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

there could def. be potential areas of privilege on my end, but I have asked for ways to communicate better that would better suit this person and that hasn't happened, and I don't think anything excuses getting yelled at/berated like that

I guess the way I see it (and what I was getting at with my questions) is:

A. You have a shitty work situation with this coworker and something should be done to make it less shitty
B. These factors may play a role in making it shitty, and may also affect how you can get things to be less shitty

Thanks and yeah I agree on A and B. There are def factors going on here way out of my control

To: All
Subject: Dogs ROCK!, so do cats different ways

hear them out

tbh i appreciated that subject line

he's a fan of dogs, but does not want to alienate cat owners. though the body of the email shows it was just a token gesture.

Always been fascinated with the dog-human evolutionary partnership past and present:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dog-evolution-60-minutes-2022-11-27/

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/dog-cancer-trials-comparative-oncology-60-minutes-video-2022-11-27/

i was not allowed to take PTO until October, so I had to burn most of my PTO in November/this week. I have to teach a class next week and needed to send invites, so I did what I always do - logged in for 5 minutes to send the invites and pop back off.

instead, it took over an hour because a bunch of assholes in Operations decided to enroll 50+ extra people in a class that was originally 10, which forced my teammates to scramble and find 3-4 other teachers and split the class in three.

Then they continued to make changes in the days after this, and rosters were sent through multiple emails and the official roster, and none of them matched at all.

I finally figured out that the official roster was mostly correct but that someone in Ops this morning requested to remove six of the people and nobody had seen it or made updates. I (quite rudely, admittedly) fixed the invites and sent them and ended by saying "btw, this is VERY CONFUSING" and making it a point of how I had to work far beyond what I had planned during my PTO due to the lack of clarity.

amazes me how dim-witted some of our higher paid employees are.

has it occurred to any of them that they might do better on retention if the onboarding process were not constantly fucking everyone involved in it

lol - i gave up shouting at them about that the sixth time they jedi-handwaved it away as "things that happen".

meanwhile, i have a friend who works at a competitor and she was listing all of her clients and I was like "those....used to be our clients, 5 years ago".

the good news at least is we just hired new people and I'll get to mentor for a bit which is fine and a thing I like doing. we're doubling our headcount for the first time since 2018.

apparently setting up Out of Office messages is a forgotten art.

One manager decided to take two weeks off, never set up an OOO message, left without telling his reports who to contact in his absence, leaving chaos behind him.

another did set one up, but it refers to people who claim to have no knowledge of why he's referring to them.

facilitator: Accidental Death and Dismemberment isn't like a life insurance, it only pays out if you lose a limb or the loss of a limb.

students: But it says it pays in the event of death.

facilitator: well it's not a life insurance, we'll talk about it in a bit, but it's not like a life insurance.

me: actually it is, you see the word DEATH appears in the title, and it does pay out in the event of death, if the death is due to an accident of some type. whereas other life insurances pay out for any type of death (with a few exclusions).

facilitator: (awkward silence) oh.

more an "lol r u serious" moment than anything to be mad about

my co-worker is currently practicing more radical acts of vacationing ... dude works really hard so it isn't like he's lazy but ... it's a bit awkward when I have to respond to a client he was supposed to get in touch with that "he's on vacation again" ... and this client has been waiting on my co-worker to complete a project for months.

I ended up euphemistically stating, "I think he is somewhere without cell reception today"

lol the having to lie for co-workers is always fun.

should make the lie embarrassing next time

"hate to tell you this....loads and loads of diarrhea. yeah.....yeah his house is completely sealed as cleaning crews get to work. yeah....possibly contagious. mmhmm."

hahahaha

this is a guy who at one point a couple years ago had his work laptop stolen, so he got a rental laptop, which his cat knocked a glass of water over onto, frying parts of it ... and he was too embarrassed/afraid to report this to the laptop rental company ...

update: so apparently the co-worker's car broke down while on vacation and they were gone an extra unplanned day while waiting to have it fixed in the idyllic beachfront area where they were vacationing ...

Did their phone also break down

he had no/bad reception, however his wife apparently had much better reception as she posted video of said idyllic beachfront area on Insta ....

nothing will top the time several years ago where he had scheduled a meeting with me for later in the week but had forgotten that he was leaving for a two week family vacation in Tuscany the day before our scheduled meeting ...

Lol brutal.

I had someone I was supervising on a project go on a winter vacation to Tennessee. This was a habitually negligent employee that never finished assignments on time and eventually was laid off for performance.

The general rule in our dept was "take your PTO and use it, but you better be done with outstanding assignments or have worked out a backup plan with your PM". Nobody ran afoul of this typically so it never really came up... except with her. She insisted she'd finish the assignment in the week leading up, refused my offers to get someone to help, then didn't finish.

They again refused my offer to bring someone into help, offered to work during the last few days of vacation to finish.

They apparently forgot about the snowy winters in TN, were driving there and back, and lost two days of travel due to a snowstorm, only getting home day before training began. Didn't do any work.

I wound up doing it all. A year later, I asked to leave the project manager role lol

Lol brutal.

I had someone I was supervising on a project go on a winter vacation to Tennessee. This was a habitually negligent employee that never finished assignments on time and eventually was laid off for performance.

The general rule in our dept was "take your PTO and use it, but you better be done with outstanding assignments or have worked out a backup plan with your PM". Nobody ran afoul of this typically so it never really came up... except with her. She insisted she'd finish the assignment in the week leading up, refused my offers to get someone to help, then didn't finish.

They again refused my offer to bring someone into help, offered to work during the last few days of vacation to finish.

They apparently forgot about the snowy winters in TN, were driving there and back, and lost two days of travel due to a snowstorm, only getting home day before training began. Didn't do any work.

I wound up doing it all. A year later, I asked to leave the project manager role lol

Oops soz for dub post

it was appropriate in context lol

HR tried to ask us today if we could catch up a learner who misses a lot of material by recording the training session on MS Teams. besides the practical reasons this wouldn't work, they apparently aren't familiar with wiretap/eavesdropping laws, which would require us to get permission from all learners in 2-party states before recording.

while technically we record other meetings, we do disclose it, and it's easier to get away with because a) often times the people in recorded meetings aren't doing any talking themselves, b) the meetings are short, and c) if they don't want to be recorded, they're allowed to just leave, no harm no foul.

a new hire cannot voluntarily leave training, and are going to be doing a LOT of talking, and might view it as creepy surveillance. if they don't agree to being recorded, we'd have to stop abruptly.

so one of our new hires was struggling in class and we put them on a 3-day improvement plan, and the TM has transparently tried to interfere in the process, trying to pressure the instructors to fail her on the plan since Day 1 (which would end her employment).

she wound up passing, and he is refusing to budge. I am in process of determining whether I go to HR to complain about his interference. As it stands, if we did fail her now and she complained to HR, I am 100% sure they would side with her, noting in the email trail that it seemed the TM was pushing for a result before it even began.

and this is after I explained this to him multiple times over three days. at this point just to spite him I would have passed her even if she showed up to the session and took a shit on camera.

does the shitting relate to her job duties? I mean, if someone takes a shit on camera and there is no one there to watch it?

Goddamn, please just quit. Please. You are miserable here, I get it. But please stop subjecting the rest of us to the constant complaints and bitching, the negativity you radiate is soul destroying.

Thought you were referring to an ilx poster, which would’ve been reasonable

Ha, no. Just a co-worker that is driving me particularly nuts today. I've been out of the office for about three weeks dealing with a series of family emergencies so, admittedly, my priorities and what is actually important have shifted, but her constant bitching and complaining about everything are soul-draining today. Sure, there are valid frustrations worth venting about, but she actively seeks out new things to be miserable about and absolutely insists on rubbing those miserable things in other peoples' faces.

I mean, not to belabor the point, but this is just a small sample of quote from her during just the three hours I've been in the office with her:

"I hate his fucking face, retire already dude"
"Don't fucking call me, I sent you an email"
"Oh my god, I can't believe they gave (random person x) this new title, that's absolute bullshit"
"Oh and look, (random person y) got a promotion, what an absolute slap in the fucking face"
"Just seeing his car makes me so angry"
"I've only cried about this place three times this week"

"I order you to be quiet!"

see as much as I ever griped about my own company, out loud outbursts are something I'd consider out of bounds when I was in an office. nobody wants to hear my internal monologue and being on the receiving end of it is massively aggravating. if ya gotta vent, find a vent buddy and do so electronically, and make sure you listen to them vent too (like me and my boss's boss).

like i'd be tempted to tell that woman "this isn't your private suite here, other people can hear you". we used to have one who would loudly berate her kid on the phone and bang her fist on the desk aggressively. and another one who'd go on loud rants until his boss came over to him and said "I'm tired of having people complain to me about you - do you hear yourself?"

*about you to me!

Oh she knows very well that other people can hear her, these aren't outbursts, she specifically walks over to other people to share these thoughts. Headphones are no deterrent, she wants the audience and if you don't at least acknowledge her complaint of the minute, she'll keep throwing more at you until you engage to her satisfaction. It's exhausting.

You can't tell her to leave you alone?

xpost - lol, as I was typing that last one she walked back over to complain about some email she got. One would think after my tenth straight noncommittal grunt in response, she'd get a hint, but nope. As another coworker, he days are filled with reminding us that she's the main character around here.

As professionally and non-confrontationally as I can, yes. Multiple times. It doesn't phase her.

"another coworker says, her days"

Anyway, she's always been like this. I don't know if it's just gotten worse while I was away from the office, or I'm just much more sensitive to it after the personal challenges I've had, but good lord it's just a neverending stream. I think the problem is that the two other people in the office she does this to openly encourage her bitching.

Seems like someone should fire her tbqh

If only. She's been threatening to quit since I started four years ago, but sadly absolutely zero follow-through on that. She's very good at holding her complaints in when anyone with any power whatsoever is within earshot.

she may be annoying, but she's not stupid

I would be strongly tempted to tell her exactly what Jon posted.

my company fired someone toxic like this back in 2006. she was about 65 years old, claimed to everyone she was married to a 'rich' husband, didn't 'need' this job but wanted it because she liked helping customers (despite complaining about every one of them), would claim to not be racist and use phrases like "towelhead", also shared someone's confidential HIV diagnosis with another colleague without his permission.

it still took two years to get rid of her due to our HR always wanting to 'give another chance'.

jon have you considered playing grindcore really loudly so that it bleeds out of your headphones and she can hear it? and then point at your headphones and shrug every time she comes over?

lol that wouldn't work but it'd be fun trolling.

lol, I was actually listening to Cattle Decapitation earlier when she came over.

I mean, I've literally picked up my earbuds and put them back in my ears while she's talking at me, I think I'll have to be even more direct.

time to bring in an airhorn

Remind me again, jvc, do you have an HR dependent at your work? I would absolutely talk with them about this if so, though I think you probably have exhausted this avenue already.

I have not formally pursued that path yet, no. Our HR process is extremely formal and distant, and I've heard a few horror stories about how they've handed some complaints in the past.

I think I need to document some specific ways she's impacting my work, otherwise I feel like my complaints might be dismissed as churlish whining.

Maybe you can just tell her "you're too blessed to be stressed" and then discuss the bowel movements of a member of your family? Idk ... like, this seems like something that can be resolved with direct communication. Just tell her straight up that you know this job is frustrating but you're trying to get through the day and hearing her complain makes it worse for you, and you have other serious personal shit going on and you don't have the capacity to listen to her while you're at work. Straight up.

The problem there is that then it becomes about whether jvc says something that she could find objectionable and complain about— not that you would, jvc, but I think that your strategy is a better response. sarahell’s is much funnier, admittedly lol