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

Like how standing still on an escalator is slower than climbing the stairs? True in most cases but not all.

This lift politics stuff is interesting, I've never had cause to consider it tbh

Like if they're there for accessibility only & not accessibility + convenience that's simple enough - able-bodied people should take the stairs in all cases anyway.

what's the main objection, is it an environmental thing or is it the seconds you lose getting to your destination or something else

it is actually the time. dunno how your building is but p much everywhere i've ever worked the lifts have been a nightmare. cumulatively the amount of wasted time is a low-level irritant.

when you've waited ages for the lift in the first place it does grate a bit.

any excuse to post this btw: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-down

I work in a one-storey farm building & live in a ground-floor flat, v rarely go anywhere with enough floors not to just use the stairs

I used to work on 13th floor and would seethe at lift being taken up by people going 1-2 floors. Could make me late for work, not just by 'a few seconds'
Not to mention shops with tiny lifts but loads of people with buggies/wheelchairs needing to use them.

i dunno if it's a trick of the light or just more thoughtless cunts, but in my lift at work, if you're standing in either corner at the back, a lot of people seem to massively overestimate how much room there is between their back and your face. i've never known this to be a thing in other places i worked.

this is what interests me though - it seemed before that everyone was in agreement that lift use became justifiable at two floors+, are we changing it to 3+ now

I bet you could walk up 3 floors in the same amount of time it takes to wait for & ride these slow, slow lifts

My floor is secure, so I have to take the elevator.

not just by 'a few seconds'

what are we talking, 45 minutes?

at work we'd get people coming back *from the gym* taking the lift one floor.

worst lifts i've seen recently are in the new tate modern tower. i ended up walking up 6 floors. waited 3 or 4 minutes at each floor but there was never any space.

they're tired from the workout, geez 😏

xxp yeah, could be

In buildings I've worked in, stairs are for emergency use only, so they're locked from the outside at the ground floor (and locked from the inside at all other floors) so the only way to get to any floor is by elevator.

This is the norm, except in buildings with open staircases as opposed to stairwells.

But when people at my last workplace griped about someone taking the elevator only 1 or 2 floors, I told just them "Oh, well s/he has bone cancer, so...."

This is not my co-workers' fault, but a series of events have led to us needing to produce a brochure on safer alternatives to injecting drugs, which has required me to spend the morning looking through image libraries for photos of people shoving pills and powders up their arses. This has not been my funnest day at work.

listened to my least favorite coworker inquire why a thing happened (answer: she fucked up) and spent what felt like an hour not accepting any explanation that suggested that her fuckup was in any way the cause

i hate her

Shove some MDMA wrapped in a cigarette paper up her bum, then take a photo and send it to me. It can't be worse than anything I've seen today.

lol

For literally years, I have butted heads with the manager of another department about the way we need her department to do a particular thing that directly affects us. I've written up very detailed guidelines about the correct way this process should be handled, and her department complies for a little while before inevitably backsliding into halfassery. For about the eight hundredth time, she has stubbornly asserted that her department will continue to fulfill requests in the demonstrably incorrect and incomplete way they're sent by requestors who don't fully understand this process rather than simply following our guidelines, a decision which inevitably leads to multiple follow-up correction requests (and, it should be noted, unnecessary duplicative work for her department) and pointless delays and frustration on the part of everyone affected and almost certainly lost business. So because I'm so completely tired of this intransigent moron, I've decided to turn the rhetorical fire up to 'white hot' and burn her to a cinder in an email to everyone in the company that is even tangentially superior to her. Which will almost certainly result in nothing more tangible than a momentary self-righteous endorphin rush, but you takes what you can gets.

I'd target it more specifically and tone down the white hot to rationally indignant. But that's unsought advice, so take it however you will.

Rational indignation is my perpetual weapon of choice.

Handed my notice in a couple of weeks ago. Spent yesterday trying to make sense of the handover from someone else who left a week ago to the two new starts on his site as a favfour to that site's general manager (and because technically it's still my job for a month), by lunchtime nmfp had hit and I spend the afternoon just going "no, that's a fucking disaster, sucks to be you".

In the meantime the guy I car share with has been telling everyone I'm not going to work for another company but I'm going into Big Brother next year and they can't tell anyone because it's embargoed.

Would vote.

That is excellent

dude insists on addressing issues directly to me even after I told him I'd transitioned ownership to someone else and gave him the name three times, and even when I was on PTO with an out of office message hitting him every time he sent it.

I didn't respond to a single one of them (the other person on the email did them all as I'd previously said) so I think he finally got the message.

i like my coworkers generally but lately i find the basic competency on the slide. like i keep getting messages about a problem which is fixed by almost no action whatsoever, or like just a basic competency. this morning a colleague im'ed me to say "this page we are about to publish is meant to link to page xyz but i can't find page xyz, it doesn't seem to be live" - i went to the website we work on and typed the title of page xyz in and it appeared as the first result. i feel like this kind of thing slowly kills you.

I've got a severe outbreak of co-workers who have self-elected to "ensure a co-ordinated approach/make sure we're on the front foot/look for opportunities to join up across teams/help you to make your ideas land", most of whom add no value, and are actually a drain on the organisation.

Particularly annoying are the "stakeholder engagment" people who email (copy to all staff of course) to say "I've spoken to a,b, c and x,y, and z' - and they're all really keen to come to talk to you." I'm busy enough thanks - perhaps you could handle it.

It seems that for every person producing "original content" in government, there's are about 10 people who have a nebulous self-publising ineffectual hangers-on role.

Whilst I'm on a grumbling roll, here's my top 2 irrtiations of the moment:

"Can you attend this meeting in the next 5 minutes to tell everyone what you're working on"

[Subtext: we had no idea how to fiull this meeting so we thought we'd drag you in]

"Can you urgently forward me a description of your project"

[Subtext: I'll forward this, using my finely-honed cut and paste skills, as if I've weritten it.

We're now at the point where Outlook crashes daily. DAILY. Often for an extended period of time, sometimes as much as half the day. I cannot do any work without access to my email. I'm currently at, like, forty minutes and counting of getting paid to browse the internet today. But this is just treated by management like...whaddayagonnado! Imma go work for IT and enjoy that sweet, sweet job security with apparently zero expectations wrt performance.

we merged with a separate department that views governance as a dirty word, and today I took a closer look at some of their documents that are used daily on phone calls by reps. In just 30 minutes, found five errors, all involving incorrect documentation of federal regulations, and the time stamp on each page seemed to indicate none of these pages has been quality reviewed since 2008!

but go on and brag about how you don't need oversight for these things!

OUtlook isnt crashing due to a plug-in, is it? that used to do it for me, one particular plug-in that was taxing it (xpost)

No, this is company-wide. Yes, that's right: probably thousands of people affected daily (and, y'know, thousands of dollars pissed down the drain every time your entire workforce is prevented from doing their jobs) and they just shrug their shoulders.

Yeah we use ShoreTel voip at work and the plugin for that would ruin my outlook if I went into the calendar.

it's real fun when someone sends me an email saying they gave "major suggested revisions" to several of the docs I authored, to where I'm panicked wondering if they hacked them to pieces and I'm basically having to go back to formula...

and then I look further and none of the suggestions are major, and most of them are based on the reader's misunderstanding due to not reading the docs in fucking sequence like they were supposed to.

on the plus side, now I'm at least relieved that my week isn't ruined with re-work.

most of my team is out this week, the whole office will be closed for all of next week. Why do so many people want to sneak in major projects right now?

this is why I like working in IT. embargo period, fuckerrrrs.

my job told me last week they won't renew my contract end of january, they can't tell me any reason why, they've just stated a lot of bureaucratic reasons, my recruiter tried to find out and ended up concluding "it is a mystery".

it's not a big sad story or something, i p much have another more highly-paid job secured already and i'm a contractor, so these things can happen. but it was a good place to work and prob a centre of excellence of sorts for what i do. i prob stepped up and did some of the best work i've ever done, and was learning more than ever.

it's the circumstances involved that are rotten too. we've just finished one major project which took a year, a big editorial set of 160 pages or so. and despite working on a team with 3/4 others and having no more responsibility than anyone else, i probably ended up writing 130 of those pages and seeing them through to completion. during this time more than one contractor went on sabbatical for two months and came back to a new contract. i carried the project at times, i became responsible for lots of things i didn't have to be responsible for, they kept fencing off sections for other people to work on but because those people would never finish other sections they had started, on schedule, i'd end up working on those too, with the blessing of my bosses. in the end over time some of the bosses who knew me really well had moved to other teams, and it was like there was nobody to stick up for me.

i wasn't even told one to one by someone i know, my new boss summoned me to a room with herself and two people i never work with in it, and they just mumbled loads of bureaucratic excuses like "frameworks" or "procurement" which my recruiter subsequently found out to be untrue. ironically my role exists to eradicate the kind of language they use. coupled with the fact they tried to move me from one team to another last month, it's doubly sinister. they vaguely alluded to my contract when, for the honest good of the business, i said i had to stay in the team i was in to actually finish the year-long project, like to protect them from themselves, then the next day they said asking me to move had all been a mistake, they had got confused and it didn't matter, everything was okay, i think because it was clear how weird and unprofessional the whole thing was.

i keep trying to tell myself this is how contracting works, and i will move on and it'll be even, plus even if i wanted to stay there i could, i could go permanent for 40 per cent of the money, but the fact is they've renewed other contractors in my team.

we're launching the product this week with a big hoo-ha and i prob have as much a sense of attachment to it and commitment to it as anyone, if not more, yet i feel v little pride given my work has transpired to be invisible.

That always sucks - i was just made redundant along with 2 others out of a team of 20, when I'd been there 12 years and others were on less than 2. I tried fighting it but, given the circumstances (we were in administration and got bought out by another company very different culturally) and the redundancy settlement, not that hard.

The main feeling is that my manager didn't go to bat for me. But I'll never see him again so...

> "it is a mystery"

A lot of this too. I guess they don't have to explain...

that sounds hard after such a long time - at least i was only there 15 months or so. such a weird feeling once you know you're leaving a place, everything suddenly seems so irrelevant.

I am in my last week and am literally doing nothing, just seeing the time out. I have decided to use it wisely, and am re-reading Cerebus opnely at my desk.

I spent yesterday writing an audio skit about a fictional Irish priest, episode 1 of 8.

sorry to hear that lg. weirdness sounds the worst part of it

as i say, i'm in no position for a poor mouth story, i'm lucky enough that there are lots of things on the table elsewhere, it prob means i can take a few weeks and go on holiday between roles, but it's just the general sense that all the work i put in meant nothing - leaves a sour taste. sometimes i wonder if the fact i was progressing and learning a lot is the reason i was let go. like a wing clip.

That's really shitty LG. Wonder if they had to prove costcutting after you'd done all the work?

Contracting/temping is so sucky. My bf has been working temp at a company for about a year (mostly but not always full time). They didnt invite him to the Xmas party - but they made him design the fucking invites for the Xmas party.

They didnt include him in the end of year newsletter either, everyone else in his team was featured in a column but not him.

Oh that newsletter was designed by him as well btw.

that kind of thing is shit. our place makes a big song and dance about how contractors must be treated exactly the same as permanent staff etc, but it can't be that way. ultimately they want to nurture or promote the permanent people and not the contractors. if they had actually just given me an honest reason along these lines that would be fine.

i feel like i might have worked myself out of a job, like one thing i know is that i work unusually quickly, which probably means despite the fact i try to be communicative and inclusive etc, i usually end up feeling like there are too many people on the team or not enough work. that's a good thing overall but i dunno, maybe working ahead of the pace of an organisation isn't a good thing. i'm not saying this to big myself up, it's just a fact of my time there, it was like a running joke in the team. i guess having three people who work at the same pace and are happy to have long periods of boredom might function better and might mean all three are learning.