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

I don't know if this is the right thread, but how do y'all handle periods of being inundated with extreme negativity and anger at work without losing your minds?

Essentially, my position is construction-adjacent and I often find myself as the face and contact for projects that can be sometimes intrusive or annoying, given that construction work itself is by nature something that cause inconvenience even at the best of times. I do all I can to minimize it and spend a lot of time clearly communicating with those impacted and trying to ease it as much as possible with the limited influence I have. But ultimately, the decisions about the extents and timing of construction work are made well above my head and I just implement the work as best I can. Complaints are par for the course and I'm used to dealing with them, I get it - it comes with the territory. That said, something seems to have flipped in the last year or so and the anger and outrage is just off the charts. Where I used to see maybe 4-5 complaints over the course of a 2 or 3 month project, I'm now seeing dozens a day. And just pure angry, frothing rage in many of them. Not even for the usual targets like noise or disruption, I'm talking multiple paragraph screeds about a temporary door that "sticks a bit" or having to travel 35 extra feet to a different suite exit. I've racked my brain for weeks to try and tease out if I'm doing something differently than I used to do, or if there is something I'm doing wrong, but I can't put my finger on it. It just seems like people are either much angrier lately, or just way more vocal in expressing their anger. It's wearing me down and I'm finding it increasingly hard to get out of bed when I know I've got another day of nothing but negativity coming my way.

tl;dr - increasingly surrounded by negativity and it's overwhelming me

I think that's a general trend, with multiple causes, including the Trump Presidency and the pandemic. Anxiety, anger, fear are all significantly up, resulting in higher incidents of violent crime and lesser incidents such as confrontations on airplanes.

It just seems like people are either much angrier lately, or just way more vocal in expressing their anger. It's wearing me down and I'm finding it increasingly hard to get out of bed when I know I've got another day of nothing but negativity coming my way.

For the past year, I've been in a similar position to you, and yeah, it can feel like your job is to be yelled at and beaten down, with little consideration for the fact that you are a human being and essentially, the messenger. My position differs in that the people complaining are essentially my org's clients, as opposed to my co-workers, though the arrangement is fairly informal, so I am viewed as a co-worker rather than a consultant.

But, to give you an idea of where I'm coming from (and to see if our work is similar or not), I have had to contend with: frustration over missed garbage pick-ups; complaints about roof leaks in one part of the building that implied that I was too concerned about the roof in other parts of the building and not their part of the building; a vacuum cleaner that did not effectively work to clean a wood floor; enforcement of safety and code concerns being a tool of white supremacy; and could I personally deal with a burnt-out lightbulb. The person who asked me to change the lightbulb was nice about it. (At first I had thought it was probably an overhead fluorescent, and some of those are 8 feet, and that is perfectly reasonable and legit ... but it wasn't ... but at least the person was polite and grateful.)

Coping mechanisms ... it helps that I have a co-worker who does the same work I do and we can commiserate about it and support each other. I also have gotten better at mentally putting the work stuff in a box and ignoring it when I am not at work. I also try to interact more socially with the people who are complaining? Like, ask them what they are working on, try and reinforce my humanity to them, as opposed to being the person who can get the guy in to blow out the roof drains and patch the leaks, etc. ... and I don't want to get into the white supremacy issue here, but needless to say, that one is not as easy as changing a lightbulb and the people aren't as polite.

the policy for our trainers up until now has always been "you may have up to 5 hours per week without pre-approval, IF the overtime is needed to do actual work". and it makes sense, you have to show up early for class to get things ready and ensure it starts on time, and there's usually administrative stuff to do after class. Usually only adds up to 30 mins or so, but it's OT.

so this week, someone comes to me and says their manager is saying that no longer applies, they need all OT approved in advance. None of this was actually communicated to us until one of my instructors told me their manager was demanding I talk to them about any OT her direct report needed to work that week, and I was just told "well talk to her".

I had to tell her she'd already taken a half hour and that I'd blessed it based on the previous guidance, so that the instructor didn't get in trouble for taking 'unapproved' overtime, but I also told my boss's boss that on a permanent basis, I'm not willing to be the middleman on this, because that will lead to us eventually being held accountable for when one of these instructors takes unauthorized OT, when we don't even have the ability to see their time cards, nor are we their people managers.

seems like a few bad actors causing our company to take it out on the people who aren't doing anything wrong, and worried it'll lead to people working 'off the clock' (which I'll report in a heartbeat if I see it - I've had to do it a few times where I suspected one of our business partners was telling their employees to do that).

5 hours *overtime* per week

my awful manager was gone for two weeks on vacation and i am NOT doing well with the fact that she is back today.

sorry sarahell, missed your post over the weekend.

Fortunately this week things tapered down a little bit, so I'm trying to enjoy the lull and be productive in other areas as much as I can. Mine is a little more focused on specific construction concerns, it ultimately just ends up that no matter how communicative and clear you might be about the unfortunate inconveniences around construction, people will always find something to complain about. One particular piece of information I learned late last week provided some illumination and helped me to depersonalize the complaining a little - turns out, well before I got involved, two different groups of professors were angling for renovation of the same old lab space and the Dean could only recommend one to move forward and the other had to be tabled for a few more years. Turns out that the most angry, vocal complaints were all emanating from the group that did not get their plan realized. Still very obnoxious to have to bear the brunt of anger about politics and departmental decisions that have zilch to do with me, but reassuring to know that I hadn't done anything "wrong" and very likely, no matter what I did, these people would still be complaining loudly because the root of their frustration has nothing to do with me.

yep, that is usually the case! glad you are feeling better.

It was the greatest feeling to see this thread pop up and realize that I have absolutely nothing to contribute to it for the first time in...what, at least a decade and a half? I'm fucken exhausted but at least it isn't because of any stupid, annoying co-workers for a change.

buncha people lost the ability to access a Sharepoint excel sign-up spreadsheet starting at 5 pm last night. paradoxically, as all show as having edit access. re-granting hasn't worked.

IT is outsourced and has no clue how any of our shit works. we get directed to the Sharepoint page owners....who don't even realize they're the owners.

easiest way to fix seems to be "repost this to a Sharepoint page that our team is the owners of, update all outside references to new link, send a blast with new link letting people know to update bookmarks". but instead, I'm just being told to forward physical copies of the sheet every day as a workaround, even though people update it multiple times per day, as this is a sign-up sheet.

so now I'm basically forced to send a copy of the file beginning of day, notify the trainers when updates are made, and then update the attendance myself manually. which is a waste of time. so I've said "i'm not doing that, try again".

Permissions stuff for Microsoft cloud thingies, which I've only just had to dip my newb toes into, appear to be astonishingly hellish/arcane(/buggy??). And also a work in progress; I got complaints that something useful had stopped working, and it appears it was never intended to work that way, but just did so for a while by happy accident. (End of off-topic aside.)

Stopped uploading to Sharepoint when I realised everyone just pings me asking for the file on Teams anyway, despite previously sharing the Sharepoint link on Teams.

xpost they finally fixed it and I have no idea how.

alright, i gotta ask. why do people forward Outlook invites to the same email address it was already sent to?

Like I get why people forward it to personal emails, or if are an external partner with two email addresses, but I'm talking about someone whose email address is Be✧✧✧.Bigmac✧✧✧@fiz✧✧✧.c✧✧, and they get the invite, and they forward it to Be✧✧✧.Bigmac✧✧✧@fiz✧✧✧.c✧✧, according to the forward notification.

do they think this is how it makes it appear on their calendar, or is there sorcery I'm unaware of.

Wasn't there someone on here who said their colleagues forwarded emails to themselves so they'd appear at the top of the inbox and not get pushed down into obscurity? maybe it's the same thing?

but if they accept the invite, it's no longer in their inbox, and it's on their calendar!

my co-worker will have me forward him something I had sent him numerous times before because he gets a ridiculous amount of emails and he is often overwhelmed and it just is more expedient that way. It's kinda annoying but sitting and waiting for him to search could also be annoying, and everything is always a crisis and there's not enough time.

I mean that I understand, even if agree it sounds a bit annoying.

in my case, the people are accepting the invite, then forwarding it to the same email address they received it at a mere minute later, when it's already on their calendar.

one day I will probably ask one of them "out of curiosity, what is the purpose of this?", just cos I always gotta know 'why'?

so, coworker t. the story i like to tell is that a week or two after i started this position, she asked me if i liked star wars, and i said, you know i've never really been a big fan, and she immediately replied "get away from me" in like a startled, almost hostile tone. i laughed in the moment but then realized she was serious! if you read this shit in a novel you'd throw it across the room.

anyway, she is a sniveling busybody lieutenant to my godawful black hole manager who everyone else dances around (missing stair). i'm convinced that she's deeply closeted, she lives with her parents, she is mormon and very invested in nerd culture, and she like, really, really lives for people to think she's soooo smart and good and busy and it all just makes me want to puke.

you should ask her about the comics where there are some very gay star wars characters, including an indiana jones-type female relic thief who loves the ladies. probably her favorite lol

"Neanderthal, I think there's a problem - there's a feature in our tools that was disabled a while back, yet we still have it. I'm worried that there's a systemic problem that we're not getting updates."

"um, the disabling of that feature hasn't occurred yet. you're seeing a preview of a forthcoming development change, but it hasn't happened yet. Here, in fact, are 3 other teams that have the same feature."

"Well I distinctly remember being told it was being disabled and anecdotally I know of clients that don't have it anymore so I don't believe you and am asking the technology side."

"fine, go fuck yourself."

(obv artistic license)

y'all got any people who ask you ping you all panicked about an emergency, then when you try to help, answer like 1 of every 4 questions you ask them so it takes you an hour to find out what they're even freaked out about?

y'all got any people who ask you ping you all panicked about an emergency, then when you try to help, answer like 1 of every 4 questions you ask them so it takes you an hour to find out what they're even freaked out about?

yes my old boss used to do this all the time

Thankfully, pretty much all of my co-workers are neither stupid nor annoying, unless they are drunk, in which case they are fairly easily avoided.

The ineptitude of my colleagues makes me look better and helped me get a second bonus this year for performance so I guess I'm grateful

I was back at my job after two weeks of vacation out of the country and two hours into my first day back and my boss asks me for a status update for one of my (many) projects.

Not exactly a co-worker, a legacy consultant I have to keep working with, but an older boomer to responds to every email with a phone call. Has a yes/no question for me? Calls me on the phone to ask. I send him a file that requires no response? Calls me on the phone to say thanks. I ask him to forward me some information or document? Calls me on the phone to tell me he's going to send it. I'm wise to it and usually just let it go to voicemail, but even when I respond later via email, that still triggers a phone call.

there were five big last minute changes requested Monday night to our training schedules for Tuesday. It was aggravating but I accommodated them all. However, one of the changes made the afternoon class size too big.

I initially said to myself "If I split this class in two groups, no matter what steps I take to communicate the change, some of them will not pay attention and not show up". But I also knew if I kept the class together, the time allotted would be insufficient for a class of that size and then the attendees would complain we rushed.

So I bit the poison pill - I emailed everybody that I was moving to the second group in advance to tell them training wasn't cancelled, but they were were being moved to another group, and that they'd get a cancellation message from the original trainer, and a new invite from me. Then we did exactly that, almost a full 24 hours before the session.

Today, I get a manager screaming at me that we "cancelled training and didn't reschedule it" and I had to spend 15 minutes cutting and pasting screencaps to show that we not only did send a new invite minutes later, but we sent an email to them at the end of the day telling them these people didn't attend and to reschedule them.

lol....and yet after the shitty day that was yesterday, getting mad over stuff like this is actually a welcome distraction to me.

xp Billing the company for every call

I wish even that would explain it, all the work they do for us is on a project by project, fixed fee basis so he gets paid the same whether he calls me once, or if he calls me a hundred time.

This one is more just funny haha as an example of just how petty grown ass adults act in the work environment, but I still rolled my damn eyes.

My boss casually mentioned joining another meeting he had already set up and that I should see an invite from Jill Doe shortly, no big deal. So about an hour later I get said invite, click accept and think nothing more of it. About half an hour after that I get cc'ed on an email from Jill Doe to her own department that says, "Team, feel free to include Rando #1, Rando #2 and Rando #3 if they are available. I thought this was going to be a high level discussion with Boss, however, he has invited three people from his team to join the call."

Oh yeah? You're gonna invite three members of your team to call? I can do that too!

this other colleague and I oversee this special training course - he has one half of the classes, I have the other. all year, our boss's boss has wanted us to keep managers updated on weekly attendance, so they can sign up agents that miss for a makeup session.

I have sent the attendance email every week since it was implemented - it takes 5 measly minutes. He has sent a total of one attendance email over 5 months, despite reminder after reminder. At first, I actually did it for him a few times, then I stopped because I was too busy, my attitude being "if you want to fuck up your portion of the project, that's your problem".

So last week I take two much needed days off and I ask him and my boss's boss if one of them can send a daily attendance email for one of my classes, as it was important as they all have to attend by 6/1. Boss's boss asked him if he could do it, he said yes he would, and of course he didn't fuckin' do it.

so I get to deal with the managers angry that they're getting a day's notice to reschedule people.

AND one of the classes he was supervising had technological issues and more than an hour of content wasn't completed (occurred my last day in the office before my PTO). he said he was working on getting the attendees rescheduled, did nothing, brushed off his trainer's question on it without adequately answering it on Friday, so now *I* have to fucking solve it and by tomorrow.

from now on when I take PTO i'm just gonna dump everything on him.

"wanna jump on a call?"
"not really"

but after capitulating i got 20 minutes of me repeating the details i had already written in the slack channel interspersed with him apologising for his Bluetooth connection being shitty.

I hate "wanna jump on a call", so so much

would you trade it all in for a place with no calls, ever, and a large room of cubes with 3 other people who barely ever speak? Beyond this room I'm lucky to get a "good morning" returned. Everybody just checked out.

this place gives me the willies and i can't believe i've been here 4 years.. well kind of 2 given all the pandemic interruptions. I hope it hasn't turned me into a huge(r) weirdo. Somehow I've put together 3 job interviews over the next week, a couple even relevant to some schooling I did. wish me luck

^^^^

I can feel that maffew, the post pandemic era at our office has so demoralized people that it's like walking onto the set of a zombie flick every day. Silence and an air of quiet desperation has settled over everything, just one more reason not being able to work remotely at all stings and saps the life out of me.

solidarity! The thing here is that it was exactly like this before. It's really wild. When I do get some of them to have a chat it isn't bad, but we go right back to zombie mode. I mean hostility would be worse of course but god dam...

Welp I've been here a bit long to think, like, I'm not part of it now. Time to be on my way.

every time someone misses a day of our class, we get asked if we 'recorded' it so they can listen later.

when exactly are they going to find time to listen to an eight hour recording when you have literally every moment of the next two weeks accounted for and aren't approving overtime at the moment? not to mention nobody would ever pay attention ever again if we recorded them ("I can just listen to it later...")

There's a guy from another office currently visiting ours. He's using a guest office next to mine. He's nice enough, but he's very loud. The walls are not particularly thin, and it sounds as though he's sitting next to me.

that was one of the things that really bugged me about office work. tons of loud conversations that are distracting (at best) or things that you shouldn't be privy to hearing.

once sat next to someone who would call her son and basically do nothing but yell at him for fifteen minutes and bang her fists really hard on the desk. she was also hella racist, liked Rick Scott too.

and then this one dude loudly, on speakerphone, would tell his soon to be ex-wife his entire legal strategy and how he was going to destroy her, loud enough for the whole floor to hear.

It's hard to concentrate! I've had my AirPods in most of the day. They help, but not completely.

should blow an airhorn every time he talks

colleague: can you tell me why <name> is on the roster for Pension training?

Me: well, that would be because you signed them up. I don't just randomly send people things.

probably not co-workers but work related. i have to send my laptop back because the battery is bulging more than i can ignore (it's been noticeable for about 3 years but now you can feel it)

anyway, had a note saying that it'll be swapped on Monday and that it should be placed on the original packaging (which i don't have) AND an outer box with 3-6 inches of bubble wrap (which i don't have). but, Saturday today, the shops are open...

just had a text saying they'll be coming between 10:36 and 11:36 this morning, Saturday, and the nearest whsmith is in Westfield which doesn't open until 10 and is 15 minutes away... which is cutting things fine.

it would also help if my packing tape was actually sticky.

(^ my work laptop, hence posting here)

he arrived 5 minutes after 10:36

and the replacement laptop came in really scant packaging, was probably no need for me to be at rymans at 9 this morning buying 10m of plastic coated air for £8.50

I pretty much set my own hours at my job, though usually try to work either 8:30 - 5:00 pm or 9:00 am - 5:30 pm. but on training days, I usually try to be up by 8:30 because of the endless parade of people who aren't registered for a course screaming at me "WHERE'S MY TRAINING INVITE?", because apparently people in 2022 still don't know how to properly sign up for things and think I can read their mind.