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

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.

In open space offices, employees create better relationships and work in a team.

JAN: Oh, Mark, I see what you meant about the city manager's office. I called over there, tried to leave a message with Bruce, but got disconnected as soon as they tried to transfer me. You called it, they got me good. Mark?

KEN: He left to get coffee five minutes ago.

We're about to move into a new building next week. People were discussing the new meeting rooms over our skype channel and where the name scheme/list was for the calendar. The rooms are all named after elements for some reason - argon, hydrogen, oxygen etc

The idiot sitting next to me blithely types into the (office-wide) chat "haha thats funny! Like gas chambers!"

O_o

Haha yeah, I immediately winced - theres a few jewish people in our office for starters - then someone else gently pointed out he might want to delete the comment and "pretend you never said it" and he did. lol.

Sounds like something I would've said.

Why I don't chat with the office.

so does anybody else have someone w/ a really similar name in their office that they've been getting emails for due to people not paying attention, for like the last TEN YEARS

my friend has that problem, in that he's Firstname O'Brien and there's a Firstname O'Bryan in the company somewhere

happened again for the first time in like 3 years, had a chuckle. we have the same first name, and last name differs by just 3 letters. He went as far to officially change his first name in the system to his nickname ten years ago which helped, but despite that and despite dude working in a diff state, still happens now and then.

One of the first times it happened, this dude sent an urgent request by email to the right person (other guy), and when he didn't hear back on the latest exchange, mistakenly instant messaged me. I had no clue about my doppleganger at the time and had no clue what he was talking about so he was talking to me like I had a stroke ("we just talked about this"), even called me to discuss. Finally I asked him to send me whatever email he was talking about and he forwarded it and tersely said "Here, ring any bells?!", and then I politely told him to compare the name he was msging to the one on the email.

just attended a very bizarre meeting.

it was a kickoff meeting and I noticed a few usual invitees weren't invited. We all arrived at the start time to dead silence, then the meeting owner pipes in to say "sorry, I'm here guys!" after my lead pings her, then silence again. My lead asks her a question to prod her along, after which she goes silent, and finally says "I'm sorry, isn't this the kickoff meeting", to where the owner says "Oh. Right. This is a meeting *I* scheduled. Geez, I thought it was one you all had scheduled that I was invited to."

It didn't get much better from there. Instead of rescheduling, she tried to pull it off. Her voice became more and more faint and then we could hear what was pretty obviously other people's voices, as if she was in a public place like a store, so everyone tells her they can't hear her and she dials back in. She then says she's going to screenshare something with us, and spends the next 15 minutes rambling and at the end forgets she promised to screenshare and just says she's going to email it to us while apologizing ten times for how awkward the meeting is.

She sounded disoriented like she'd just woken up or something, or taken like a Benadryl and was drowsy, so I wouldn't call her 'stupid', but was like - why didn't you just reschedule it, it'd have been way less awkward!

my friend has that problem, in that he's Firstname O'Brien and there's a Firstname O'Bryan in the company somewhere

― mh, Friday, 25 August 2017 14:07 (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well my heart bleeds for ye over there surely

lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Aw5ZkPbCIAEabX8.png

There are two dudes who sit near me who, I'll qualify, are very nice guys but whose respective banality created some sort of banal singularity once they started sitting next to one another. Long, involved, animated conversations about the most incredibly boring things you could possibly imagine. They're currently marveling over plot points of the Santa Clause films.

We've got a fella in here who used to live in the big city, so he's always educating us about how the big city works.

Such as DID YOU KNOW there's a street in New York called "Houston" that's actually pronounced "HOW-stuhn"?

Do they

Do they post on the trump threads do they

pplains, if he ever gets into politics you should drop the "Did you know that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and.." anecdote and then just kind of stare at him

Long, involved, animated conversations about the most incredibly boring things you could possibly imagine

too easy

>They're currently marveling over plot points of the Santa Clause films.

this sounds amazing.

pplains, if he ever gets into politics you should drop the "Did you know that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and.." anecdote and then just kind of stare at him

try this one: Henry Adams wrote a novel called 'Democracy' in 1880 featuring a womanising politician called Clinton and a dull also-ran called Gore.

life would be sweet if i could just marvel away at Santa Clause

I may have mentioned this on some other thread but I cannot bear the odor of my immediate deskmate. I dont know if its a cultural thing or a male thing or what, but he reeks so intensely of a combo of cat piss, smokers clothing, cheap shitty south asian patchouli scent and BO that I can smell it *from 15 feet away when he isnt even at his desk*.

I mean I'm honestly at the point of quietly going to my team leader and ... saying something. But what?

people who "work long hours" that really just work slowly and chat too much... they really need to fuck the fuck off.

xpost just leave a box of Irish Spring on his desk

the joe rogan guy pissed me off again today. he is really bad at hiding his passive aggressiveness. You know that laugh these people do? with like no joy whatsoever? i just wish people would either a) COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY or b) fuck the fuck off

oh god I've always hated the awkward pass-agg laugh, my last client did that all the time and I wanted to force choke them.

I sometimes feel bad at laughing at a coworker's laugh because his "amused but not cracking up" laugh sounds like the Count from Sesame Street

Sometimes I unintentionally laugh like Dr Hibbert. I have no idea why.

been signed off for the past six weeks due to stress caused by a toxic working environment and a level of expectation that's completely unrealistic (I'm the third person in the role in two years, I didn't apply for the position but was coerced into the transfer). I'm meeting my manager this afternoon to discuss a possible return to work and I'm dreading it. It's hard to say No to your direct boss, but I know nothing has changed while I've been off and I don't see how I can go back to the same situation and not make myself ill.

7 people pair-programming in the space of 4 desks (next to mine). lots of space elsewhere in the office. show some common sense. (i've taken my laptop to completely empty desk, but they haven't spread out to use the space i vacated yet)

i mentioned being short of things to do in the daily standup. was told there were plenty of unassigned tickets. team-lead then launches back into whatever he was doing yesterday before assigning me anything so i'm sat here posting to ilx instead.

Sorry Boxedjoy, that sounds awful. Our office is having a toxic environment problem too at the moment, caused by (a) mass team restructuring and (b) arseholes. I used to be on our Staff Association, and they're doing a shitty job dealing with it. I'm trying to push them to organise a town hall session where staff can have a cathartic moan and hopefully figure out what our "you can't fuck with us past *this* point" line in the sand is.

Filling in for someone today on their project and helping report out s/ls. Someone wanted to know the combined service level for two skills and before i could quickly calc i get pulled aside and told not to because you can't simply just average the two numbers, it's a "complex equation".

No...it's not. You literally multiply the # of calls answered by the service level % for each skill, which gives you the # of timely calls answered for each skill. You add up the timely calls answered, the overall answered, and divide the firsr by the second, there's your combined s/l. 7th grade algebra.

I shared it anyway

Boxedjoy that sounds terrible. Sympathies and luck.

boxedjoy, recently went through something very similar. Sending you best wishes, hit me up via e-mail if you want to talk

thanks guys. I went to meet my manager yesterday with one goal, namely "tell him you're not ready to go back to work unless things have changed: can he take a few days to think about a possible solution?" But there is no possible solution. My manager is a really nice guy who 100% has my back and he told me believes that I'm capable of doing the job but (xpost to rolling depression thread) I'm not prepared to feel so tired, so defeated, so combatant, all the time. The reimbursement is lacking - my store department is bigger than 60% of store totals in the company and yet I don't approach the wage an actual store manager would get - but even if it was a rewarding salary I just don't want to do it, not in this environment. It has made me ill and without any change it will make me more ill.

the whole thing is an absolute disaster. There are no full-time positions in the region so the only way I can go back to work is to return part-time in a basic role ie a paycut of over 50%. My sick pay will expire so this is the reality of it.

And the reason I'm in this mess? Three months ago, I found out the role I was about to progress into was being made redundant (supervisor to assistant manager, but now we don't have assistant managers). My then-manager had a realistic conversation with me about my prospects. "You can't have my job cos I'm going nowhere but if you stay in this job you will be bored and unfulfilled and you are better than this role." So when a new job came up in a flagship branch I applied. I scored best of 10 candidates in the assessments but was told I wasn't to be offered the job because of a personality test (a tickbox exercise from Buzzfeed!) indicated my style was too similar to the people I would be working with and they wanted more diversity. Which is great if you work for the UN and not in a retail job to keep you in gig tickets and wine. So instead I was offered the job I've had to take sick leave from. I didn't want it because I knew the atmosphere would be toxic and the work would be demanding without worthwhile reward, but I let myself be persuaded into it because being overpromoted is a great ego boost. So I am literally in the position where I went to a job interview, was the best candidate, and yet this is the result. I don't know whether to be angry that I've allowed this to happen to me or simply relieved I don't have to go back into the culture of sniping and bitchery.

I mean, in the world of work you have to be tough and strong and resilient and not take criticisms personally and that's all stuff I accept I need to work on, not just for my career but for the sake of my own mentality in life. But there is a difference between "as your boss I have to tell you that this is not right" and the constant backchat of 30-40 people who have nothing good to say about you or anyone or anything.

sorry boxedjoy. That sounds crazy and miserable and I hope you find something better because you clearly deserve to.

also Buzzfeed tickbox personality tests for actual hiring decisions, overriding actual assessments and experience, wtf

(disclaimer: the thought of personality tests for hiring in any circumstances at all makes me itchy. everyone says psychologist Martin Seligman's self-help books are v good and as a kinda learned-helpless-depresso I ought to read them and take in his joyous self-improving message or whatnot, but when I got to the part where he rubberstamped some tickbox personality test for BigCorp to reject people who didn't think they were fantastic in every way and when they weren't it must be someone else's fault, I threw the book across the room and never finished it)

I scored best of 10 candidates in the assessments but was told I wasn't to be offered the job because of a personality test (a tickbox exercise from Buzzfeed!) indicated my style was too similar to the people I would be working with and they wanted more diversity. Which is great if you work for the UN and not in a retail job to keep you in gig tickets and wine.

this is appalling!

we did some personality-style testing in our team once and we're all pretty much the same AND WE LIKE IT THAT WAY although granted it's probably not for the best...

So the woman who was pissed off at me the other week congratulated me on my performance in today's meeting. So that's good. I was given her category and improved its performance by over 200%. The other campaign I was working on, I was able to create materials for it that performed around 185% better than the past materials they were using.

Now I've run afoul of the marketing manager. I was given a new project, and ended up developing a new vision for the product while doing research. I think it'll work. Today he tried to school me, but his schooling used scenarios that didn't match the fact pattern of our situation, so I know it's some dumbshit ego thing on his part... things got real fucking weird for the rest of the day after I submitted my proposal.

I wasn't trying that, I was just looking for something that worked, and invested a lot of time and effort into developing something that I thought would. And based on actual metrics, I've already got a pattern of doing just that at this place.

Today was a pretty miserable day. I've been dealing with crap like this since I was a kid. I have no idea what job or situation would be a good fit for me at this point.

It sounds like you work in advertising or similar - that work is full of toxic bloated egos.