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

Boss:"Ronan could you comb your hair next time you come to work"

Me:"eh in fairness the contract doesn't say anything about me having to comb my hair"

Boss:"yeah but I mean you're a student now yeah? this job isn't so bad. they look after you well, it's a good wage, I'm happy with my lot"

Me:"I don't think there's any chance of me ever working here for a living, long term"

Boss:"Yeah and they pay your health insurance, it's not too difficult a job either"

Me:"Yeah no I'm never going to want to work here, to be honest I was planning on quitting as soon as I start college, or maybe even sooner, you needn't tell the main boss that"

Boss:"Oh don't worry, whatever is discussed here stays here. *long David Brent style lecture* I know what it's like to work WITH people and AROUND people, and I know that this station is not being run as effectively as possible, it's a clique, and I'm sure you can see that too Ronan. But quitting isn't going to change that. You quitting will not make this a smoother operation.

Me:"Eh I don't care about this job, I'm not sure what your point is"

Boss:"All I'm saying is, think about what I've said to you yeah? Just think about it"

Me:"............ok"

CEBCWTJCW: Morning Rachel!!! Oooh! What have you done to your NOSE??

Me: What? Oh yeah, it's a spot.

CEBCWTJCW: No! You've cut yourself or something! It's really RED.

Me: No, really, it's just a big, shiny, noticeable spot.

CEBCWTJCW: It looks really BAD!

At this point I gave up all hope of having a good day.

Woman At Next Desk: Oh, you used to live in London? So did I. I moved back after my daughter started school and, to be honest, I'm really glad I did. The education you get in London is terrible.

Madchen: I've heard inner city schools are, er, challenging.

WAND: Oh yes. I mean, she was one of only three white faces in the class.

Madchen: Oh. (Mutters something under her breath about 1 in 4 Scots).

Office twats who preface statements with 'I'm not being funny' should recognise that everything following the phrase comes with its own virtual kill file.

My other suggestion would be to canvass other coworkers for a pizza delivery one Friday and exclude her blatantly.

I work in a room with two people. Person 1 said to me all the stuff I wrote above. She thought nothing of saying it to a stranger (the assumption, I guess, being that I would think the same). Person 2 laughed along merrily. Also, I have come across numerous people in Glasgow who tell me they get scared in London because there are so many black people around. Again, the way they express themselves implies they feel no sense of shame whatsoever - they just don't see there's anything wrong in expressing obviously prejudiced opinions.

I'm not denying for a second that racism doesn't exist elsewhere (and I'm not forgetting that the survey found 3 in 4 Scots aren't racist) but this is the only place I've encountered bigots who have the expectation that my opinion must be the same as theirs.

reply from me: "actually, on Friday we both determined that we had the wrong CD and would have to special order a new copy. On Monday."

reply from my boss: "There must have been some miscommunication here."

yeah, between your ears and your brain. moron!

What the fuck?

Despite the fact that she's obviously still pregnant.

However, I AM authorized to purchase them, however I want, whenever I want.

What does that even mean?

SUBJECT LINE: I gotta get outta this place
...if it's the last thing I ever do (feel free to hum along.)

After a delightful morning spent discussing why someone:
1. Shouldn't open a printer paperfeed drawer, while the printer is printing;
2. Shouldn't send emails to everyone on their mailing lists about Church-related emails;
3. Should let others know when they need the printer instead of deleting documents in the queue;
4. Shouldn't tell someone "this is urgent" so they work really late to get it finished, when really, it isn't urgent at all and in fact, doesn't need to be done at all; and
5. Shouldn't take someone else's lunch from the refrigerator and leave it on the counter to make room for "extra drinks in case we have visitors,"
I have now experienced the conversation to top them all (and really, you have to laugh at this one. I did. Once I calmed down, imbibed chocolate and nicotine, and thought "well, at least it's not quantum physics?). So....here it is:

A Dialogue between "M" (yours truly) and "S" (Otherwise known as Scarett/Princess/Arch Nemesis/The Scarf Lady/etc.)
S: Hey "M"!
M: Yes?
S: You know how to work that digital camera yet?
M: Yeah, figured it out last week.
S: How long does it take to get those photos developed?
M: What?
S: I need some photos really fast, so I can photocopy them and make notes on the back. And get duplicates too, in case they get messed-up.
M: What? What pictures do you need taken?
S: I need to you take pictures of my computer.
M: Why?
S: I need to know what's on my computer.
M: (sigh) You are looking for a file?
S: No, I need to know what is on my screen thing.
M: (dawning awareness) You need screen captures?
S: No, I need pictures of my computer.
M: For....?
S: I need to know what's on my screen, 'cause these instructions don't make sense and I want to make notes.
M: Okay, then you need a picture of the information on your screen, that you can print and add notes to?
S: Yes.
M: Okay, we don't need the camera for that. We can just do screen captures. It's easy.
(M walks over to other office, taking deep and soothing breathes all the while, and explains how to "CTRL+ALT+PrtScn" - runs into trouble with explanation of holding down all keys at the same time. Eventually resolved and screen is captured.)
M: Now open Word and set the page to ?Landscape.?
S: My computer won't do that.
M: What? Yes it will.
(M goes through brief discussion of "portrait" vs "landscape" and how to perform operation in Word. Discovers part of problem is that S doesn?t know how to open Word because the icon isn?t on her desktop.)
M: Now just hit "Shift+Insert" and your screen shot will be inserted.
M: No, you need to hold down both keys at the same time.
M: I don't know, that's just the way the program is designed.
M: Yeah, it is find of frustrating.
M: Okay, now you have it. Just insert a new page for each of the next screen captures and then print the file.
(M returns to own desk and gets back into rhythm of formatting proposal.)
S: M! It isn't working. I want you to take the pictures for me.
M: I don't have time to take the pictures right now, I have to get this back to _____.
S: Well, I don't have the time to use the camera, so I guess this won't get done and _____ will be mad.
M: Yeah, I guess ___ will be mad, but I'll explain the problem to him.
S: Can't you do these thingys for me?
M: No, not right now. I have to get this done.
S: You know, it's your job to do this.
M: No, actually it isn't. I am sorry, but I really can't do it right now. If I have time later I'll come over and see what we can do. In the meantime, why don't you look under the "Help" menu to see if those instructions are better.
S: Oh, my computer doesn't have any "Help" on it. I keep telling ____ he needs to fix it, but he won't.

(M decides, for sake of sanity, to not try and figure out what that last comment means and returns to her editing, swearing all the while.)
End of original email.

And here are additional interesting tidbits about ?S?:
She claimed on her resume to be ?Microsoft Certified,? but was unable to explain what that meant;
She wrote all of her correspondence in Excel, because she didn?t know how to open Word (the icon wasn?t on her desktop);
When she came into work each morning, she made herself a pot of tea and sat in her cubicle reading household decorating magazines and drinking tea for the first two hours: and, best of all
She was once asked to provide a file that she had finished working on to another co-worker. The file was not on her hard drive for, as she explained, she ?didn?t want to fill it up with things? (and it was a 20 G HD!) File was eventually determined, by her, to be on a floppy. But floppy was blank when co-worker opened it. Eventually ?S? showed supervisor where she stored all of her floppys containing important info. She was attaching them to the metal parts of her cubicle with large magnets, so she ?could always find them.?

~ Laura (who is thankful that she can claim to be a happy rat, that abandoned the sinking ship in time to move to a much cushier and affluent ship, and is now ridiculously happy with things)

I've met a few people who have done basic "computer literacy" courses at colleges and Adult Ed. places who do this. What seems to happen is: the college says "don't store your files on the hard drive [of our lab computers], use a floppy" and the person absorbs this without understanding *why* they're being told it.

These sort of courses always seem to produce people who can't do anything except exactly what was on the course, and then only if their computer is set up exactly like the college ones were. Hence, not being able to start Word if it doesn't have a desktop icon.

(of course, the other stuff shows that this person seems to be a fuckwit regardless of that)

The ex-receptionist at my office once printed out an email so she could type it up in Word.

it's a sappy day.

1. "What does agriculture mean?"

2. "I was so annoyed. Someone threw themselves under my tube yesterday. People that do that must be mad."

3. Me: "Just tell them to put the web address in and it will take them straight into the site."

Her: "What address? Their address?"

Other things he did: worked at his cube standing up (making everyone around him very tense), unbuttoned his shirts halfway down his chest, commented on every phone conversation I had (work related or not), talked to himself, and played horrible CD-Rs of cabaret tunes he wrote and produced. I think the whole experience inoculated me against ever being annoyed by co-workers again.

Unfortunately something this stupid is uttered in my office at least once a day...

Literally a single, very self-explanatory thing to click! Yet, once again today, someone asked her about getting a PDF and she ranted about how she "can't". No one volunteers to help anymore, since it's easier and less painful to ram one's head through the nearest drywall.

ask her to create a calligraphed parchment next time

lol, I've never met a more hard-headed, resistant to change, refusing to adapt person in my life ever. when we got a new copier/scanner, she ranted for THREE WHOLE DAYS about having to learn a slightly different, and less cumbersome, sequence of buttons to tap to send a scanned document.

so she’s a fucking moron is what you’re saying

Oh, absolutely.

next time you have a chance, very quickly uninstall the print drivers from her computer.

an email reply from a third party vendor we work with wound up in Quarantine w/ no way to release it. wasn't a crucial message, just a response to an invite, so I let IT know so they could whitelist these emails, and got the rudest, snottiest response talking about how I was incorrect and they weren't going to blanket approve emails from this vendor/etc/etc.

responded: "so the solution is to have emails from approved third party business partners wind up in quarantine?". give snark, get snark.

the breakout room feature on Teams is great but there's one class we have w/ 3 people in it, and our trainer decided to put them in all one breakout room. that defeats the entire purpose - it'd be one thing if you were giving them a private room to work in outside of your line of vision, but you're in the room with them helping with the activity. there's literally no difference between a breakout room and the main room!

Feels like my new boss may suspect (not inaccurately btw) that I do almost nothing all day and is going to call me on it during a one-on-one meeting this morning (which has become a two-on-one meeting, as she's invited the boss I had been reporting to, before she was hired, to join the discussion). My current contract expires on 12/31, and they both say they want to keep me on for next year - the other boss and I had been in discussions about me going from contractor to full employee, but that never quite happened because... I don't know why, their focus was elsewhere, I guess. I'm getting emails from new boss that say things like, "It doesn't seem like the list of things you say you do adds up to 40 hours a week, can you give me a more detailed breakdown of how many hours you actually think you'll spend on Project A, Project B, and Project C in January through March?" (things get very busy starting in April) and part of me wants to flip the table, rhetorically speaking, and tell them "If you don't like the work I'm doing, just don't renew my contract, I don't care, fuck off," and go find a new job, but this one kind of fell in my lap and obviously the current ratio of salary to workload is very pleasing to me, and I'm not entirely sure I could find a new job right away. I mean, am I currently applying for other jobs? Yes, but that's because I want a second job, not a new job. Ugh, this is some bullshit.

The meeting didn't suck as hard as it could have, but it still sucked. They want me to start filling out timesheets indicating what I worked on on a given day; "We're not just going to automatically approve 40 hours per week anymore." Considering that I don't even get paid holidays, or paid sick days, my general feeling is they can suck it from the back. But on the plus side, my contract is being extended for another six months. And if they think I'm smart enough to do the work, but not smart enough to dummy up a timesheet... Hooray for capitalism!

This does not sound fun!

It was not fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuLAe8KshZw

I have almost never had a job that didn’t require keeping a time sheet or at least estimating time spent on various things. From where I sit, you have a lot of privilege.

And I consider myself privileged because I don’t have to use a timeclock or have some software surveillance system doing it

Yeah, on some level I know I've been getting away with it for a while. And they did give me a large project in the meeting, and talk a lot about how much they value my contribution. And I am just a contractor — if they wanted to cut me loose, they could do it without blinking. It's just the freelance writer in me that gets frustrated, because I'm more used to the terms being "Here's the assignment, here's the deadline, see you back here when the work is done."

speaking from experience you're right on the line where it would be more irritating for them to replace you than keep you, good luck staying there

otm, you’re doing good work and “does it take that many billable hours?’ is just year end budgetary judgment. keep on

So my workplace has never acknowledged birthdays, not once in the seven years I've been here. Folks you are friendly with will say 'happy birtday' if they know. It was a bit of switch from my previous workplace, but since my current place is much bigger, it made sense, otherwise it would get to be a lot. I was fine with it.

When we had a few meetings last year about "ideas for improving morale", I suggested maybe we do something small for birthdays. Got shot down. Fine.

Walk in this morning and another coworker was surprised with balloons, donuts and cake by another coworker. Cool.

(didn't finish that before I clicked 'submit post')

So now, the person who had a birthday last week and the one who had one a month ago are both annoyed and won't take part. So trying to do something nice, of course they fucked it up and handled it in such a bad way that more people are pissed off than happy about it.

If someone wants to celebrate a friend or colleague and that person also wants to be noticed/celebrated, that seems like a private and personal affair? It also seems like it could come across as unprofessional if that's not the vibe of a workplace but ymmv. I worked in a school where every stupid engagement/bridal/baby shower was a whole school cake and balloons affair and it was expected that everyone would "chip in" to a little gift for those people. Which was usually the same people three times in about three years. Maybe that made me phobic.

Well it's not really private, since the display for everything was at the front main table and the donuts and cake are for everyone. It's definitely meant to be a public display. Assuming the celebrant is good with it, I guess, I just think maybe consistency is good. Either do it publicly or don't do it publicly, just don't pick and choose to potentially offend people.

I just think it's kind of hilarious that these "leaders" can even manage to fuck up something meant to be nice.

Sorry, that's true, I should have been clearer. When I said "private" I didn't mean as in secretive, I meant as in...it was a private individual's decision to do it for someone else. Not company mandated, and not company prohibited. If the company were doing either of those things on a policy level it would be kinda controlling and weird imo?

It's unclear who originated this, to be fair. Either way it just felt jarring to some to see a public celebration after so many years of not acknowledging them at all.

you ignored the point, which is the entire point, that it sounds like the act of one person for another and there is literally absolutely nothing to be upset about as far as "work did or didnt do something"

I honestly can’t imagine caring about this. People at work have people they’re friends with and sometimes they do things like this. Must be fucking awful to be offered “donuts and cake for everyone” by someone who wanted to celebrate their friend. My sympathies.

It’s the balloons that are the worst tbh … I have been balloon-averse since seeing The Prisoner as a teen.

Xp jon — I totally get where you’re coming from.

https://www.indiewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Severance_Photo_0201.jpg

Having panic attack rn

Babes babes don't, it's just your nervous system rushing you. Do you want to talk?

Lol I was joking re Ned’s pic of balloons

Phew

But I would love to talk npo work stuff w/u!

I sent you my number via the cursed m3ssenger. Let's find a time!

I had a group of coworkers (I was adjacent to the group, but not in) who would do little pranks for birthdays for a few years but we were young and cared about birthdays? My coworkers pranked me when I turned 25 after I had joked about turning old and put black balloons in my cubicle and black confetti inside the books on my desk and I appreciated the bit.

I don’t like, give a shit about my own birthday? Some people really don’t like being reminded of theirs, some like to make a big deal, whatever. Making it a formal office thing seems like hell, you’d have to opt out and some people would know you did, the reverse is also bad, etc

My workplace does work anniversary recognitions but it’s low key. That seems more appropriate? I guess if you care about birthdays, hype up your birthday to your coworkers you’re closer to

That doesn’t even get into ageism in offices. No worse feeling than someone deciding you’re not their peer because you’re older/younger than they considered

Assuming we can afford it I fully intend to put on a big show for my 50th birthday at the local civic center where we held our daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. The vast majority of attendees will be a curated list of local coworkers, because that’s who my friends are now. There will be free desserts for everyone.

Mandatory desert for all

somehow my initial skim indicated you’d throw the party in a honda civic. also good

Have you considered an EV?

I used to have a co-worker called Rebecca. She was nice! But I kept calling her Rachel. She looked like a Rachel. Her hair was a little bit like Rachel's hair from Friends. She exuded Rachel-ness. Rachel is a lot more dynamic than Rebecca. Thank God I didn't ever call her "prominent nipples"! I dodged a bullet there. I don't think I ever called her "prominent nipples".

NB she didn't have prominent nipples. That's a reference to Rachel from Friends, who did have prominent nipples. No, I do not spend my time at work staring at my co-worker's chests. I'm going to delete this whole post when I find out how. A bit of googling for Jennifer Aniston nipples backspace reveals that Aniston had a fairly diverse range of hairstyles on that show, but the one everybody remembers has a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rachel

I even got her name wrong in a birthday card once. I like to think that she took it in good humour. One issue with celebrating workplace birthdays is the awkward issue of age. My hunch is that most of the people on Ilxor are young, hip, urban professionals in their twenties, very much like the cast of Friends, but younger and hipper and more cocaine-y. Closer to St Elmo's Fire. Obnoxious, but interesting. I mean, yes, Ilxor is around twenty years old, so the older posters are in their forties or perhaps even older, but mentally we're all hip twenty-something graduate interns, so we're all eternally young and healthy and happy etc.

But what about people who are 49? Or, horrors, 59? Or, horrors, 29? Do you celebrate that birthday? What about people for whom birthdays have ceased to have meaning? Obviously beyond a certain point you're just generically "old", and by that time you're a high-ranking executive who has their own office, but how do you approach someone who is sixty years old? They tend to be irrationally angry, old people.

I would rather, like, get more work done than socialize, sorry.

contrary to daytime attempts at communication via ilx

We've evaluated our trainers for years with a flawed, weighted formula that our partner lazily came up with so they could just plug in our numbers to determine their employees bonuses and not actually do work.

It is so bad that you could actually scream I CAN'T FUCKING TAKE THIS BULLSHIT, YOU ASSHOLES ARE AGGRAVATING ME and still pass because losing your temper in class only docks you like 4 points. So our choices have always been "let people get great ratings they don't deserve" or "manipulate the numerical inputs to achieve the desired rating", both of which are bad.

The former has led the trainers to ignore feedback and become complacent. The latter is dishonesty.

So finally a new boss comes in and says exactly this, we need to trash this and stop using it, and asks me to redesign the process. I design something much simpler, a three tiered rating system like the one we used 2022.

First feedback i get from same boss is, can I add a numerical component to it, and gives me a document as an example.

The document is the one he told me we were trashing because it sucked.

.....what?!!! Now I have to schedule a meeting to find out if I'm being asked a slightly different version of a thing we already have and hate.

I think it's largely due to everybody's obsession with converting everything into a piece of numerical data that can be fed into AI and trend-analyzed, without bothering to consider the difference between fact-based data that records things that have defined measurement vs aggregated data from an arbitrary formula that largely only measures itself

just assign them numbers 1,2,3 and call it a day

That reminds me. A while back my workplace introduced an improvement methodology that involves a weekly meeting in front of a BIG BOARD. We have to put tickets on the board and have a short meeting where we talk about the issues on the tickets. The basic concept is fine. I have nothing against the basic concept. The concept of coming up with a workplace issue, writing it down, and bashing it out, is perfectly okay. It's a good concept. As concepts go, it's good. Nothing wrong with the concept.

The problem is that the board looks a bit like this, e.g. it's incomprehensible. The concept is dressed up in a process that resembles an imitation of rationality. A cargo cult imitation of intelligent problem-solving. Something that a "linkedin lunatic" might come up with.

Each issue has to align with a vision metric, or a driver metric, and there was a third metric. I have no idea what differentiates them. No-one does. No-one knows why that part is important. We also have to fit each issue into one of three categories, and it has to be within a certain scope, and then it goes on a journey. There are four stages to the journey. And there's a thing called a "true north strategy". As a result we aren't actually free to discuss any arbitrary problem. It has to be only a certain kind of problem. So we end up pre-processing the problems so that they fit all of the aforementioned. Actual real problems go unaddressed. Is tear gas flammable in an enclosed space? I have no idea, and I can't ask, because that doesn't align with our vision metrics.

So the end result is a system that on paper solves problems, but in practice it's like something from Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. I mean, I'm a reasonably intelligent man. I have a questioning, creative mind. I discovered masturbation entirely by myself. I didn't have to ask my parents for help. When I did ask them, they were impressed with my initiative. Or at least they were very quiet. So they didn't disagree. I apologise for ruining the carpet. Sorry about that.

But the point still stands. If I don't understand this monstrosity, if Ashley Pomeroy doesn't understand this monstrosity, who does?

Inevitably the people who introduced this system eft the workplace shortly afterwards and the people who replaced them have also left, so we have a system that no-one understands, implemented by people who aren't there any more. We're basically torturing each other because someone misinterpreted an ancient scripture written by another culture on the far side of the world.

Why not just stop doing it then? Feels like a problem for the board: “currently we have a problem solving process that is being brutalized by manager speak run amok”

Boss took two weeks off. He comes back and asks me about a class starting tomorrow, if I or the other guy is leading it.

I had no idea it existed because this class was only documented in a solitary email he sent weeks ago and not the class tracker itself, plus it's not assigned to me on the assignment board. I think he forgot to assign it to either of us.

Getting to the point where I just ask if he wants to trade jobs with me. Dude is a worker bee who got promoted one time too many.

"Why not just stop doing it then?"

By sheer coincidence, a week later we did stop. Because the person who replaced the person who implemented the system retired, and there was no-one left to replace that person. And yet the board is still there. The points are frozen but the beast is not dead. Cogito ergo elk.

I'm reminded of an old science fiction short story in which the inmates of a gulag wake up one morning to find that the automated security system has stopped working, so they break into the control room and discover that a data cartridge has fallen out of the central computer, leaving the gulag completely non-functional. They get ready to escape until one of their number instinctively re-inserts the data cartridge, at which point the speakers come to life again and the inmates meekly return to their cells, because they had been so brutalised that they has lost all hope.

Which reminds me that there used to be a website that had a database of sci-fi short stories. You could click on a story and it showed you which books it had appeared in. And conversely you could click on a book and it showed you which stories it contained. And... oh. It still exists. It's the Speculative Fiction Database. The story was "The Day Volman Died" by Philip Dunn, published in The Weekend Book of Science Fiction. The story has otherwise left no trace on the internet.

I worry that one day this database will cease to exist except that it's text, which uses very little bandwidth, and pragmatically if no-one else on the entire internet cares enough about "The Day Volman Died" to write anything about it - this thread is presumably going to be one of the few things on the internet that mentions it, after I hit "submit post" - it isn't worth saving.