT.

so this week, someone comes to me and says their manager is saying that no longer applies, they need all OT approved in advance. None of this was actually communicated to us until one of my instructors told me their manager was demanding I talk to them about any OT her direct report needed to work that week, and I was just told "well talk to her".

I had to tell her she'd already taken a half hour and that I'd blessed it based on the previous guidance, so that the instructor didn't get in trouble for taking 'unapproved' overtime, but I also told my boss's boss that on a permanent basis, I'm not willing to be the middleman on this, because that will lead to us eventually being held accountable for when one of these instructors takes unauthorized OT, when we don't even have the ability to see their time cards, nor are we their people managers.

seems like a few bad actors causing our company to take it out on the people who aren't doing anything wrong, and worried it'll lead to people working 'off the clock' (which I'll report in a heartbeat if I see it - I've had to do it a few times where I suspected one of our business partners was telling their employees to do that).