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

it me

busted

for reference: The Reinforcin' O' The Stereotypes

He's from Dublin and likes writing wacky reviews on Amazon, which he shares with us on Slack

jesus god this guy sounds like a monster

Yeah no arguments carry on

colleague just came around the desk to show me a "prototype" he's made for putting a wardrobe in his house. like some string that showed where the wardrobe would be. as he came around i sort of thought "please no it's 4 o'clock i have a hangover, please be going elsewhere" but i couldn't have prepared myself for a story that was so hard to respond to with the straight bat of a smile.

my eyes were having none of it - entirely dead as i gazed up trying to nod enthusiastically.

like some string that showed where the wardrobe would be

Retaliate by giving him a one hour lecture on Visio.

wow a prototype for a wardrobe made of string. jesus.

it was like, just some string that showed where the wardrobe would be. he said "until you do this you just have no idea of what it'll be like to have a wardrobe there" - it seemed to me given there's nothing inside the borders of the string you still have no idea but i didn't want to ruin the lifehack.

"until you do this you just have no idea of what it'll be like to have a wardrobe there"

bwaahaha

no part of that story seems like relatable human behaviour

srsly wtf is going on with that guy

send him the link to google sketchup and tell him real men 3d model the interiors of their homes

one weird trick to get an idea of what it'll be like to have a wardrobe there

interior designers hate him!

i feel like i meet people like this all the time in my working life, especially since i've got more into digital service design. like i guess it's techno utopianism in a way, with a bit of lifehacking thrown in. the guy is an interaction designer - i guess often they try to bring the logic of their work into their home lives or something.

today our client comes raging about an escalation and of course I got asked matter of factly by an exec "Neanderthal, did you train the reps on these types of calls?".

Would that be the same "types of calls" that our client asked us to handle less than a fucking hour prior to the grand opening (one full week AFTER training) that you inexplicably agreed to (despite it being well outside the sphere of the contract) and despite TWO OF US LOUDLY PROTESTING TO YOU THAT SOMETHING LIKE THIS WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU AGREED TO IT?

humorously enough though I got an award for my work on the project just a day earlier, lol

I think the best part of every story on this thread is when bosses and coworkers use your ilx handles to address everyone

excuse me, Neanderthal is my gov't name

same piece of string guy i mentioned upthread keeps like tapping me on the shoulder etc. this morning i was waiting for the lift and i got this jab on the arm, i didn't even respond i just looked at him and he was like "good morning!"

what a fucking weirdo. it's not even like football jock jabbing, just some bizarre attempt at camaraderie.

anyone who touches me in the office is getting fucking lamped tbh

he did it again like five mins later, tapped me on the shoulder vigorously. anyone knows you do the whole handwave thing if someone has headphones in.

bizarro otm

he's about to go now i think, i took my headphones off because i honestly think if i don't i'll get a third tap o' the day.

has also impersonated my accent two/three times in the two or so weeks i've worked with him.

it is v strange, all these things together and you might think he's some sort of obnoxious alpha male, the reverse is true, i think he is doing these strange things as some effort of shared masculinity or something. he's not a particularly bad guy, but extremely annoying.

oh god the accent thing.

he said "i'll be flying *ROYANAIR*" in one of those horrendous attempts at irish accents that english people do.

i was tweeting about this but it is bizarre to me that somebody might somehow think "he's irish, he's going to love this one! it's ME doing HIS accent!!"

my boss and another coworker incessantly do impressions of a handful of coworkers & i hate it so much

i was tweeting about this but it is bizarre to me that somebody might somehow think "he's irish, he's going to love this one! it's ME doing HIS accent!!"

― Bein' Sean Bean (LocalGarda), Friday, March 24, 2017 10:06 AM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this happens to me a bit but not very often. i think this has to do with the fact that I'm scottish rather than irish - people seem to find doing the irish accent much more hilarious, for whatever reason (WASP supremacists obv) - and live in canada rather than england.

altho because I'm from the west of scotland and my accent doesn't really correspond to groundskeeper willie or whatever people are constantly asking me where in ireland I'm from

OMG imitating peoples accents is just so offensive. I used to work next to a call centre where I'd hear one guy on the phones constantly veer into different vague, terrible accents, then realised it was because he couldnt help it: he'd just echo whoever he was speaking to and unconciously talk like them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_accommodation_theory

Linguistic accommodation is real - I had to teach myself to stop doing it

I'm an Australian too (hi VG) but I find people trying to do an Aussie accent genuinely hilarious. Particularly people from Kiwi or Japanese backgrounds, I've noticed. North Americans aren't close enough to be funny (although I know a Canadian who nails it).

ha yeah whenever I hear anyone do an aus accent *well* I am always really blindsided. Cant think of any examples.

Matt Gourley from Superego does a dece aussie accent. he was in the running behind Jemaine Clement to do the Outback Steakhouse commercials

tbh you know you are american but pay too much attention when you're like "hmm that is a new zealander trying to pull off australian"

I can do canadian pronunciations of things for about two weeks after being in canada due to osmosis, but I lose it rapidly

So, what - does Clement make his accent sound more evil or something?

I was kinda the same way back in my radio days - I'd try to get all my voiceover production done first before going into the studio and taking calls from Arkansas Razorback fans for three hours.

nope, you don't get to ask why I'm behind on another assignment when you forced me to shoulder a 2nd one when I already barely had time to do the 1st (despite my protests) and then demanded I be on it two weeks longer than initially promised.

also can we retire "the problem is YOU'RE TOO GOOD" as a reason for someone being given so much extra work, it's cloying and doesn't make it less frustrating.

"ok, I'll start doing a halfassed job then?"

haha that was my comment to some of my friends - "is this my incentive to start screwing shit up"?

Dispiriting when half-assedness is the general norm in a workplace, and simply doing your job is somehow seen as going above and beyond.

I'd say it's bloody great tbh

if we're gonna bring the system down from within then apathy is a key tactic

enh i can't be bothered to bring the system down tbh

I have new workplace, which brings with it a lot of new smart people with no common sense. Don't scrum in the gangways, don't leave just a tiny gap so that, say, someone coming back from the kitchen carrying a cup of water is tempted to squeeze through it but only succeeds in knocking over the nearby coatstand which is laden with about 300 coats.

(I caught it before it got much beyond 10 degrees from vertical but not without losing some of the water all over them and me)

i've definitely felt in some jobs that doing less would be better and would make it easier for a lot of people around me - but since it's contract work for the state i can't really acquiesce. it's never been an issue though as far as getting extra work goes. in my last job my constant asking/begging/pleading for more work became a subject of gentle mockery after a while. deems prob otm overall though.