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

"he's in the final third, and.....ouch, he was talking about the time he got wasted at the local Red Lobster, and he lost a little volume there. he's got to watch his breathing, judges deduct two points for a 10 decibel drop so that's going to hurt his final score"

often at work people do blog posts and are like "tell us what you think!". it's a very collaborative open organisation, or . so this week i saw one of the pieces i work and i decided to "tell them what i think!" - and basically it had loads and loads of problems. i was pretty polite but made a big list of them, and there have been two reactions. the person that does my job who was involved has got mega-defensive and fu about it. i then sent a mail being as ultra-nice as i could "just my opinion, i apologise if it came across over-zealous etc etc", which didn't really change her tone.

just after this, her boss (i think it's her boss) is like "interesting ideas, let's you and me catch up about this, local garda".

feel like in trying to help i've just utterly utterly undermined someone and their boss is like "yes let's undermine them". this post is less bitching about co-workers and more office politics.

feel free to point out the errors in my post - i'd love to hear your feedback!

jesus that is the worst post ever.

just after this, her boss (i think it's her boss) is like "interesting ideas, let's you and me catch up about this, local garda".

lol, did her boss copy her in to this? cold bruv

yeah she was copied in. i had apologised and everything, she didn't really accept the apology, like replied brusquely, and then he replied in the same chain: "no need to apologise, feedback helps us to make things better. are you free to discuss this?"

terrible bossing on his part tbh. i've mailed my boss to extricate myself. POLITICS.

Go gard or go home

turned out fine really. my boss was fine with it, pretty much. just said to find out exactly who receives the feedback email in future, based on her own experiences.

i wasn't offering my opinion to boost favour with this team or get one over on the person, i just had genuine opinions about the piece of work that i felt most people in the organisation would agree with.

our 'practices' team decided to roll out this new procedure to the entire firm while simultaneously forgetting to notify 33% of the people who would be affected by it *and* without piloting it to ensure it was set up to work correctly on all systems first (*it isn't*) or giving anybody ample time to train people on it.

so now there are hundreds of employees all mondo confused about how to adhere to the new protocol.

three live dates in a two week period = just ugh

had a rough month with three live dates in a span of two weeks and had to travel to San Juan (ok that part was fun, not gonna lie) for one of em. was looking forward to this week, having a day or two of a lighter workload.

got three hours of peace and then they give me a special complicated project due in two weeks. welp fun while it lasted

i just realized I already mentioned the 3 lives in my last post. lord last week was a blur.

I decided to move a guy but he wouldnt move this morning now the guy i was replacing him with has no seat

What, he just straight up refused to move desks when told to? Who does that?

just make new guy sit on old guy's lap

tbf i refused to move desks once, because I was supposed to use a different computer with none of the software I rely on to do my job available to me

movers broke my monitor during a routine move once, and then left pieces of it on my desk. then just left it sitting there broken and were all like "oh yeah I guess that happened" when I called them pissed off about it.

working virtually came at the right time

they also, for years, used to issue the laptops for us virtual folk with outdated drivers installed and nobody except an admin level or higher could download newer ones and the outdated driver caused the VPN connection to disconnect and reconnect something like 400 times a day and it'd take you a 45 minute convo to explain to the people that this same thing happened to you two years earlier when you got a new laptop only for them to go "nope nope I'm p sure it's your home internet connection" only for them to reluctantly install the up to date driver and well what do you know it stopped like you said it would.

there is a strange little old man crawling round on our floor tagging all the electrical equipment. he has an accent so thick you can't work out what he's saying, and he smells very strongly of ash and urine, as though someone has been electrocuted on the toilet.

I get mad when someone asks me "have time to touchbase" and I say sure thinking they mean via instant message but no, they insist on calling, and take fifteen minutes to say something they could have said in an instant message

Today she brought in the bulldog she's dogsitting.

Dog panted like hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah for four hours and snored like a wailing Harvey Keitel for the other four hours.

I would demand it went elswwhere, I just couldnt put up with that shit.

..I dont really like dogs tho :/

One of those things where it doesn't seem to bother anyone else in the office, so it's either me making everything awkward and weird or me just putting up with it.

Trust me, I'm all teetering on the verge of putting MY GODAMM FOOT DOWN or risk being a MILQUETOAST CHICKENSHIT, but really. It's all about how I react to this that defines the vibe more than anything.

There's probably a message board for each co-worker in which they're making the same complaint.

OK guys I need advice on how to outflank the worst co-worker I've ever had

Preamble: I work for a small company, about 17 employees. The nemesis in question is a relatively recent hire but an old friend of the boss'. In between them seniority-wise is a manager I mostly like and respect.

This guy writes terrible "reports" we spend more time fixing than we would have writing *and* editing if we'd been assigned them, gets wounded and defensive at the slightest criticism, and - most insidiously of all - if he senses that you don't like or disagree with him but probably aren't at risk of getting the sack anytime soon, he pulls you aside and is almost creepily nice to you. (He did this to me today. It involved unprompted, hyperbolic personal compliments. And similarly unasked-for hugging.) At the same time, at least a half-dozen co-workers have expressed outright antipathy and/or had open verbal scuffles with him over his thickheadedness and lack of respect for others' skillsets.

Anyway yesterday I finally spoke to my manager a little about my misgivings w/r/t this guy, workflow, attitude, etc. Today I got the creepy compliments and the hug. I earnestly do not believe the manager said anything to him, I just think he has a keen sense of when forces are aligning against him.

What do you do in the face of such a weirdly shrewd (yet also incredibly thick), well-positioned adversary?

The hugging alone would have my hackles up immediately.

meant to write *spent less time writing and editing (lol)

and yeah it was the hugging and telling me that I was truly special that solidified him as my first-ever real nemesis

Thats seriously creepy is there someone sideways you can talk to about it? HR or something?

Nah I already spoke up to the only person I can and he is a bit powerless. (Also, he literally just found out he has a kid on the way and that has him extra reticent to rock the boat, I believe.) As I said, it's a small, tight-knit (for the most part) company and the offender is well-situated. Sadly I think the only move I have is to call him out on his shit as openly as possible and hope I don't end up facing retaliation in the process. My ace in the hole is that I do a lot of the grunt work no one else wants to even consider. Basically it will come down to utility vs. closeness to the boss.

"I don't feel better and I recommend that people don't come anywhere near me <coughs and splutters all day>"

well gee thanks for coming in then, we all love germs and noises

snored like a wailing Harvey Keitel

amazing.

Nope not calling in on a day off to have a special meetimg about something that can realistically wait til Monday and that i havent the faintest clue about anyway

Reached the point where someone finds an article about Donald Trump online, reads it aloud, and everyone offers their reaction to it.

It's like working inside the liberal media version of the 700 Club.

lord, so glad this is why I work at home now. it's like politics don't even exist at my job and I'm thankful for that.

we had two telephone issues for our client in a three-week span. One of them was global, the other one isolated to one specific team, but due purely to human error. Our division leader agreed to reach out to the telephony group to determine what could be done to address the issues that kept occurring, as there were five unrelated incidents in a three week span for various teams, which is very unusual.

In a pure pandering moment, our leaders present to our client that our long-term solution will be to extend QA by an extra week AFTER live date from now on, without asking us for our thoughts on it. Even though this would not have prevented either of the two incidents noted above (as borne out by the final incident reports).

aborting the "get ahead of emails" initiative. this shit waits til Monday now!

People who don't reply to emails which say "Is this stuff right for your totally vague specifications with a deadline tomorrow? Please let me know if not and I'll do my best to fix it by the deadline"

(deadline sails past with no acknowledgement that files were even received, never mind right)

£%^&^%£

the symmetry and pound signs were accidental but I like to think they signify a particularly florid burst of swearing (of which I am probably not capable in actual words)

ugh that describes literally half of our corporate office

you feel needy for expecting a response to even the most basic questions! and voicemails go ignored too it's like being forcibly Bartleby-ed

https://www.the-pool.com/work/work-smarter/2016/32/a-guide-to-looking-interested-in-meetings

I do the squint but I also touch my hair.

this is as much IA as co-workers, but one thing that always really annoys me is if you come back to your desk and someone from another team who happens to be talking to a colleague is sitting in your chair. it's so awkward. if they actually notice easily or are self-aware enough to do so then it's fine, but it can be so frustrating.

See how long you can go just standing vaguely near them with a patient smile on your face, shifting your weight from foot to foot

i'm sure they're perfectly nice but i just flung my security card onto the desk and walked away to get water, after a brief attempt at politely communicating via body language that the desk full of someone else's work trappings was mine. not my finest hour but standing isn't always that easy for me, healthwise.

when i got back there was no change and my boss was like "oh yeah that's local garda's seat"...

Similarly but not quite as egregious, people in my office will stretch out and lean with their elbows atop the cubicle walls on either side of the aisle while talking to someone and then seem totally surprised when someone comes up the aisle who needs to get past the human spider web they've erected. Like, the same people, over and over.

The guy who sits behind me eats something for breakfast every morning that smells, no joke, like diarrhea.

Is it some runny, egg white thing? There's someone here who makes a significantly pungent sulfury egg dish some mornings. I don't understand how that sensation in regards to BOTH smell and consistency could possibly be appetizing to anybody.

I do think it's some egg thing. I haven't actually looked out of fear that I'd witness him actually slurping away at a bowl of diarrhea.

holy crap, i clicked this thread to complain about my coworker eating a boiled egg every morning. It signals a 15 min break for me to leave the building.

It's like eggs have a defense mechanism (when prepared in these particular ways) that some humans have the ability to ignore. How do they not get hungry at the scent of actual diarrhea? In this context the smell is indeed exactly the same...