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

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...

one of my colleagues was told they couldn't have a certain type of setup done because "we don't have it documented how to do it and the person that knew how quit a few months ago"

it happens.

we had a lot of software projects where only one person knew the details. what happens when they leave? i still don't think i've forgiven the person who had two weeks left and decided to spend it refactoring the code rather than leaving it alone and documenting how it was, making handover harder rather than easier.

how dare people have coughs and sit in my vicinity

I may have to quit because of my boss giggling every fucking day at things that ARE NOT FUNNY AT ALL.

Employee: Last time he said it was two weeks. Now he says it's 10 days.
Boss: He could mean business weeks. HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE 10 days is two business weeks! HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH

This exchange occurred 10 min ago. He has giggled at other things several times since.

We're moving offices come Monday so everyone is basically acting like it's the last week of school here except for the part where there's, y'know, still work to do. The super annoying dude who should be Ritalin-ed to the gills is making me want to DIE because he won't SHUT UP like EVER and it's always somehow simultaneously the most banal and the most narcissistic shit you've ever heard (he recounts like every detail of his boring life, up to and including the loving details of pretty much every meal). Thank Christ he's going to be sitting about as far away from me as possible come next week. Assuming I don't defenestrate him before the day is over.

this is my old job and not my new job BUT:

An employee came out as trans (MTF) and has begun talking to colleagues abt transitioning in the workplace. A lot of the brass at the company has been fiercely supportive, adopting zero-tolerance policies w/r/t harrassment, etc etc. My friend who still works there is in charge of some communication logistics, filling ppl in, ensuring that they don't behave like dicks, and THE ONLY person who seemed uncomfortable and asked questions about bathrooms was the HR person

o_O

setting the tone from above, wonderful

not mine but a friend of mine's HR is the absolute worst. I've probably complained on here before about them doing a Michael Scott-style diversity training course about 'people of ethnicity'.

oh jesus christ

I mentioned it on the business travel thread but i had to complain to HR yesterday that the cultural awareness training app they'd bought in was hugely xenophobic and offensive - which they took with good grace and promised to investigate tbf.

did it begin something like

"People who talk funny and eat weird foods are all around us, but did you know - they're just like us?"

I'd tempted to start a 77 thread to repost highlights but let's just say it didn't come as a huge surprise that the team responsible for authoring it looks like this:

http://s21.postimg.org/70hs7f6cn/Culture_wizard.jpg

the most awkward diversity presentation I saw was when I worked for @lbertsons. it began something like with a woman sitting down behind a desk for the first few minutes of the video, and then she came out from behind it and was in a wheelchair. and she says something like "ask yourself - did you assume I was sitting down because I was lazy? Admit it - you made a judgement thinking I was able bodied and sitting down, and now your judgment has changed since you can see I'm in a wheelchair".

I was like.....ooook?

I quit a week later. not for that reason, but cos the deli sucks.

So lazy.

http://i.imgur.com/phea9DK.jpg

A person sitting at a desk in an office... omg lazy!

tbf it may have been slightly diff than that - this was a shitty VHS tape that I watched 12 years ago.

moments later they showed a guy who had all the room in the world squeezing by an employee in the aisle and brushing up against her and her yelling at him "YOU COULD HAVE AVOIDED ME YOU CREEP!" and another dude inviting a girl to a pool party and saying she should attend sans swimsuit while everyone laughed.

this was expressed as 'bad and perhaps illegal' behavior to us by the narrator.

so today after spilling something on my laptop and having it make the entire home row not work, I went to the office to have them see if they could salvage it, and then temporarily propped up on one of our unassigned computers that you can use in these types of scenarios.

Logged in and then loaded the browser to go onto my company's intranet home page so I could start a work ticket only to have it blocked with a scary warning telling me the site was an Untrusted Connection and the Security Certificate was invalid.

I've had that happen on a spare computer where only my company's website was blocked.

hah yeah, I suspect it's cos these computers don't get used often. the IT guy who I was telling where I was to come and help me had no idea what location I was talking about at first.

CW1: Yeah, "Radar Love" was a good song. Pretty good for a one-hit wonder.

ME: GOLDEN EARRING WASN'T A ONE-HIT WONDER. THEY ALSO HAD "TWILIGHT ZONE".

CW1: Don't know if I've heard that one...

Three days later...

CW1: Oh, I thought of another Golden Earring song the other day. What about "When the Bullet Hits the Bone"?

ME:
http://i.imgur.com/AAteF8c.jpg

TBF, I also thought it was called 'When the Bullet Hits the Bone' for like the first couple decades of my life.

(Also, totes incidental but I was pleasantly surprised to discover a few years back that Golden Earring had a really long and largely good career.)

one of my co-workers doesn't realize that forecasted handle times are expressed as a decimal, which has to be converted to minutes, so yesterday in a stats report she reported the forecasted handle time as 8:80

reminded me of Simon and Garfunkel's strategy to get longer songs played on radio

I think i saw the sleeve of a collection of 60s work by them(Golden Earring)crop up when I was looking for something else or running through Amazon recommendations recently.

During that conversation, CW2 sent me a YouTube video from Golden Earring's catalogue where the lead singer pretty much rapes a nun on the subway.

I've learned a lot about Golden Earring in the past week. Might stick with Bettie Serveert for the long run.

I think it was this that I saw somewhere, so maybe on a site about psychedelic clothing I was looking at.
//e.snmc.io/lk/f/l/b191e5b280a704769de27615f32c0142/1354995.jpg

"did the process for <xxx> change?"

'no, it's the same process as it always was. that thing we used to do for you and we said you were welcome to request at any time actually should never have been allowed so we stopped allowing it overnight and opted not to ever tell you cos LOL'.

"so...yes?"

Trying to eavesdrop on an interesting conversation which tangentially overlaps with my work in the office next door, but sadly in the other office next door the coworker with the loud droning nasal voice is droning loudly and nasally about something very boring and drowning out the interesting conversation

Later today there will be a team meeting which will be 90% this guy immediately answering everything the boss says and similarly droning on at length

Do bosses ever wonder "what would meetings be like if that one guy didn't talk for 90% of the time?", do they just think "that one guy is really helpful and informative and everyone else is just too lazy or clueless to speak!", do they not even notice that one person is talking all the time as long as they like that one person?

(tempted to add "and it's a man" w/thoughts of that study where women were thought of as noisy, bossy and conversation-dominating when they spoke for way less time than the men, but hey, Not All Men)

I was basically told by a manager this morning that it's unfair of me to expect her people to understand the correct way to do a thing (that I've explicitly reminded her and them how to do, many times, over several years) and that me taking time out to send them correction requests on a daily basis is apparently an acceptable substitute for their mindfulness.

(I should note, too, that this isn't about making mistakes, which is forgivable, but rather ignorance wrt a basic daily function of one's job, which I tend to be a little less forgiving about for some reason. Probably because I am a meanie.)

My company has started trying to enforce the following rules in relatively quick succession:

1) You must take a half hour unpaid lunch (state law only requires twenty minutes, but whatevs).
2) You must start your work day no later than 7:00 AM (we've had a flex schedule forever which allowed us to come in earlier and get out earlier but still no huge deal).
3) You must take your lunch no more than 5 hours after your start time (again, dumb, but nothing ott).
4) You cannot eat lunch at your desk (wait...what?).

At a half hour (anything OVER half an hour must be approved by a manager), leaving the building to eat is a PITA, particularly during the winter. So you basically engineer things in a way that encourages people to bring their lunch to work but then tell them they can't eat at their desks, which means they have to eat in one of two small kitchen areas. And because you've over-engineered people's start times and restricted when they can take their lunches, that means that basically several hundred people are going to be vying for that kitchen space at the same time every day.

I'm continuing to eat at my desk, FYI, and, on the offchance that someone above me decides to actually call me out for doing so, I relish utilizing the opportunity to discuss any number of actually impactful work matters that have gone largely unresolved in favor of an increased focus on treating professional adults like unruly twelve-year-olds who have to be corralled through the lunchroom.

Is that for real? Honestly? What kind of a workplace is that? That's insane, do they think you're toddlers?
I only take half an hour for lunch but can take longer if I want. You can't get out to get food and come back and eat it in that time. You can just about queue for one of the two microwaves in that time, I suppose.

Are you in the US, Old Lunch? The "lunch at desk " sounds like they are getting ready for the new FLSA regs for December 1 - in case you might answer a work email or three while eating lunch, bing - could be overtime!

Yeah, I'm in the US. And this is coming straight from HR, so that doesn't surprise me at all. I just need to relay to any and all concerned parties that the idea of doing one iota of work for this company while off the clock is laughable in the extreme.

Yes, we had a big meeting about all that a couple of weeks ago, in particular with exempt staff who will move to non-exempt, so they might have *possibly* answered a work email or two while at lunch and next thing you know, overtime. We're grant-funded, so that could be a problem...

there's a systems guy who on multiple occasions has made config mistakes which caused things not to work. things that are p crucial that we have working. and I might be forgiving cos we're all human, except the ensuing convo always looks like this when we're testing...

Us: Hey, we expected <result> but am getting <other result>. Can you look into this when you have a chance?
Him: That's weird, I have no idea why it wouldn't be working. (end of message, awkward silence)
Us: Can you take a look at it, or do you know a resource who might be able to help? This will cause a major problem if this isn't working properly tomorrow morning.
Him: (no reply to various forms of attempts to communicate, so we give up and root around, struggling to find somebody who might be able to help, and then when they show up, points out dude set it up wrong and has to fix it for him).

oh my god these people will not fucking shut up about the heating/cooling

my kingdom for a kitana

XD

Apparently a coworker has left a brassiere on the bookshelf in my office. I don't know what to do about this at all.

I think the best course of action is to pretend that I haven't seen it.

I feel like I need some more context here.

But I believe that general rules of etiquette dictate that you should leave a rumpled undershirt or perhaps some sock garters in her work area as a show of mutual regard.

I don't know which of my women coworkers it belongs to!

http://65.media.tumblr.com/avatar_1d6330389db6_128.png