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

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.

ugh ... yeah ... one of my clients does custom products and has a store as well ... and complaining/joking about customers was definite bonding time. ... like the guy who walked in and wanted the front end staffperson to help him make a cactus hoodie, like how to design a cactus hoodie ...it was actually hilarious (because the guy was a jerk and also probably high) and awesome because it then became a brainstorming session about how one would actually go about making a cactus hoodie and why someone would want a cactus hoodie.

really hate when managers want a meeting with me but it's beneath them to set up the conference line so they email me to set it up instead

Lol yes that is bullllshit

oh it wasn't even asked either, it was just like "we would like to have a call tomorrow morning," just implied that they wouldn't be setting it up. i wish i could have replied "OKAY, AND?"

"that's cool. i would like a salad right now myself"

how one would actually go about making a cactus hoodie and why someone would want a cactus hoodie

so how would one make a cactus hoodie though?

asking for a friend

LOL speaking of bitching about customers in group chats, I wrote "ugh i am going to kill harry" (a customer) in what I thought was our direct team-only chat but it was the somewhat wider our team + all the devs and managers craaaap

Thankfully someone just joked "make sure you Jira that" lol. I deleted it p fast.

I did that once years ago where our most toxic member of our team had just loudly boasted "I WORK TWICE AS HARD AS EVERYONE ELSE ON THIS TEAM". I wrote "K@thleen just said she works 'twice as hard as everyone else on the team'", and then accidentally sent it TO HER. I tried to backpedal and say "and I agree with you", only I realized by looking at her desk that she hadn't read it yet, and then a manager pulled her into a meeting and she didn't lock her desk like she was supposed to.

I got up and closed the window. this was Sametime 15 years ago so it didn't save Conversation History and it wasn't setup to send email transcripts to her email, so she didn't see it.

Now if I'm trash talking, I double check!

i wrote a css overlay for slack to make 'safe' chats have a different background colour to shared chats, just as a reminder.

anyway, i'm off for a week so i wrote instructions on how to make a time sensitive change to the worst config file in history and on the jira ticket noted that there was a known problem which is unimportant and pre-existing and to be careful because the config is fragile.

change was applied as requested, and then the team-lead noticed the non-problem and 'fixed' that too, breaking the config and causing other jobs not to process.

Going by my past experiences, your coworkers will then subtly infer that this would not have happened had you not taken time off.

we're redesigning our training and one of the SMEs disagreed with feedback that my colleagues and I had left. She posted her concerns directly below our feedback, which was sure to confuse the developer with conflicting instructions, so I took the discussion offline. We discussed and the head of our dept decided to go with our approach rather than the SMEs.

In retaliation, the SME is now making passive aggressive comments ("you'll need to ask Neanderthal/etc, I disagreed, but they decided not to go with my suggestion, and then she deleted all of her feedback, including feedback not related at all to the content in dispute. so now the developer is asking where that feedback went as they need it for today's deadline.

like, are you 12 years old? jfc.

My immediate team is 4 staff. With the way our work's structured, we've basically divided the work into 4 parts, each about as busy as the other but all diff skillsets. Me and the other gal in the team we can, and do, manage all 4 tasks when we have to ie when someone's away we'll do their bit.

Whenever I or her are away, the other 2 useless men in the team stick to their own part and whinge theyre busy.

2 ppl were away the last 2 days leaving me and Useless Guy to divide the work up. 50 50 right? Makes sense?

So I say "I am doing my usual task A and T*ryns task B, You can do your usual, and Task D". He has the gall to say "I'll see what I can do to help out."

...help out? How are you HEPLING me by NOT DOING YOUR SHARE.

He kept making it sound like he was doing me a favour doing his extra quarter of the work, whinged he was busy, and inevitagbly I had to do the bulk of it because it couldnt just not get done.

So I did 3/4 of the work last 2 days and I am PISS MAD.

there seems to be one of those at every business and yet if you ever call them out for not being productive, they have every excuse in the book, none of which has anything to do with why they couldn't do the work to help.

is there another assignment you can have someone drop into his lap by proxy?

i'm tired of idiot team managers being allowed to add their stupid fucking representatives to training roster up until the Friday afternoon before it begins. rather than instituting a firm cutoff date, which should optimally be a week before.

We base the number of trainers on the size of the class a week before, which proves faulty because between during the Monday - Friday of the week before, the requests that come in Thursday/Friday wind up increasing the roster 150 - 200%. More than half the time, that means we have too few trainers (as the ratio is supposed to be 12:1) and have to go scrambling to find someone last minute, or leave the class short handed. (and in virtual training it's important to have a good ratio due to the increase in the number of tech issues, where there's often multiple that need to be addressed simultaneously).

then a quarter of the time, they wind up msging us the Monday or Tuesday to disenroll these same people, saying "nevermind, they have a conflict this week that I didn't know about". real easy to keep together who's in the class when the 'official roster' is out of date by the time it gets to us (and the dude responsible for keeping it fucks it up half the time).

verbatim exchange I just had. including timestamps, which were visible to the other person while making these statements:

[12:26 PM] GOOBER
how much time do we have I want to take it over but if not enough time to start it I will do it again later.

​[12:26 PM] NEANDERTHAL
about 9 minutes

​[12:27 PM] GOOBER
Ok, I reviewed, I know my mistakes but want to make sure I have time to redo so I will later even if it doesn't count for you guys, for myself.

​[12:36 PM] GOOBER
that was the longest 9 min I could've retested by now.

entire GUI system down in our test environment for over 24 hours. nothing like this has ever happened before.

the lead IT guy's response is to merely say over and over again "this shouldn't be happening".

so basically all of my trainees can't properly utilize the environment they're supposed to use and aren't getting practice.

fun!

fuck ... I want to post in this thread, but it's on ILE and not 77 ... honestly, I should keep it to myself. Stupid, annoying ... but understandable

I told my boss once back in 2019 that he could message me on WhatsApp since I was in the Philippines.

He apparently took that one time permission to mean "message me here always instead of texting" and unbeknownst to me, has been sending me messages there for weeks. Usually for emergencies. Like today, he wanted me to come in early to help fill in for a training, so he WhatsApped me yesterday. I didn't see it as I don't even have it installed anymore, he didn't text me, so I was late.

WhatsApp is like FB Messenger, it shows you if the messages have been read. can't...he see...that I am not reading them?

Not to mention the years of nonresponse!?

yeah for real. i haven't replied to a single message since 2019. lol

told him this morning to just text me from now on.

well now at least he knows what's up

one of our trainees in one of our classes has a smoke alarm with a low battery that has been chirping for two weeks, and constantly forgets to put herself on mute. eventually one of the other classmates said DOES SOMEONE NEED TO CHANGE THEIR SMOKE ALARM BATTERY

observing a trainer who is literally making the training all about him and his emotional outbursts. he made a mistake yesterday and then said loudly "put a bullet in my head!"

oh yikes. Is this training about dealing with stupid, annoying coworkers?

unintentionally, it has become exactly that

i uh hope that fellow gets the help he needs

He did in that I told him he was done for the day and took over

in more stupid trainer chronicles...

"Hi Rob - here's the status report for the week. Sorry, I couldn't take roll yesterday as I was presenting."

"I....what? You literally have a partner who wasn't presenting who could have taken roll. For fuck's sake, MS Teams shows you the people who were invited that aren't present in the session, it takes all of 30 seconds to confirm at the beginning of the day."

it's a level of dumb that I have no antibody for

much like public schools and standardized tests, our dumb leaders think that the stupid post-module 'assessments' are these great predictors of individual performance (editor's note: they're not). We have *14 of them* in the Pension course I teach, and they're open-note so they're not hard to pass, and usually only illuminate the poorer performances (or those with test anxiety).

If you cut them for time - you get an interrogation, even though not cutting them means if you run over time in a lesson, you have to cut tiem in another lesson, and then you're rushing and nobody learns anything.

coworkers who cc themselves on their own emails are 9 times out of 10 completely disorganized and have an inbox that is an actual nightmare

My father died suddenly of a heart attack while I was on vacation and I emailed my manager so that he’d tell my coworkers.. he offered to do so.. then “missed” my reply. So when I got back I had to answer a bunch of chipper “how was your vacation?”s in back to back calls which was absolutely brutal. The first one, I didn’t know they didn’t know, so it felt completely heartless that this usually thoughtful person would ask. I want to burn it all down. So instead I booked my second shot for that night so that I’d get sick (and I did) and miss the next day. Fuck you shitty “oh we are all such good friends” fake ass manager. Having a pension is the only thing that’s stopped me from rage-applying to other jobs. This is after six months of my father going through significant mental health problems during a time of great project stress at work, all of which the manager was very aware of and was praising me for withstanding.

jesus christ, i'm so sorry to hear about your father, but also the insensitive way that it was handled by your manager at work.

thank you. It is nice at least to feel anger occasionally rather than sad. But the first hour when I sat online prior to our calls and none of my decent work friends reached out was so alienating and depressing. I could tell my coworkers were so shocked and sad to see me have to say it too. He fucked that up so bad.

❤️

Wow, yeah he did. So sorry, FFM, what a horrible time <3

ugh what a careless jerk