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

we have a fancy coffee machine now, it's like an automated barista machine, but the trouble is nobody cleans it. it has a milk compartment in the bottom, it is refrigerated, but the milk is sucked up through a rubber tube from this and basically the very bottom of the milk never gets used, so if it isn't cleaned out regularly, you get cottage cheese in the bottom after a few days.

similar things happen to the coffee grounds container. if you don't actually clean it out, grounds harden in the bottom and turn into mould. I only noticed because I got the message to empty it one day and pulled it out and it was just a massive green lump.

I've pointed both of these things out to the office manager but she doesn't give a shit, she doesn't drink coffee and doesn't seem to think it's anything she should be concerned about. I only work in the office twice a week but seem to have become designated coffee machine cleaner, maybe because everyone else doesn't mind drinking cottage-cheese-spore-coffee blend

cottage-cheese-spore-coffee blend

yum

we have a misspelled sign telling people not to dump "COFFEE GRINDS/GOUNDS" into the sink. The kitchen area shares a wall with the sinks in the bordering men's restroom, and excessive dumping somehow clogged the pipes earlier this year, causing the sinks to back up

i low key blame my roommate for clogging our kitchen sink with coffee grounds a few months ago. it was TERRIBLE

the mystery is that the sink they were dumped in does have a garbage disposal

not running a ton of water after the grounds seems to cause them to solidify in the pipes, though

my job requires regular live photographs, so for about 15 years now we have had a network of freelancers who upload pix to a flickr pro account. flickr has of course gone through a lot of changes in that time, including being owned by and having various levels of integration with yahoo

somehow, one of the photographers got his personal yahoo email account linked to our flickr account, such that anyone with the proper flickr credentials could access it

so this week a colleague stumbled across 15 years of this photographer's emails trying to find men and women to have sex with, featuring very very detailed and explicit photos, requests, prices, directions, hourly hotels, etc.

we got it de-linked and as far as we know he remains unaware -- although i'm not sure he'd really care

that is amazing.

whom amongst us, etc etc

guess we're lucky to have a fridge with a freezer compartment and a microwave, my last place had neither

I don't know whether it's some kind of anomaly that I'm only now, in a professional setting, decades after working unskilled jobs in like food service and factories and what have you, encountering the most profoundly stupid people I've ever had the displeasure of working alongside or if people in general are just getting stupider and the workplace just happens to be where I've become most acutely aware of this phenomenon.

I was, admittedly, being a little bitchy the other day when I mentioned to someone that I have to explain things to (that one guy) like he's a dog but...well, it's mostly only untrue inasmuch as a dog might eventually understand what you're telling him.

We have expectations that if people can obtain a job in a corporate setting that they aren't disgusting and selfish monsters. But it seems a lot of people still need their mothers to come and manage them.

i think maybe it's that incompetence is easier to spot in jobs like food service and factories, where there are specific outcomes expected and it's obvious when they're not happening, but once you move to the world of office work it's often easier to obscure those things? that's my experience anyway - i feel like i worked under more pressure, more regularly, in catering than i do now in a better-paid job where success is a bit fuzzier and harder to define

I had to work out of the l3hman br0s offices for awhile and they had some of the weirdest, shittiest, forgotten milk kitchens that I had ever seen. I was like, no wonder you guys failed.

xpost Yeah, that makes sense. There definitely isn't much scrutiny or oversight around these parts.

I should note that the person I'm talking about is senior to me (although in no way my superior) and makes at least 2-3 times what I make and doesn't understand, for example, the vagaries of email correspondence (eg, do not respond to an automated response that clearly says 'do not respond' and definitely don't do this multiple times a week for years and years and years).

The last office I worked had a free seltzer/soda vending machine. They eventually started charging .25 cents per can because the ceo/pres saw an employee taking home a tote bag full of sodas. And supposedly volume of sodas went down 60%.

i've seldom worked anywhere where the hiring process was good, except maybe bbc where they scored people and the highest score got the job.

ime hiring is actually more reliable now all my colleagues are contractors and people often join based on recommendations from within in the team. that ime works better than sifting cvs.

in my last permanent role, i liked and respected my boss but he hired really badly, and based on some of the team i managed he seemingly had a history of doing so. now that i occasionally sit in on interviews, my impression is that most managers are too shy/socially awkward to ask people challenging questions. it's not that i think someone should be intimidated or made to feel uncomfortable, more that the good candidate doesn't get a chance to stand out if all the questions are just platitudes or have the answer in them.

tho obv 'can you clean up after yourself' should be taken for granted.

xpost some of that basic 'how to behave efficiently and logically' shit needs to be taught. not replying all or derailing meetings etc.

That's like this very senior person was hired into my last firm and he only lasted two months before he was fired. Part of the reason was that he pissed everyone off because he had somehow never used outlook email before and didn't realize you view peoples' calendars yourself. He was completely frustrating when he tried to schedule his own meetings. Plus he put Esq. after everything and was condescending to the women so we nipped that shit fast.

A dude was hired at my last place of work and kept pulling one of my coworkers to train him on something in Excel (which I was only aware of because he sat across from me). Which y'know, nbd, new dude having people walk him through the particulars of his new job, understandable. A number of months later while talking to a frustrated manager, I put two and two and two together and realized that the reason this dude in particular had been hired was a professed proficiency with v-lookups...which it turned out he had completely lied about, failing to realize until too late that that isn't a facility you can fake your way through. Naturally, he was still working there as of when I quit several years later.

Crazy to get in like that and not learn how to vlookup in an evening or two

I mean I've done a ton of them but it's been a while and they aren't the most intuitive thing in the world (for me, anyway) and if someone asked me to do them again I'd be like, you're gonna need to give me a day or two to refresh myself before I take that on there chief. Dude's chutzpah severely outpaced him there, I feel.

I'm kind of an asshole but I would've just sent him a screenshot of google with "how to do a v-lookup" in the search box.

my favoured solution for that type of assholery is http://bfy.tw/DSmc

ha!

Okay, that's definitely preferable to stewing in frustration until my jugular ruptures.

tbh I'm not that good at hiring and unfortunately neither have my previous managers been, this job is the first one I've had to be involved with hiring, and our track record has been hit and miss. The last 2 people I was more involved with hiring and have turned out to be mostly OK, the guy we hired before that I don't really know how he managed to blag through the interview, we had 2 candidates shortlisted, and they both did basically the same on technical questions, although I thought the other guy had the edge, but the one we hired had an outgoing personality so the non-technical director liked him better. He turned out to be pretty junior level and needs a lot of help, still after being here 18 months he infuriates me with his basic incompetence on a regular basis. I insisted we put a code test back in after him because we used to do that and they dropped it for that position for some reason.

I have also been v tempted to send him lmgtfy links

i'm tempted to send lmgtfy links pretty much on a daily basis

I get distressed by people who can't figure out stuff on their own when there is the internet and instead waste other peoples' time. Hiring anyone is pretty hit or miss, I've wanted to sneakily even give people writing tests in interviews just to obtain coherency and professionalism levels.

That's not a bad idea. We received some phishing alert recently which warned, among other things, against opening attachments in emails containing misspellings and poor grammar. Which I took as tacit permission to delete 90% of the work emails I receive in a day. Really lightened my load!

We used to have so many poorly constructed and tonally semi-offensive emails sent out that I had to write template emails for my team to use because they couldn't be trusted. I am so happy not to work in an office right now.

the reason this dude in particular had been hired was a professed proficiency with v-lookups

please tell me more about this job because I think this might be my only skill

(I mean, I'm kidding, but I'm also kind of not kidding, so I am curious what jobs would have this high up their hiring criteria - though maybe it is a financial job in which case, nope, better not)

Plus he put Esq. after everything

reminds me of a coworker who was relatively competent but insisted on being overbearing and explaining exactly how software should be developed, not just explaining requirements, to the actual developers

he had several accreditations and degrees in his field, which was definitely not software. perpetually incapable of staying in his lane. only person i've worked with who had "PhD in blah, Certified blah" in his email signature

he formerly taught at a university and I can only imagine what it was like to be a student. or maybe i know, because he sat in my cube instructing me multiple times

Okay so the example that spurred my revive: there was this situation that was nuanced and might have been handled in a variety of ways which I would've discussed with others in (that one guy)'s position before making a decision about how to proceed but, because I knew I would get effing nowhere with that approach, I made an executive decision and just told him to let this party outside of the company know that we couldn't do the thing they were requesting of us. Any of the others in his position would have known that my email was intended for his eyes only and would have tailored a response for this outside party, but he opted to just forward my email to them (thankfully I omitted any sensitive information). When he finally gets a response from the outside party, he didn't manage to forward their response to me (which I predicted, because he's a fuckup) but rather to the person who initially alerted me to and had no hand in resolving the issue in question (a person whose opinion of (that one guy) was once benign and uncolored by regular interaction with him but who, in conversation about this matter, referred to him unguardedly as 'that asshole').

a passing spacecadet - lots of jobs involved with operations and feeds and distribution and things like that rely on someone to do the vlookups and reconcile everything

a passing spacecadet: yes, it was in the finance department of the company in question, but I also worked in that department and am as dumb as the dumbest of posts wrt matters of finance. I think one continual lesson of this thread is 'never sell yourself short'.

the peter principle is real, folks

It's kind of weird how much vlookups are needed but I consider it basic excel. If that was a prime qualification of a job I would want someone to at least be intermediate to advanced excel so they can at least deal with spreadsheets coming from multiple sources.

(By way of contrast, I was temp-to-hire at my current job and was asked about a month in if I knew how to do v-lookups and said I'd done them a couple times before and would figure it out and I did and I did them regularly and remained a temp for another eleven months.)

I think a great deal of professional success is predicated upon bullshitting and gladhanding and I'm an epic failure at both of those things so my facility wrt any other skillset is ultimately kinda beside the point.

thanks all btw!

I guess I do something kind of related to "operations and feeds and distribution" (my job title contained 1 of those words and a near-synonym of another until we all got re-titled to something generic) but the nice thing about my particular job is that it's not a major problem, or at least generally not my fault, if not everything reconciles at the end

the thought of being relied on to make everything add up monetarily or process-wise is a little daunting, which is half of why I said "not finance", along with, well, not knowing anything about finance/accounting

basically I want a job where they pay me not to be accountable for anything meaningful at all, which I admit is not a very lucrative line of work for yr average joe or spacecadet

Don't let it being in finance stop you. Most places' IT and operations are a total mess and are in a neverending backlog of reconciliation anyway.

if someone in IT insists that a system will be perfect and never need reconciliation, they are a horrible liar

Okay, okay. This very minute, (that one guy) forwarded an email to just me but wrote a response in the email intended for the sender (and ftr, I guarantee he doesn't understand how bcc works, so that isn't what's happening here). I could honestly pop in here many times on any given day to just bitch about this dude.

my newest boss couldn’t figure out how to copy paste an element within a powerpoint. we use powerpoint day in day out for briefings etc. lord give me strength

i had to tell someone what a link was once.

they were working on selling ads for a website.

like a cyberlink?

I lost my rag in a meeting with aforementioned coworker yesterday after he was failing to answer what I thought was a fairly simple question and exasperatedly asked him "do you know what HTML is?" then I realised I wasn't helping matters so I calmed down a bit. but seriously I don't know what to do with him sometimes

I know I have mentioned this before but I had to teach T3ddy Roosevelt IV how to doubleclick. I guess his assistant usually handled his mouse.

I feel like my general expectation of coworkers (possess a basic understanding of your responsibilities and the tools you need to do your job and then just actually, like, do your job) is such a ridiculously low bar that most people would be likely to clear it almost by accident. And yet. And yet.

lol Yerac