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

Dear fellow employees I am overhearing in a conversation right now about not wanting to follow anyone's orders about sheltering in place re: Covid-19, with your "not being afraid" and "it doesn't matter to me, I'm healthy and young": do you want what's happening right now in China and Italy to happen? Because that's how you get what's happening right now in China and Italy to happen. I am not going to confront them about this because to do so would be exceptionally unprofessional and create an antagonistic work environment, so thankfully there's this thread wherein I can vent. BTW, if we do end up enacting a San Francisco-style "shelter in place" order in my city, you better fucking believe I'll obey it because I'm not a dick and would actually like the whole "flattening the curve" thing to happen.

wait til next week when this will just serve as a thread about seinfeldeaque observations about all of our partners/families/housemates

I'll prefer that to the dire daily news

xp and pets, don’t forget those of us beset by small cats crying because they want to get into the attic

my home coworker, who is a cat, has now been exposed as a food grifter. if i am working from the dining room table and see you snack on food every half hour, i am no longer going to believe you're starving when you yowl at me at 5pm

I’m not looking forward to the one benefit of this, not having to get up at 6 anymore, being taken away from me by the attic-crier kneading us both until one of us gets up to feed her. Sometimes she does this and suddenly isn’t hungry!

My coworker today (18 year old with cancelled Uni classes) is awesome. He stayed in his bed all morning then made me a coffee.

again

thats not unlike my normal routine tbh

Guess I'll just comment on my co-workers then since I seem to be in the increasingly rarer numbers still going into work. Except work hasn't been that bad lately and the execs even sent us lots of coffee and doughnuts this morning to boost our morale. (in a quiet voice) Plus I'm in a supervisory role here so I feel awful about bitching about my co-workers for all but the most boneheaded reasons. (exunt quiet voice mode)

I can tell my trainees are distracted today. I'm being friendly and nurturing as I can, because ultimately, this thing I'm training them on just doesn't matter in the scheme of things

Plus it's for a client that is an evil financial institution

My company, a UK based high street clothes retailer, is launching a sale on Thursday in an attempt to drive footfall and profit. Wildly irresponsible.

God I am trying so hard right now with all that is going on. I'm not getting mad when people don't listen. Or when people interrupt me or don't follow directions.

But at a time when my nerves are already shot...when this one learner who is supposed to be a VETERAN is CONSTANTLY stopping me to ask things that I already answered. Or to insist things aren't working for her even though they are working for everybody else, and after you try three times to get her to coherently explain what's happening, she can't.

Can't remember her Skype password to screenshare there. Can't figure out how to do it in WebEx teams even with me literally giving every instruction in ridiculously overexplained fashion after three times.

I can't use my virtual session to do it because then I have to take down the instructions that I'm sharing.

It took everything to say JESUS CHRIST I AM FUCKING AT MY WIT'S END AS IT IS AND YOU'RE MAKING MY WAKING HOURS HELL!!!!

This is a class that normally lasts 24 hours and I was given fucking 14!

My company, a UK based high street clothes retailer, is launching a sale on Thursday in an attempt to drive footfall and profit. Wildly irresponsible.

I've been getting more vouchers than I have for months! Today's vouchers: another one for a free eye test, or 40% off lunch at the not v appealing Beefeater on the other side of town. I feel bad abt places seeing a reduction in custom but, no

I suggested to my boss last week that we encourage online shopping by doing an online-only sale. She agreed. I got the draft of the email announcement, and it said something like “we don’t want to discourage shopping in store” and I was like, please PLEASE take that out, it is bad and also makes us look terrible. Amazingly, she agreed.

The email went out yesterday morning and then the shelter-in-place came just a few hours later so our stores are closed for at least 3 weeks.

Our online store is not popular so I’m not sure I’ll still have a job in 3 weeks. My boss is trying to sell the business to the PM and the PM let me know she found out after looking at the books that business hasn’t made any money in YEARS. My boss has been loaning the business money (she owns rental properties, remortgaged her house multiple times) to keep it going.

ouch - good luck, just1n3, but also good job and good timing talking her round re the mailout

I typically do well at annual review time, have consistently gotten an "Excels" rating for 9 consecutive years. Began reading the annual review summary my new boss was sharing with me during the one on one, and it appeared I was well on my way to a 10th. Comments were mostly raves, there was no actual negative feedback or specific area of improvement.

Get to the end, it's the lowest rating I've ever had in 15 years, only the second time I got a "Meets Expectations". I was baffled. I got an "Excels" last year despite doing much less impressive work in 2018. Last year I voluntarily traveled to the Philippines to oversee 12 concurrent training classes, San Juan (on less than a week's notice for an impromptu two week class), voluntarily learned and immediately began teaching a new platform (becoming only the 2nd person licensed to teach it), acquired the access to update internal system materials that had been needed for TEN YEARS but had never been done, and was one of the most prominent participants in the training material redevelopment project.

it was, as is always, bureaucracy. our bosses can't give us direct ratings, it's calibrated at the leadership level, so all bosses in our division present their employee and recommended rating, and leadership either approves or denies it, and they also set caps on how many people can get each rating in each division, so I'm fairly sure they saved the "Excels" for other "more important" roles.

so that was the only chance of me getting any incentive pay which would have been helpful given what's going on. so the message to me is "do the bare minimum from here on out".

OK! will do!

a fairly pointless thing to get worked up over rn but w/e. i'm going to pretend the only reason I got the lower score was for saying "motherfucker" on a hot mic, that's easier to live with.

When I was a manager doing ratings, we were only allowed a minimal number of excels vs meets. Definitely forced us into a position where people doing good work got penalized for no reason other than available budget.

yep same thing here. I can tell having friends in higher places in past years before I switched depts probably played more of a role than I realized.

so I'm wondering how I managed to get the higher rating at all last year, considering I did not get along with the boss that did that review at all, to the point where we had to have meetings to clear the air.

they also set caps on how many people can get each rating in each division

It sucks. I had a colleague quit over the finer details of the review process.

I guess our developers are real real bored sitting at home because they went in on a whim overnight and completely overhauled the layout of one of my essential work apps such that a search function that used to display all information on a single handy screen like so:

Business Name DBA
Street Address
City State Zip Etc.

Now displays everything like this:

Business Name



DBA



Etc.

Forcing everyone to scroll endlessly to find information that we used to be able to see at a quick glance. This is a thing I have to consult dozens, sometimes 100+ times/day, and which has remained the same for years, which allows for a lot of mental shorthand and eliminates a lot of cognitive effort on my part. And my work is already slowed way down, working at home on a tiny laptop screen (down from two big desktop monitors). I'm fuuuuuuuurious.

JESUS CHRIST STOP REPLYING ALL ON EVERY FUCKING EMAIL YOU MORONS

CC: All

After yesterday's fiasco, my class seems fried. I feel bad subjecting them to my braying today.

I've been working with one particular freelance client for 20+ years and something happened today that beats all for unprofessionalism. She hired this livestock photographer to shoot all the year-end award presentations for a nonprofit she runs; the awards section runs 20+ pages in the May issue of her magazine. This goddamn dumbass photographer moved all the pics he shot to his laptop and then overwrote the SD cards with subsequent jobs rather than putting those cards aside; AND he doesn't have any data backup protocol for his laptop. Of course, he lost every fucking thing, including official backdrop photos for 2 or 3 other shows and pasture shots from a couple of ranches. ugghhhh so mad right now

Geez. So does that mean the magazine article is scrubbed?

No, we'll do the award recipients without pictures, and the rest of the section will be as usual (sponsor and donor recognition mostly). But the nonprofit is a junior livestock association, and the parents who bankroll their kids' participation like to see their babies' pictures in the glossy color mag. It's going to hurt signups for 2021 after a year that's already full of lower turnout and cancelled shows. My client went ahead with publishing this issue instead of doing a 1 or 2 issue hiatus based on the photographer's assurances that his computer guys were hard at work getting that data back. If she'd gotten the straight dope from the photographer a month ago and gone with a hiatus, I could have been getting some of that independent contractor unemployment. But what was a 72-page issue last year will probably be 32-40 pages this year, and my billing is tied roughly to issue size.

they pulled me from my 19-day class with another person to have me lead a 3 day on my own. I was afraid this person would lose track of the clock and put us further behind, but she'd taught the class several times before, and I had no choice, so w/e....

she lets me know end of day today where she left off, which is about 6 hours behind, and tomorrow is the last day, with no sense of concern that that leaves next to a zero chance of finishing tomorrow, and we can't extend class, and the time to have raised the alarm to leadership was like 3 days ago.

I had to spend an extra half hour mocking up a schedule that cut several unessential things and gutted the time on others and hope like hell we can meet it, which isn't a given.

thankful I'm taking Friday off.

I've become a more peaceful person in quarantine. Being removed from a situation where some think lying is justifiable or even an art form has done wonders for my self-esteem. Not to mention I'm sleeping better at night now that I don't have to spend time around people who have no sense of boundaries.

I reported a server error in our QC environment on December 17th, 2019. Aka, something that usually took 5 minutes of scanning the error logs in GUI, and resolving whatever issue. Except this time, they claimed the logs were clean. So they told me tell them next time it happened, which was early January, and this time they found something in the logs, and said they were looking into it.

It is now May, and they have nothing to report, even though we've been consistently reporting a QC environment that barely works for six months, which keeps wrecking our training classes. The QA environment also started developing the same problem, basically meaning we don't have a working test environment to use in class for hours/days at a time

what....the....fuck? I about had enough today and said I was tired of getting bitched at by trainees who aren't willing to accept "they're looking into it" day after day for three weeks.

lol i just got a comment on a jira ticket filed in june 2018

'because we're now migrating to a new cms, we will not be devoting resources to address this issue'

fair enough! sometimes if you ignore a problem for long enough, it ceases to matter

haha somebody was psyched to be able to close that ticket with a clear conscience

lol that reminds me of

"hey wanted to see if u r still having issue"

follow ups, hoping you'll say "nah it fixed itself" so they can close the ticket

I'm on the other end of those, and sorry guys, our management and current work doesn't care about that issue until it gets mentioned in a management meeting

:(

Ha yeah I often get rebuffed on feature requests with "well we're likely moving to a new system soon so theres no point".

But like, if you've been saying this since 2015 and NOTHING HAS CHANGED, cmon man.

Also:
"hey wanted to see if u r still having issue"

follow ups, hoping you'll say "nah it fixed itself" so they can close the ticket

I am guilty of this, esp with mobile faults on monday mornings. Did it fix over the weekend? most likely.

My boss laid off almost all staff 2 months ago except for me and two seamstresses who don’t speak a lot of English. After 2 months of being the sole focus of her chaotic energy, I’m losing my mind. The last few years have been less stressful bc I had a coworker who was v interested in buying the business and took the brunt of my boss’ weirdness. I’d forgotten how bad it can get.

Here are some examples of the whiplash I deal with regularly:

“Our strength lies in offering so many colors” ——> “we really need to limit the amount of colors available in a style”

“We offer too many styles, the stores are cluttered” —-> “lets make 20 variations of the same garment instead of just perfecting it the first time”

“We need to get rid of our store in San Francisco, it’s too expensive” ——> “scale of economies!”

“This is the summer palette” —-> “actually lets drop that color” —-> “actually lets bring that color back” —-> “nah get rid of it” —-> “wait maybe you could make more like {shows me a sample that is a fabric nothing like we make, in a color so rich I clearly can’t replicate it considering the dyes I work with}”

My favorite recurring argument is about our store windows:
Me: Windows are free advertising. They need to be more eye catching. Ours are too beige and nothing stands out
Her: it doesn’t matter. Everyone looks at windows. You don’t need to catch attention
Me: we should dye a couple pairs of pants in brighter colors just for the store windows, bc it’ll help with contrast
Her: but then ppl will see the bright colors in the windows and come in to buy them
Me:......
Me:?!?!?
Her: I don’t you to dye pants in bright colors for instore stock bc nobody buys them
Me: *punches self in face*

are you making things to order anyway cos of reduced frequency of trade?
I mean would seem to be overkill to make so much more stuff.
BUt that's presumably what you're saying anyway.
Though if you drop in production does that mean the last few staff are in danger of being fired if tehy're not seen to be active all the time?

interested actually are you getting a lot of walk in trade now? NOt really been around places like clothing shops cos i think most of them are closed here and the only open ones are departments of larger shops.

Our stores are closed till June at least but our online traffic has increased x 10. What’s annoying is that she’s been nagging me to fill the stores for weeks, and I’m like, why?? If I fill the stores now, we run out of undyed stock, she really can’t afford to buy fabric right now, so let’s be judicious until we actually know for sure when the stores are opening.

I normally do online orders as dyed-to-order but we’re doing too much business for that so I’ve pulled a lot of stock from our 3 stores, which she’s also giving me whiplash over - one minute she agrees with me that we should be utilizing the stores’ stock for online sales, the next she’s going on about how the stores need to be ready for opening at any moment.

The last 3 of us a safe unless she loses the business.

Once again, stupid managers enrolled students who didn't meet the minimum criteria to take my class...into my class. The class they should have been enrolled into is one week longer. I can't squeeze 5 days of extra info into a schedule that's already full, so... they're pretty much lost.

The managers know. They are playing dumb.

We pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalty fees per year due to undertrained representatives misprocessing 401(k) transactions.

Clearly the solution to this is to train 5 people who have never used our systems before on 401(k), and cut the hours of the system training from 40 to 8, and to assign me to prepare for this class on a day's notice while I'm simultaneously leading another class and can't work OT.

This won't blow up at all.

We've got an ongoing problem with our coworker that processes all of our invoices and paperwork. She is just constitutionally unable to wait a reasonable amount of time for anything to get reviewed or moved forward, the second it hits her inbox she just HAS to get it out of her court as fast as imaginable. She's efficient, but it also creates unnecessary stress on everyone. It's been a known issue and our boss has talked to her about it before, but it's gotten so much worse while we are working from home. As an example, a consultant emailed her an invoice at 10:14 this morning. She attached the pay requisition form that I need to to sign and sent it to me for review and signature at 10:18. At the time I was on a zoom call for another project. She emailed me at 10:28 asking me if I had a chance to review it yet, again at 10:45 asking if there were problems with it, yet again at 10:55 asking me why I didn't approve it yet and finally CALLED me at 11:05 to ask why it wasn't done yet. It's infuriating.

I am that person, except I never send the emails or call, I just sit on my couch stewing.

Last 2 posts summing up this lockdown shit. Unconscionable drain on people's wellbeing.

I feel like my company's acquiescence to our clients' concerns that the "quality of our customer service will decline" or the "service levels will suffer" is such stupidity. What call center is anybody calling right now where your first impression is "wow, they really are at the top of their game"?

don't see what it's going to help if you throw a bunch of already stressed out people who aren't used to working from home onto the phone with a third of the training they were supposed to get, knowing if they quit they won't get unemployment.

Had to report a data privacy violation for the first time in my career here today because some motherfucking idiot supplied sample documentation for our training materials. instead of properly redacting the materials, or supplying fictitious customer data from a test environment, they submitted actual customer data/applications with their private data only obscured with a REMOVABLE TAG that said "Confidential". anybody can delete these tags, and sometimes they disappear when you scroll fast, making visible the customer's data.

None of us internally on this project are authorized to see customer data from this client, and we've also now just shared it with a third party, basically breaching this customer's privacy.

motherfucking MORONS.

they used Pop-Up tags. all you have to do is click and drag it out of the way, and boom, customer's info exposed.

first higher-up I reported to seemed to not care. why even have a Data Privacy policy in place if we don't care about enforcing it. fuck.