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

11 days into training, after showing them multiple times how to email and how to check calendar in Outlook, and after actually sending them invites to MS Teams meetings for almost two weeks and having them accept and join these meetings, once again 10% of the class freaked out when their manager sent them invites to a touchbase today, because they couldn't 'find' the invite. they accept the invite in email and then complain it 'disappeared from their email', or it's not on their calendar because they never accepted it via email.

I know Outlook isn't the easiest but you were using it just fine two days ago!

one just emailed us to let us know Teams and Outlook wasn't working for them, two minutes after msging my partner on Teams, and the email went through which means Outlook was obv working

I can’t figure out who the people you training are. Are these people employed somewhere getting upgraded skills? Seniors with their first computer? Ho-ly cow I consider myself a patient computer trainer (I’m a dev) but this stuff seems like such a trial...

they're people ranging from early 20s - 60s, who are going to be using computers all day every day to take calls for benefits-related customers (health, pension, 401k). technical skills is supposed to be a pre-requisite for hire, and the last class I taught, they were very sharp, but this one....I'm kind of afraid for some of them.

I actually had to pass a WINDOWS 95 test when I got hired (and it was 2004, so it made little sense).

Hah, awesome! Fair. Some of my senior coworkers who are devs also go through moments where I’m describing something I can see on the screen they’re sharing and it’s clear they can’t see it in the slightest. So frustrating.

we will be seniors some day (presumably) ... so ....

my co-workers are all older than me -- two by only a couple years (both used to work in tech), the other two are in their 60s (at least) and they occasionally have old people computer problems like "I can't see the button ... maybe I have it zoomed in too far?"

ffm, I hear that. I feel like I have done that to peers and it comes down to whether you have had to design user interfaces, because you spot things quicker

my developer coworkers had problems with Microsoft Teams because the UI genuinely is bad, there is one part in the sharing bit where you can pick a document to share, but the text is the same as the descriptive text in the same area and it doesn’t seem like an action button or link? like, you should not have “Files” as a description and “Pick file” look identical

so my branch is confirmed as closing down. This means all of us and not just myself are getting made redundant. We do not have a timescale or action plan yet - which is fair enough, given the unpredictability of how the UK Gov't are rolling out lockdowns.

But I didn't find out through a phone call with my boss or even an email. I found out because Head Office posted an announcement on Yammer and I got a notification on my phone about a large comment thread underneath it. I had to phone my own manager to ask if she had seen the news. She had only been told ten mins before the announcement was made on Yammer and had been explicitly asked not to tell us just yet as without a timeline etc it would have caused more questions than answers. Apparently the post went up before every affected branch manager had even been told, not to mention the staff working in the stores who it also affects. A logistical nightmare - imagine if your pal who works in another branch heard you were losing your job before you did and texted to ask if you were ok and that's how you found out?

jesus that is shorty and a super weird thing to post on yammer in a hurry or otherwise!
I’m sorry boxedjoy

Shitty* 🙃

people that ask you for a status update on a deliverable when said deliverable is actually being held up by them not finishing a task.

this happens to me regularly and I spend quality time inventing dialog for what I could say to them, and what the fictional version of me in the tv show / movie / play would say to them.

😳

my issue is every response I come up with sounds sarcastic.

"it looks like in the thread below, you're being asked to do X. Do you see that?"

the other thing is we're training people on that aforementioned "new tool" next week, and nobody thought about access requests. and it turns out users aren't being granted automatic access to it since it's new and not widely available yet, so we have to grant each trainee individually. not a huge time suck, but would have been a big disaster for next week.

also I'm one of two people who knows how to do this so I'll probably have to do it for all classes next week :/

i swear we try to make everything as difficult as possible

I consider myself very lucky to not really have co-workers. That said, I do have clients who do things like send me a 200-page manuscript to be line edited that's formatted as a single 200-page, 75,000-word sentence (and before you ask, no, it's not avant-garde experimental fiction, just some barely literate maniac who doesn't know how written English works).

Armond White?

my issue is every response I come up with sounds sarcastic.

oh yes! That is the joy of it. You can both be sarcastic and have righteousness on your side.

Man, this is more of a recent, COVID era development, but my workplace has become absolutely obsessed with lunch time meetings. 95% of the meetings on my calendar for the next month are scheduled between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., with over half of them straight up for the 12-1 hour. It's obnoxious for me, personally, because this means I'm almost always overlapping with my son's break from remote learning. So either I'm scrambling to make his lunch or having to completely ignore him during the one break for him where I'm sure he'd appreciate some non screen human interaction.

I've had like no meetings scheduled on the noon hour this whole time, tho there is one tomorrow at noon (with regrets from the person who set the schedule). 11am I figure has to be fair game, considering nobody really wants to meet before 10 anyway.

the early-start people start even earlier under wfh conditions it seems like, I have one colleague who I think is on 5a-2p

I mean, my inbox starts filling between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. with the early rising contractor types and doesn't really taper off until 10 or 11 p.m., which is usually when the IT types check in.

I mean, I don't mind the occasional lunch hour meeting, but I've had one every day this week. Was looking forward to Friday since I had a break from it but, nope, meeting request for 12-1 Friday just came in. smh

so yesterday one of the learners missed a few hours due to a technical issue and I gave them what they missed to make up later. they were willing to stay late, but naturally, that's overtime. so they ask their manager if they can make up the material off hours (meaning "can I work overtime to do it?") - I had asked her to do so because it's not my call.

Manager literally tells her she can either make it up during regular work hours (how? she's in training all day) or that she can make it up outside of work hours "off the clock".

report this to my dept lead, who....doesn't respond or care. so I'm going to HR now to report this.

I suspect this is happening a lot as we had a classmate work 10+ hours off the clock one week without billing it and I was horrified - I always tell learners in class bill EVERY hour you work because we do not work for free. even one of my (dumb) colleagues was telling learners they could do this.

It's obnoxious for me, personally, because this means I'm almost always overlapping with my son's break from remote learning. So either I'm scrambling to make his lunch or having to completely ignore him during the one break for him where I'm sure he'd appreciate some non screen human interaction.

Could you let your co-workers know this and request more variety in the meeting times? Or, what happens if you miss one of these meetings? Could you send your stuff in advance and then not be there?

I like to propose other meeting times

you should troll and propose the meeting be moved to another month

Unfortunately, due to my role I’m usually last to get added to meetings after they’ve already been scheduled with faculty. Trying to convince six professors to change the time of a meeting after they’ve already agreed to it is usually an exercise in futility.

then it should be understandable to them if you can't make some of these meetings, as you weren't consulted and you have family obligations.

when a manager gets pinged asking for a link to provide backdoor access to a tool, instead of perusing the materials to find it (which would have taken 5 minutes), you send them to....me, when I'm in the process of screensharing and leading a course, so I don't see it until 90 minutes later.

brilliant.

which I said in nicer, yet passive aggressive words

jon – i would probably just mark off 30 minutes in your calendar everyday for taking care of your kid over lunch (hopefully your system is set to notify people you can't make it when a meeting is scheduled over that). it sounds like these people have all decided through indifference that you don't deserve a lunch break anymore (which is bullshit on it's own) - and if they can't understand that parents are all having a hard time right now and you need to see to your child, then you're going to have to make it their responsibility to make some extra time later to tell you what you need to know from the meeting.

for one of our processes, there are two separate 7-day timings. reissuing pension checks requires a 7 business day wait, but if reissuing to a new address, that address has to be on file 7 calendar days first (fraud reasons, etc).

confusing, yes, but....it's been the process a while. so anyway, we're redesigning our training materials, and the third party helping us do it gets this timing correct on the first attempt. inexplicably, one of the subject matter experts, who actually wrote the Best Practice for each 7-day wait period, incorrectly tells them to change the 7 calendar day timing to "7 business days". I piped in that this was wrong, citing the actual Best Practice she wrote, but was ignored, and the wrong info made it into Production.

I got the information fixed, and a day later, someone else submitted a request to change it back to the wrong info. which I just caught before it was done.

OMFG

you don't have to ask a question in every meeting

esp 1 minutes before meeting end

oh this guy is the type that's the first to ask a question the moment "any questions?" is said

my pet hate is when a presenter will take questions during a presentation instead of at the end. especially HR open enrollment meetsing. omg derail CITY.
and when questions get too specific they dont push to handle offline - they’ll just go right on down the rabbit hole

drives me insane

lol yeah, especially when the presentation is about something new rolling out and people are already asking about "what does 10 months from now look like", or you're teaching a basic concept and they don't even understand that yet and are asking advanced questions about unlikely scenarios which create a 20 minute tangent while other people had legit questions to ask.

I used to say "I'd answer that but you don't even understand the basics yet, so how is my answer going to make any sense?" or "so let me parking lot that for you" and....move on

nothing like one hour meetings that get derailed to where the presenter doesn't get to finish and then the dreaded question

"do y'all have hard stops or can you 'stay longer'"

on a conf call with someone who I found out is a Trump donor thanks to that site caek shared.

tempted to ask my first question - "who here supports coups?"

do it.

do it

a couper says what

Hangin' With Mr. Couper

Had a meeting about returning to work in the office today, they'd already gone over how people with health concerns can apply for exceptions to stay home.

Coworker pipes up during the q'time "I have elderly parents and am worried about public transport can I stay home" THAT WAS ALREADY ADDRESSED TAKE IT OFFLINE GEEZ.

so the 'new tool' I referenced we are building, since it's on a third party vendor and no longer proprietary tech of ours, it requires licenses for all users. previously, no 'licenses' were needed, access to the previous tool was automatic.

they had a deal with the vendor for a specific # of licenses. the number of licenses is insufficient for the # of people who need it. entire project put on hold.

after we already moved our training materials in QA and QC to the new format.

lol. this place is hilarious.

Whoopsie doodle

My boss has been out of the country for the last 5 weeks so I had to take sole responsibility for hiring and training 2 new staff for the stores, which I hate bc 1. I don’t want to talk to anybody let alone strangers and 2. I don’t fucking work in the stores so I don’t know shit about the front end of our POS

But fine whatever, I do it and it’s been 2 weeks. One of the new staff, who seemed promising, is already giving off major red flags:
We’re all in a group chat bitching about a customer who tried to throw a one coworker under the bus to another. New staff member - let’s call her G - privately tells another coworker that she thinks it’s “catty” which is just like... wtf you claimed you’ve worked years in CS, bitching is what everyone ever who works in CS does - it’s fucking bonding!!
Again, we’re in a group chat bc there’s some customer issue, we’re trying to figure out who she originally dealt with, coworker E says that from what she can gather from the customer, the original staff member was G. G goes OFF and accuses E of being a liar - in the group chat!!! She eventually sort of apologizes and blanes it on stress caused by unspecified family issues.
Later on I tell that I’m happy she apologized but that she needs to know it’s inappropriate and unacceptable to speak to a coworker that way and WOW she didn’t like my attitude. She claimed she was raised to “defend” herself (except she attacked instead of defending), blamed her personal problems again, and when I told her that personal problems are no excuse for disrespecting coworkers she gave me a lecture about disappointing it is her employer doesn’t care about her.

I can’t wait till my boss gets back bc these two will absolutely not vibe and shit is gonna hit the fan.