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

I was in a meeting last week in which multiple supervisors used the phrase “work smarter not harder.”

Neanderthal, to my face. She glowered at me and said "what are you doing out here"?

She's not my direct boss and couldn't do much about it. He signed off on it.

"whatever I goddamn like, that's what I'm doing"

my management encourages me to take my paid time off, and now encourages me to do it regularly because the shit was hitting the fan in november, our pto expires at the end of the year, and after the first week of december I was like “whoops gotta use my pto, see you in january!!”

I was in a meeting last week in which multiple supervisors used the phrase “work smarter not harder.”

When is the arraignment?

the holiday thing is the same here. holiday year ends at end of march so it gets quiet towards the end as people use up their spare days. everyone knows this. but this year they've gone and agreed deadlines for early april. (tbf there are external factors, like national events)

but if you're 100% busy during the rest of the year there's no good time to take holiday. i had a week for my birthday and a week for Christmas (and didn't really enjoy either). i struggle with weekends, even.

I really need my co-worker to stop telling me they need a "wee", "tinkle", or this morning, a "wee wee". These are grown women. It drives me nuts.

co-workers - there's more than one offender.

That’s a bit Hunni of them tbh. Do your male coworkers tell you they’re off to have a slash?

lol nope!

Tinkle and wee wee are the first. They're not puppies ffs.

‘Tinkle’ suggests a twee American colleague because British people rarely say this. The ‘if you sprinkle/when you tinkle’ rhyme is horribly American.

People at work write "brb bio" and it makes me more mad.

Just say brb I don't need to know stuff is coming out of you

Nope - the one who uses tinkle is from Bromley and has never been to the US!

and yeah I hate bio break too - just fucking excuse yourself we don't need to know

The if you sprinkle thing is horrific. I knew someone growing up who had the whole phrase (which I am not typing out here it's bad enough you made me think of embroidered on a hoop in their bathroom. Nope. Just no.

You have a genteel workplace if you’ve never had a colleague excuse themselves for a slash/wazz.

I was once training people remotely and had one of them tell me they'd had a potluck that day and one of the people severely undercooked something and she described the diarrhea she was having to me as subtly as possible which wasn't much.

Idk what I was more annoyed by, that detail, or the fact that someone fucked up a potluck dish that bad.

Never eat anything at a work potluck that needs to be 165 degrees to spare your intestines

Just say brb I don't need to know stuff is coming out of you

pvmnic

knew you were going to have that teed up

My old boss was great and didn't really care about Workday for vacation. My new boss is a bit different. Further the system works a bit different to how everyone ever communicated (you can roll more than 5 days).

I have about two months vacation to take this year.

I am sure the enthusiasm for me to use it is going to dissipate about as soon as I book some of it.

I really need my co-worker to stop telling me they need a "wee", "tinkle", or this morning, a "wee wee". These are grown women. It drives me nuts.

Let me know if you need legal representation.

my HR called me back in regards to my escalation. when they announced themselves, they gave the name of our former company.

we spun off in 2018.

Received an email this morning that "Unfortunately there are significantly less courses available to teach this upcoming year than there have been in the past years." Besides the grammar error, among the few that really enrage me for some reason, there's also the fact that I have taught *five* courses at this school every year for the past two years— this is basically a huge chunk of staff being downsized, myself included. I have a feeling the school is going to shutter the program, which is unfortunate, especially for the wonderful students I've taught that will now have no alma mater, for all intents and purposes.

As for me, I'll make it work— I'm going back to school this summer, and know how to hustle other shit for a year or so— but JFC, how abysmal.

The word "tinkle" is one of the best justifications for censorship.

The word "tinkle" is one of the best justifications for censorship.

This is a minor one in the scheme of things, BUT.

An otherwise very nice and good to work with newish coworker clears his throat every 20 seconds all day, every day. Cough drops, water and gum have all been offered up. The clearing persists.

we had a guy who would similarly cough all day. claimed it only happened in the office. we figured it was the fibres from the work carpets.

I used to have a colleague who would regularly take a deep snort, as though clearing his nose into his throat. Not sure why, I guess it had to do with sinus issues.

that's what I do during a bout of sleep apnea

Yeah, but he was (or at least appeared to be) wide awake.

the aforementioned "face 2 face" day where we all go into the office for... reasons coincides tomorrow with the release of some software we've been working on for a while. and because it's potentially disruptive we've been given a change window of 7 to 9am.

tldr: i have to be in the office at 7 tomorrow morning.

Received a good reminder in recent weeks to never, ever question direction from middle managers, no matter how mildly, well reasoned and supported by data that gentle push back may be. It will NOT be received well and will backfire, almost always.

Before my new boss these tasks took up maybe 10% of my time. When my new boss entered the picture, it went up to probably 40% of my time, prompting my gentle questioning. Now it sits at about 65% of my time. Lesson learned, don't complain.

omg i've never actually needed to post in this thread until today

the ONLY words i can think of for this person are ANNOYING DUDE

i hate to just barge into a thread that i haven't followed and bark up a storm but i'm trying to put my finger on this guy

i'm going to have to think about it but i appreciate having a place for this lol <3

Not a specific co-worker, but a complaint about a specific type of co-worker that I like to call an escalator. You know, the ones that start with a very simple, easy to answer question that gently snowballs until they get to their real ask, which is a big time suck.

co-worker: "Hey can you send over the square footage of this project?"
me: "Sure, here you go."
co-worker: "Thanks, can you actually break that down by floor."
me: "Ok, here it is."
co-worker: "Great, do you happen to also have the costs for each floor?"
me: "Had to spend some time breaking down the overall costs, but here you go."
co-worker: "Oh, actually, all this information was for this 18-page form I've been asked to fill out. Can you just fill it all out for me? That's probably quicker."

i seem to be currently doing someone else's ticket for them using the medium of slack messages so i feel your pain.

jon stuff like that is why i've gotten to where i ghost people now. not saying you should or even know if you can, but there's definitely a personality type that does that and basically if I've done what was originally asked and they're trying to be sneaky, i just 'forget' to respond ever again.

Yesterday one of our idiot plans administrators nearly prevented a single mom from adding her newborn child to medical coverage because of a egregiously bad understanding of the plan's rules.

Most companies have rules preventing people from getting duplicate coverage as an employee and a dependent child of another employee (i.e. you can't have your own medical, and also be covered as a child on your parent's plan).

This person was covered under dependent life under their mother and tried to enroll in employee life, and so the system was invalidating the entire transaction where she tried to add the child. A ticket was started.

Instead of telling the agent to just remove the Employee Life, he incorrectly told them that she couldn't cover the child on medical at all because of the unrelated coverage she had under her mom

Scares me to think how many other catastrophic mistakes he's made

xp - this was actually my first interaction with this specific first person, but yeah, i'll definitely have my radar up next time they reach out for something.

the other archetype i hate are the 'intentional forgetters', people who know there is a defined process for doing things, but they circumvent the process and go right to you, and when you remind them of process say "oh I'm so dumb, I forgot about that, well can you just do it for me now and I'll remember next time"...and then next time, do the same thing.

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!