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

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...

An old japanese woman wearing a baby dress and pigtails jumping and down in front of me at the desk. I just came in. Please, let me wake up a bit first. Or am I still dreaming?

i feel like i'm missing out

There's nothing like a five minute meeting with your boss in which he tells you that you've basically got like two months to turn things around with a mouth full of Mike n' Ikes.

big flat mole on the left side of his face with 9 really long and scraggly hairs growing out of it. He was always playing with them... twisting and pulling on them (but not pulling them out.) Very distracting....

"Please tell me if you understand what I am saying, at the moment in the exqualifier there are only a 4 digit code, you append another 3 in front of them I don't know where, but doesn't matter anyway to sort out the letter in the front for the new code."

I assure you it makes only 1% more sense to me than it does to you.

THis goes on at least ONCE A WEEK in my office.

software is so good

put me in my fucking grave already

stop fucking with me

lol I got a bonus for my work on this pilot project and then a week later they dismantled it and decided not to continue any further on the pilot.

well at least I got money out of it.

boss's boss decided to mess around with site permissions on Sharepoint without fully having an idea of what they were doing and now nobody can get into the daily documents they need to get into. they keep trying to figure out how to fix the site permissions to what they want while not keeping people out and I was like "can you just revert what you did so we can get back to doing our work and figure it out some other time?"

Excel dorks may enjoy this.

My boss spent over a month creating this new training class report. One of its new features is auto-calculating class attrition, which I tested after he'd already rolled it out, and noted that it was incorrectly showing 100% attrition no matter what I entered. I looked at the formulas and saw why.

The attrition calculation formula was fine, basically divides final class size by original class size, subtracting that total from 1. But it's where he pulled the final class size from that was the problem.

Instead of doing the smart thing, like having the report count every learner that had a "Yes" under Completed Class Successfully column, he programmed it to count the number of people who were marked Present on Day 21. problem is, most of our classes are 19 days, and Days 20 and 21 are marked 'optional' for the rare class that is 21. so we're instructed to input "n/a" in the attendance for those days. The report is then finding a result that is other than "Present", and since everybody is marked n/a for that day, it's returning a 0 result, so the report is thinking everybody got fired on the final day of training.

I know how to fix it but I'm going to let him do it since he didn't properly test this thing before he rolled it out.

Bwhahaha!

You could start a pool for how long it will take him to fix it

I mean, my boss still has a typo in his signature. It has been several months, so much I am at the point I don't feel OK saying I saw it.

Did they misspell their name?

yes, ask me a question when you know I'm in a meeting and then use my obvious non-response as a green light and start communicating to everybody that we might be doing this thing because I haven't objected as of yet.

like wtf, wasn't even a meeting I was attending, I was presenting.

nobody's access works today

check ticket - it was closed weeks ago, says granted.

check roster the creator attached - it was the wrong one for a completely different class.

report this in ticket. both the person working on it and creator ignore the note.

in MS Teams chat, I point out same thing - again, comment ignored, they tell me 'have everybody try again', even though nobody provided the correct roster.

it's going to wind up being me creating the roster myself at this point because i'm talkin to a wall!

so that guy from yesterday, his mistake cost us hours of headache, and he wasn't really all that apologetic.

today, he informs me at 3 pm that tomorrow's new class is half-filled with hires with incorrect hire dates in the system, meaning they probably won't be able to access their systems today or tomorrow. we have plenty of case history on what happens in this situation and it is almost always "falling 4+ hours behind schedule PLUS people quitting because of the really bad first impression", and I point this out and ask if we can delay class start by one day.

get told "no, this client paid a lot of money for this special class and the 2nd round of training has to start on time, sorry". so....the client paying all that money wasn't enough to motivate you to prevent this problem from happening in the first place, just to tell me 'no' so it becomes my problem. got it.

he's now denied our final appeal saying 'oh we are actually fixing it right now and pretty sure nothing bad is going to come of it'. will cop to being a chicken little if he's right, but...he rarely is.

there's a status report email that has to go out twice a week for each training class. my instructors failed to send it the first time it was due, so I asked them to send it on Friday. they sent me a copy to review and I gave feedback and said they were good to send, and ...nothing.

this morning, one of them insists it was sent, so I ask for a copy, as they must not have CCed me, and I need it for recordkeeping. First, one of them sends me the email they sent to me for peer review, so I say "no, I need the one you sent to the managers". I get sent another random email.

losing patience, I go to the manager who it was supposed to be sent to and say can you send it to me, she sends me two completely unrelated emails.

3 hours later I still don't have the thing I asked for and I wonder if this is an elaborate ruse to cover up the fact that it didn't get sent. lol

Update - that is...exactly...what happened. smh

Just extremely tired of my own coworkers causing roadblocks.

Tomorrow morning I had three back to back meetings on three different projects, all with the same consultant, but different project managers for each. All thee projects are in key crunch times and these were important meetings. This morning I received phone calls from all three said project managers, all saying that my colleague scheduled a meeting during that same time tomorrow, so now I am left frantically rescheduling three different meetings with about 20 different people.

Just an observation: whenever this thread gets a new answer, I assume either Neanderthal or jvc2.0 are the posters.

In the staff canteen. Table of four people just in front of me: attractive younger woman and three older verging on middle aged guys. It's like a Fast Show sketch with the men all trying to impress the woman. A lot of horribly awkward conversations and low level flirting going on. Truly a revolting spectacle!

They're talking about films and the woman has just said she doesn't watch anything older than 2006(!) because that's "too old and the quality's shit".

My 16 year old son's cut off is 2000. For him, it's more that he does not want to watch something from a previous century.

At the risk of offending table for posting itt again...

I realize this is a really petty thing, but it bugs me. Due to the nature of my job, a lot of our intense work is done over the summer. At the end of the summer, our department's website is updated to highlight some of the work we've accomplished. It's one of the rare times we ever step back to acknowledge a job well done and I like (in theory) that we do it. Except this is now the fourth straight year that none of my projects made the cut to be displayed. I get it, due to my past experience and skill sets my work tends to lean towards the utilitarian and highly specific research spaces that aren't always glamorous or show-offy.

But I gotta say, I am annoyed for another September where I have to listen to my coworkers get kudos from other folks outside our department about their hard work while, once again, my work goes unnoticed and unremarked upon.

Like I said, it's petty and there is a lesson in here to learn about still doing good work because that's what you should do regardless of recognition, but I won't lie that it's not another hit to my morale and general enthusiasm for putting in the long hours again.

I don’t think that’s petty, and I also am not annoyed by your posts itt— I was simply remarking that it is usually you or Neando posting. That’s fine! More an observation than a gripe—

and tbh, the reality is that I want you both to be happier and find jobs without such annoying, stupid coworkers.

I also used to post in here a lot and now I realise its because I was so unhappy in the jobs I was in at that time, every little thing grated. I've had no cause to post in here in a long time because my company/current role is actually pretty smooth sailing.

Now it’s my turn: one of my jobs is desk staff and adult coach at a climbing gym. I am the oldest person on staff. One of my co-workers, a new guy who just turned 18, came in yesterday and within two minutes I noticed he had a cough. I gave him a mask, and wore one myself for most of my shift. He said he felt like it was just a cold and that he needed the money, and didn’t even know that people are still getting Covid.

Gotta say: many people are fucking oblivious, and he is certainly among them. Nice enough, but knows nothing… and yes, I was 18 once too, but I was pretty interested in the world around me.

I have to present to colleagues about stochastic monte-carlo mean regressive modeling soon.

I am terrified how many questions I am going to get that are basically "well, according to my thoughts that shouldn't happen". It is about as pure as math can math. It happens because it absolutely *can* happen, because it is probabilistically possible and is a function of the inputs.

Which is also probably why you don't get to dick around with it.

Though I am pretty sure they all hate me for replying with short answers about a problem within ten minutes, then spending a day or so to prove I was precisely correct on my hunch.

Thinking about the co-worker who was fired for urinating in a bin in a prison visiting room during a security lockdown (we do prison health education, among other things).

Thanks table, yeah oblivious people are everywhere.

I wish I had less to post about itt, or rather I wish it was more just the typical obnoxious coworker stuff and not stuff coming from the top.

To make sure I had the full scope of the issue with our website, I spoke to the person who does the actual updates to our website. They confirmed that no, there are not other updates and yes, it was my new(ish) manager who made the specific decision on which projects were included. I just wanted to be able to confirm this wasn't a phased roll-out or something. So now I'm not sure what to do with this information, but my manager did specifically make the decision to exclude all of my projects, and only mine. I probably should just let it go, but part of me fears this will be just another way I get marginalized if I don't at least advocate for myself.

tbh I'm actually content at my job now (after the nightmare of 2022, we hired like 8 more people and workload hasn't been a problem since), I just post war stories for funsies sometimes.

today's entry is more humorous - leadership decided to send people on this special project a fun little gift. including a candy bar, which they didn't insulate properly in the packaging, so a bunch of people got melted ass gifts.

i didn't get one but my boss's boss did and is laughing about it