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

I wouldn't actually get somebody one, but one of my Secret Santas listed her 3 favorite books as gift ideas and Bible was #1

I got her one of her other items, a candle.

it was something like Bible, Sidney Sheldon novel, Archie comic or something

whoa people actually gift bibles in a secret santa?

LOL someone gave someone else a singing mini Koran in one of my old jobs.
Then again that same company thought giving a red lacy bra to a lady whod had breast cancer was funny somehow

I feel like I have told this story before.

the FUCK?

at one of my previous jobs, a colleague gave one of the bosses (male) a ball gag in the secret santa. tbf to the boss, he put it on in the restaurant

same company thought giving a red lacy bra to a lady whod had breast cancer was funny somehow

!!!!!!!!

Those are exclamation marks in place of my ability to conceive of what the fuck they were thinking.

The Office apparently wasn't nearly awful enough

There is a special place in hell for people who stand in the elevator jabbing the close door button while other people are still trying to get in

But is there a special elevator to get there

what if the people trying to get in are bad

i had to move from an amazing desk in an open area with a skyline view to a small dark room. the desks are arranged in such a way that when i'm sitting at my desk, there's about a 6 inch space between the back of my chair and the desk behind me. this fucking guy who needs way more clearance than that insists on squeezing through that small area behind me, despite there being another unobstructed path to the door. dude's stomach bumps my chair every time and for whatever reason he's getting up about 200 times a day.

sometimes i'll catch a glimpse of him at the fork in the road and see a flash of decision making going on in his head, and he ALWAYS chooses the path behind my desk

bossman in an officewide email: "today we celebrate the black women who led the charge to the polls for doug jones's victory last night in alabama"
guy i share my office with, to no one in particular: "tf we doin celebratin another corporate ass white man ascending the ladder of the blue wing of the corporatist party"
me: i'm gonna get lunch. you want anything?

i had to move from a desk below a skylight to a small dark room, which i'm actually okay with, but this motherfucker now sitting a row behind me will not shut up

haha same with my dude too. and on top of that, he has a weird ass voice

The close door button doesn't actually do anything unless you have a key. Hence why nothing happens the majority of times it's pressed

It works in our building

Yeah this "close buttons are fake in lifts" thing is odd, cos Ive definitely been in buildings where it has worked (as in there is a marked time diff in using or not using it)

https://www.thecut.com/2016/10/the-soothing-futility-of-the-elevator-door-close-button.html

(however, the main reason the ones here don't do anything is due to the ADA laws, so it's possible other countries don't work the same way)

How does the ADA law relate to it?

The law requires that the elevator door must remain fully open for a specified amount of time, to allow those with disabilities extra time to get on. once that was passed in the 1990s, the buttons basically became placebos in US elevators.

ah ok makes sense

my biggest pet peeve when I go into the office - when the elevator has room for more people but everybody has needlessly shoved forward, making the elevator look full to capacity. most people just say "I'll get the next one", except this happens in the majority of the elevators around 5 pm, so you might wait a while. when it happens to me I just get on and make the people spread out like they're supposed to.

Secret Santa today at 4:30 motherfuckers :D

Ask me about our work lotto syndicate when I'm sober

A new coworker has proposed a game for our department office party later this week. We each write down one fact about ourselves on a yellow index card. The cards are then pulled from a hat and read aloud and the rest of us try to guess who it is.

department office holiday party

"I once killed a man just to watch him die"

"I own 3 kimonos"

"I secretly touched all the door knobs in the office with my genitals."

“i am made of bees”

My shit client told an already overwhelmed colleague "I have no idea why you highlighted those rows in purple" and her asshole Waldorf stand-in muttered derisively "maybe she's color-blind".

The person who prepared the Excel...a good friend...actually is colorblind. Our leaders...said nothing.

I have never wanted to hit so many people.

ugh

I swear 90% of workplace assholery and bad undercurrents come from people making assumptions instead of politely asking questions. I idealistically think more workplace diversity will help a little because people will encounter more situations where choices they don’t understand will require people to ask and *scales fall from eyes* but some people just won’t get it

I remember switching to a new software development group and being pleasantly surprised that every application had a settings in the options for an alternate color palette, because one of the senior members of the group is color blind! And the feedback from users was great.

Yea. The guy running our project takes it deeper by asking a presumably innocent question, then chasing it with a snarky remark dripping with judgment.

"Can you research why the rep didn't reference the enrollment materials? We had thought you would share these with the team and that you were on top of this."

So like what is my interest in replying in earnest when you've already presumed my incompetence.

All this for a project we are probably in the red on.

so my project has several key processes that won't be ready on our project's live date in our system (and won't be for 2.5 weeks). I have been tasked with training people on two of them this week, despite me not having confidence in how they work given that they're not available to test in QA.

I've never handled one of them before, the other is completely custom, I've had a ton of technical questions spanning several weeks that I've had to escalate just to get half answers or no answers, and then pretty much everybody who answers those questions decided to take the last few weeks off on PTO. For one of them I was told only one person knew the answers and he's been gone since 12/18.

I've kind of given up and just phoned in a C- effort today because i can't even

we take death reports for life insurance claim processing. we inherited about 12 cases where the person died prior to we took over as recordkeeper, so our admin team has to apply special handling to.

We're on day 9 now since we took over, and they haven't touched a single one of the 12 cases. so people keep calling back. and the main guy they're assigned to blurted out that he had no idea what he was doing yesterday.

There is a guy who works on another team at my job... we'll call him Explainer Man, for reasons which will become obvious.

Explainer Man is annoying as hell. He believes he knows the answer to everything and if he overhears or is somehow exposed to any issue, regardless of whether he is directly involved or not, Explainer Man will immediately intrude and outline his (usually crazy and wrong) theory about what is happening or the best approach to solving the problem. He has interrupted me on at least one occasion while a team member I supervise was asking me a question. The problem is that what Explainer Man is saying usually sounds convincing to someone who isn't a subject matter expert, because he is very good at bullshitting The craziness of some of his explanations even make them seem more plausible in this context.

In some ways my dealings with Explainer Man have been personally enlightening, because I feel like he is a dark mirror of what I could personally become when supervising people on my team. So I am basically trying not to be Explainer Man. The problem is, if you lay back and try not to be Explainer Man, that kind of allows more room for Explainer Man to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I'm pretty sure some of the less savvy people in our department think he is a genius.

Explainer Man is white, around 40, and something is also off about the way he interacts with younger women on his team. I can't put my finger on it, but he seems to particularly direct his explaining on them. This is relevant because...

As mentioned, in the past I just thought this guy was annoying. But recently I took over for my manager temporarily while she went out on medical leave and prior to leaving, she took me in a conference room for a private ,off-the-record conversation about... a number of problematic individuals. One of these people was Explainer Man who apparently has a history of harassment. My manager had previously been his direct supervisor and almost fired him for insubordination, except he posted out before she could build enough of a paper trail on him. He would routinely contradict her, felt she let being a manager "go to her head," and basically undermined her at every opportunity. She told her manager in our current group not to hire him under any circumstances when he interviewed. She thinks he slipped through because of the amount of people being hired and the group interview process, which is charitable of her. (Not to give too much away, but our higher level managers are largely white male former federal law enforcement officers in their 50's or older... we work in financial crimes risk management. To the extent I've personally dealt with them I get the impression that their political views border on the fascistic. I definitely wouldn't expect much sensitivity from them.).

Recently another manager went out on medical leave (basically the only other female manager) and he was FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON EXCEPT YEAH THE PATRIARCHY being considered at her replacement. She again told her manager not to give this man any power, because if he was given any formal authority, he would probably find some way to abuse it. It appears this was disregarded and he's an acting team manager, causing chaos everywhere with his incompetent micromanagement. I have no idea what life must be for people on this team. Apparently he calls them in the evening to check in on their work. I'm busy with my own team and I don't really have time to look over his shoulder, and yeah it's not my job to manage him.

Anyway, this man appears destined to be my peer at the company (as mentioned we're both acting managers and I think he also posted for one of a few openings that have come up, as have I). Obviously I hate him, but I also kind of fear his ability to seemingly escape any consequences for his incompetence and abuse of the people around him. I dislike confrontation, but I'm also aware that I am the kind of person our idiot meathead bosses might actually listen to (i.e. not a woman, not a minority). Not that I have anything concrete to tell them.

I'm aware this is all kinds of fucked up, or maybe it's par for the course. I have no idea. My moral compass is probably 360 degrees of fucked after years of working at a place like this. Sorry for typing all this... this is the first time I've really fully articulated my issues with what is happening in any forum.

So I am basically trying not to be Explainer Man.

I feel like my Explainer Man tendencies are mostly limited to ilx these days (sorry guys) but yes, this is a life epiphany many people need

do any of you have the typical "Escalating Telephone Game" issue at work? I was out sick today with a bad sinus infection, only to log in to see what emails I missed end of day and find the following:

1) two mgrs ask a question about a recent configuration change made that they think was done "in error"
2) the dude who co-sponsored the change, instead of explaining why it was valid, misinterprets what they're saying and opens the door for them to start reverting these changes
3) actual directives are given in a task to begin undoing some of the work
4) I spend 40 minutes having to explain why they changes were correct and should not be reverted, while angrily wondering why the co-sponsor couldn't just do me a solid when I was sick and handle it properly rather than make it worse!

oh most definitely

I have a coworker who has some... tendencies.. that remind me of myself in years past. If something is in question, they'll ask why they have to do it, and if you respond relatively quickly with an answer they don't like, they'll get irritated and very... engaged

first message: this seems complicated, can we do it Y way. this is a standard software service we have implemented, everyone calls it the same way, we don't need to support a one-off

I pass it on to my coworker who handles the security stuff. He says yeah, you need to do this and this. They respond "why do I have to do <thing that isn't quite right>" and he clarifies. Then it escalates into a chain of single sentence questions, sent about a minute apart, for ten minutes without us able to get a word in edgewise.

like I was never quite this intense and not about work stuff, but the rapid-fire frantic thing makes me have to take a breath and calm down because this is exactly how my brain worked when I was EXTREMELY ANXIOUS all the time. it's just not good for my mental health to engage with them like this

sorry, this was me talking, not the questioner
this is a standard software service we have implemented, everyone calls it the same way, we don't need to support a one-off

Finding it difficult to take my boss seriously since she came to me to ask me how to keep her shoelaces tied a few months ago.
But then finding I'm supposed to.

I feel that with the rapid-fire response example above. I find myself having to leave messages unread until I've had time to let the moment pass!

kudos to the colleague who has worn a faded blue Rockport sweatshirt into work today

I just got a phone call thru the normal IVR queue customers'd call in via. I get a roomful of blokes on speakerphone talking, and not acknowledging my "hello? hello?" and it dawns on me that
a) they cant hear me
b) its my Sydney office sales team
c) they're bitching about my team, and the fact we dont answer the phone ever
d) this isnt true but theyre railing about it anyway not realising I'm hearing the lot

I ended up hanging up but man, that was an earful to hear. THANKS GUYS.

^wtf, why do people assume that just cos someone can't be heard, they aren't actually there on the line? there were a few times where I was silent not because I couldn't be heard, but because people were already talking when I joined, and then they'd talk about me like I wasn't there, so I'd surprise them with a hello.

the best comparison I can give for my department currently = that episode of The Bozo Show where Cookie has a fish stand with a sign that says "Fresh Fish Sold Here Today" and Wizzo comes by and criticizes the sign for what he perceives is an overabundance of information and keeps ripping off pieces of the cardboard sign until eventually there's no sign left.

I think with that call they thought they'd hung up, but hadnt properly.