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

so i had a meeting yesterday morning with my team to pitch for work, essentially to justify our existence as a team of contractors on the job we're on. it was sort of a fait accompli even tho there were other groups tendering for the work, but nonetheless it was fairly serious, we all had notes etc, dressed semi-formally, treated it with some level of gravitas.

we're all sitting in the room, and i'm looking at my notes with about five minutes to go until the pitch starts, and "the colleague i mentioned upthread" (this is now his name itt) turns to me and says

"have you ever thought about investigating your family tree?"

"em, i dunno, perhaps one day."

"i've been doing it for some time, it's very interesting - i have a mixed heritage, south african, croatian, IRISH..." blah blah blah until the meeting starts, as every other member of the team just looks at him like the banal lunatic that he is.

bwahahaha

I feel like with those people they view your disinterest as an accelerant

oh, most definitely

I mostly let it slide these days when meetings with coworkers that are all friendly start with a few minutes of bullshitting about the upcoming weekend or whatever

but the impulse to _want_ to be able to do that with people who have no interest, at the wrong time, combined with the "gotta keep talking through this awkward silence, maybe if I say one more thing they'll be able to relate to this" motive is mortifying

meetings at my old job were mostly full of co-workers who could barely stay awake

classic

it wasn't just the disinterest, it was also just so comically mistimed and weird, that he'd be thinking about this as basically the entire room was gearing itself up. but yeah, also a seriously boring interlude.

but the impulse to _want_ to be able to do that with people who have no interest, at the wrong time, combined with the "gotta keep talking through this awkward silence, maybe if I say one more thing they'll be able to relate to this" motive is mortifying

otm. one of my dear friends has this habit of talking to me at length about several operas. Now, the guy has a brilliant knowledge of opera and classical works and I find it fascinating, but he'll go on about it long past expiry and assumes received knowledge that I don't have, so I feel like I can't add anything to the convo. I try to steer the convo back to shared interests and usually that works.

I also hate the people at work who seem to think what you did last weekend is a show-and-tell contest for determining who leads the most awesome life.

playing bottle-flip on a table shared with 9 other people trying to work, ffs.

next week, fidget spinners, i'm guessing.

Fidget spinners are pretty quiet.

Now, the staff of a half dozen writers behind me who have to begin every morning discussing the latest CRAZY thing the president has said or done, that's not very quiet at all.

But you know, CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS GUY?

My stepkid has a fidget spinner with LIGHTS in it. That can get a bit annoying if he's in one's field of view.

i find that to be true about children in general.

Ha :)

This is how you bottle flip at work

Hard at work. #TheMick #Fox #Season2 pic.twitter.com/VJi0ZxF17G

— kaitlin olson (@KaitlinOlson) June 7, 2017

yeah girl!

Dear people who send lots of emails saying something is broken and must be fixed urgently URGENT NOW URGENT and then when you reply saying that you think it's fixed and please could they let you know whether it looks OK there are tumbleweeds and no reply hours later,

So annoying!

Love,

fixing monkey

dude keeps emailing me because the people I gave him to contact after I left a project aren't replying to his emails. I crankily asked him if he was aware of instant messaging and the ability to contact people directly.

customer: what's wrong with [genre category] on your website
me: what do you mean
customer: i tried to find [x title] and [y title] and they werent there

ok so we don't carry those two items because reasons... but the rest of the category is perfectly searchable jfc don't give me a heartattack

our company has a no paid overtime policy for management, so if I stay behind to get stuff done I can only claim it back as time owed. In the past two weeks I've racked up over a full day's worth because we have a major visit from the company CEO this week. So the only reason for me to do this is to give myself an easy life when the bigwigs turn up.

One of our summer temps came to me over the weekend and said that she overheard the other supervisor complaining to the team that I haven't done enough and that I must be struggling in the job (I've been here for three months, it wasn't a job I wanted but I was parachuted in because nobody else would take it). I've been quite honest about not being happy (ie dealing with the whistler upthread, which is major but not exceptional in this environment) but I've yet to see her do anything like stay behind or come in early. I'm so angry for so many obvious reasons and I really don't know how to proceed, because if I bring it up I'm basically revealing that this temp is a grass and I know that it will make her life difficult for the remainder of summer.

is this other supervisor someone you report to, or are they at the same level as you? trying to figure out if it's worth bringing up .......

it's the same level. We do the same job in two different departments and get paid the same and both answer to the same manager. She's been there fifteen years too so it's not like she doesn't have friends and influence in the situation, ie if she's telling everyone who works in both departments I'm useless and lazy then they'll be much more likely to buy into that, regardless of whatever I try to do to visibly show otherwise. It isn't like she's not good at her job in other ways but this is so unprofessional. I also think bringing it up is a waste of time: the damage is done because everyone who she's mouthed off in front of will have heard it and this stuff always ends up repeated as gossip.

I mean it's a moot point because I'm actively and desperately looking for something else, anything else at all. Hopefully not in retail though!

I work at a large-ish company (about 200 people) that is being restructured with little-to-no consultation.

Our CEO met with staff this morning. "We're not hiring any new people, but we're not getting rid of anyone either. However, if your job description is changed, your job *may* become available."

is it acceptable to throw things at the bloke sat opposite who keeps humming?

yes

the colleague i mentioned here a few times got fired this week. p weird actually. he had been wildly taking the piss with coming in late, arriving late for meetings, leaving early etc and he's a contractor, they just gave him the boot. feel a bit guilty in the sense that prob all of our team had complained about this repeatedly amongst ourselves, don't think anyone advocated his dismissal. on the other hand it is public money and i think he was prob invoicing for days when he worked a half day or less, and he put himself in this position. a lot of the time i've bemoaned the fact that government doesn't actually dismiss contractors regardless of any behaviour whatsoever, still weird now i'm in a team where it's happened.

what's bizarre is, after it coming up already, i think he was warned etc, and weeks of it recurring and getting worse, like late for every meeting, late in the morning then saying "btw i'll be leaving at 3pm today' - i was sat near my boss last week and the same co-worker, who was prob close to his last chance already, asked if he could work from home three days a week in august. the level of obliviousness is beyond me, that may be the request that got him canned.

I'm always of coming across like that guy - I get migraines and work from home a lot. Easy to get paranoid that everyone thinks you're slacking off.

I am working from home and posting on a messgae board but ykwim

always *afraid* of

thing is it's really, really tolerant. like wfh is generally fine a day or two a week, appointments etc mostly fine, but this was essentially every day. we basically are asked to just work 0930 to 1700, give or take. it's a very calm environment.

but even for say a normal meeting he'd be gone to get a coffee and back 10 mins late. once or twice nobody would care but it almost became comical it was so often. like almost every time. this coupled with always complaining about not having enough time and prob a few bad interpersonal issues, like defensive attitude or impersonating people's accent, again all more in the realm of foolish lack of self-awareness or pomposity rather than malice.

it's a strange issue as it feels harsh that someone so oblivious gets punished. he's not a malicious person, maybe a bit entitled and lacking in self-awareness, i personally find it hard to know how to feel about that kind of person. maybe it's just as bad as someone deliberately slacking off. i dunno. i think the fact he's prob on about 500 pounds a day makes people, esp his civil servant bosses, a bit more harsh, and justifiably so really.

Sounds justified to me. Maybe this will help him gain some self-awareness.

that's what i think ultimately. a bit of a kick up the ass. it's easy enough to get complacent as a contractor.

combed through this thread to see if anybody has ever successfully solved their office perfume problem. Nobody ever has. Been trying to get my office to make some kind of formal perfume policy for years but it's too awkward for anybody to step up and address.

Somebody brought it the biggest offending co-worker years ago and she didn't understand the criticism, because she was wearing "natural oils," not perfume.

Do you have a HR, Evan? Definitely the kind of thing that probably needs to be raised with some degree of anonymity but a totally reasonable concern.

We have an HR-ish person and I used to try to get them to bring it up. Sometimes they waffled because it was awkward (we're a small office), and sometimes I think they did talk to her but nothing really changed, at least not for more than a week or two. I've since moved so I'm out of the spray zone, but the few times a week I have to work near this person are always a challenge.

I find almost any fragrance objectionable, especially in abundance, but I don't know how she can be oblivious to how objectionable her particular smell is. It's strangely.. powdery? Kind of like B.O. and nursing home and baking soda? It's hard to explain. A co-worker theorized it was rosewater once but I can't imagine something called rosewater smelling that awful

I've a colleague that has a fragrance sensitivity. It just developed about four years ago, he gets terrible coughing fits, has difficulty breathing and gets teary eyes when confronted with perfume (not all perfumes, most most of them). That sealed the deal in our company: no more perfumes. I'm all for it.

You could say that apart from not liking the scent it does seem to affect you in your work, also. That should be ground for the others to leave the sprays at home imo.

Ha I recall this nightmare, I posted about it was upthread:

On the allergy tip once my office decided to have the stupidest theme day ever: "wear tons of perfume/cologne", with prizes for guessing the smells, most obnoxious scent etc. I am not even joking. I think I privately emailed my boss and said "are you kidding? I'll end up with a migraine, i am kind of allergic to strong perfumes" and they called it off and kind of made it clear I was the spoilsport which was embarrassing :(

― I checked Snoops , and it is for real (Trayce), Thursday, February 26, 2015

Trayce, you should have suggested, as an alternative to Obnoxious Aroma Day, a day where every employee was allowed to snap wet towels at every other employee. Your spoilsport label would have instantly evaporated in all the crazy fun!

How about a weekly “Your day in the barrel” where someone is sealed into a barrel for the work day

ding ding ding

I'm working for a small business now after getting burnt out from the corporate world. It's like working for a capricious emperor. Makes me miss being a faceless corporate drone.

I guess I'm finally living the dream of George Jetson, without that crazy space shit or family.

Jetson! You're fired!Your're rehired! Spacely was a fucking dick, man.

Had a farewell lunch for a coworker today; first 10 minutes of talk was GAME OF THRONES

NERDS IN THEIR FORTIES

back off man, i don't watch that

Small business owners are the worst.

nerds in their forties / geeking about dragons during a lunch / what a dull bunch

all the nerdy people / where do the all come from?

In my current job I'm performing really well, basically doubling the success of the current campaign I was given to work on. Now my co-workers hate my guts.

Reminds me of my legal internships where I'd win "hopeless" cases and my supervisors would shit all over me.

I'm pretty much ready to pack it all in.

kinda makes you wonder what you're supposed to do eh

xp. real fantasist hours

meanwhile, last year I was given an assignment to rework our training assessments. they prescribed me what they wanted the end result to be, and said I basically just needed to connect the dots. spent about a month putting the SOPs together, got it blessed by all the managers and sales executives. then it came time to pilot it, and nobody would sign up to pilot it, so I said fine, I'll pilot it on my own project.

I piloted it successfully twice and offered to share the results. nope, leadership changed their mind, now they wanted to go a different direction and reworked the process again, meaning I wasted about an entire month. more aggravating, one of our managers shared some skepticism about the efficacy of the new process, even though SHE WAS ONE OF THE PEOPLE WHO ASKED TO ME TO IMPLEMENT IT TO BEGIN WITH. my boss got quite the earful.

I've given up on leaving the company for time being as out of all my applying, all the people that contacted me were for jobs that would require me taking a 30k pay cut, so....just keep refreshing the internal job board to see if something better comes along.

xxp I can send you the results if you want. You can call the courts and I'm on the record. Fantasist, my ass.

That's what I'm talking about. My existence makes me a piece of shit. Can't even talk about it anywhere.

Whatever. I'm tired of being alive, so IDGAF anymore.

oooooooooook - no need to go that route, man.