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

sort of lost the conversation thread but just wanted to respond to this.

I've worked in places where I've ended up really close to people and I've worked in places where I've known the people just are not for me. I know that in most contexts I'm not an easy person to get on with - niche interests, strong political beliefs shaping everything I do, unconventional home life and background - it can be hard to relate, on both my side and for anyone who gets to know me. I don't go the cinema or pay attention to any sports so a lot of small talk stuff doesn't work either. So it does make the idle chatter at work a little trickier. But I find that it's really easy to build rapport simply by taking an interest in people and asking some questions about specifics. "What's his name and how did you meet?" "What did you pick from the menu and was it good?" "Would you recommend it if you haven't seen the first one?"

i really appreciate this perspective. i've gotten better at asking people these kinds of questions. being "interested in others" at work. it does still feel like an act though, because deep inside i still long to be known and loved - there's a hole there from what can be summarized as "queer boy raised in conservative environment who has had to cut off his family". obviously stuff for therapy. but anyway my tolerance for being the "considerate gay man who is always interested in your straight & strong hetero family life usually with mormon cultural stuff involved" is not always there. part of this is the fact that i live in the mormon capital of the world, and my "respectable" state job attracts a lot of those kind of people. the other type of person it attracts is "respectable liberal" which also feels like a club i've been rejected from, somewhat by choice. i've also found difficulty in relating to others in my "less respectable" workplace at the gay bar where i dj, because queer people here all have this burden of trauma from being raised in the fucked up conservative background and many of them have really maladaptive responses to that that i don't want to get wrapped up in. it truly feels like i've reached the end of the line in the place where i live, like there are only so many "types" of people who live here and i'm just fucking bone-tired of all of them.

anyway, this is a funny conversation timing-wise, because a position opened up where i work that would be a significant pay raise. it requires conflict resolution skills and knowledge of records law. conflict resolution i am actually pretty good at i think. records law i find boring but could learn more enthusiastically if it was in the service of helping people reach solutions. i may have been ruled out already - this is the kind of position that the director here likely has some leads / recruiting in the bag for. i think i'm going to apply anyway though. even though i'm just civil but honestly cold and withdrawn when it comes to interacting with anyone here including administrators.

There is nothing sadder than seeing someone hang out with people they work with outside of work.

i'm going to assume this hyperbole and not the incredibly judgmental/ignorant statement it reads as.
one thing i loved about my industry is the creative/interesting/funny people it attracts. some of my best friends are former coworkers. my gf is a former coworker. i couldn't imagine working in a place filled with people i had a screaming desire to not be around.

that's not to say there's anything wrong with not doing work social events. even in my industry people understand that some people are introverts or private (or even in recovery) etc.

and even tho i enjoyed the odd work from home day before coivd, i've been 100% remote since i started working again and i am miserable. i miss the people. i feel like i've been in prison for the last 2-3 years. like my growth as a person has been stunted. i'm hearing less new music, going to way fewer events, learning about fewer books/docs etc etc etc – all stuff i'd have happening if i had that group of smart energetic people i used to be surrounded by. of course some people are duds; but idiots and dead weight tend to get culled from this business. and i guess i just did not realize how hard of a time i have been having until i typed all this out just now

generally speaking i wonder if it would be possible to feel more joy at work? instead of just grudging tiredness or dread all the time. which leads me to think that maybe i need a career change. no idea what that would be though. which reminds me i need to get back to therapy with a good therapist i can't find and don't have the money for. xp

There is nothing sadder than seeing someone hang out with people they work with outside of work.

actually this is "funny" because last week, me & my co-worker went out to lunch because we had to go to a work site, and in the main room of the restaurant were a table of people who also worked together who were having the type of interactions that I'm sure this statement is based on observing ... the guy who was obviously the boss making a dumb joke and the underlings dutifully laughing, and I think there was bro-y mentions of targets and deliverables.

do you all have co-workers as FB friends?

Something like 98% of my Facebook friends are musicians, fellow writers, or people employed in the music industry. Maybe twenty of those are people I shared physical office space with at one point or another. The remaining 2% are two or three blood relatives and two or three people I went to high school with.

yeah I guess the music industry would have more social media networking than, say, mine. that's what i see with the concert promoters i'm friends with as well.

apparently my good friend (the one I referenced upthread) has virtual whiskey drinking sessions w/ his boss. that's p cool.

ok I'm not *that* optimistic about work relations, that does not sound cool

drinking w coworkers = definitely a situation i will never be in, mostly because i don't drink anymore

Thanks for your followups, map, cuz the initial post struck me as bleak. I'm coming out of an office where it was like I was strange for bothering to say "good morning". Awful place with mostly ok people when you did have occasion to chat a bit. Terrible workplace cultures can be like that. I avoided any of their (infrequent) extracurriculars because they were horribly awkward. I got by with just friendly greetings and a personal commitment to not spending a solitary unpaid minute in the place (breaktime walks). Clear to me now that I stayed too long.

i did a line of blow towards the end of a shift once (was at a friend's house, we were having a weekend long party after work, and I'd brought my laptop to finish the day). and got a tough work question ten minutes later that only I was left to answer, thankfully they didn't ask me to jump on a call.

anyway i don't recommend that

I mean, I've never tried it, but I understand that coke really puts you at peak performance for at least a few minutes.

If you’re accustomed to it. If you’re really bowled over you will be a rambling, jaw gyrating disaster.

it didn't put me at peak anything. one reason i quit doing it, that and it raised my already high heart rate

having good managers/colleagues makes such a huge difference in my case. I’m not someone who needs to be praised a whole lot or at all really, but there’s a strong culture of gratitude in my department that is really infectious. Everyone is nice, respectful, my manager is incredibly compassionate and organized and is always giving me opportunities to grow my skill set. I believe the cause of the org I work for passionately. Also, I have such respect and admiration for the “important” people I support,
I get real satisfaction out of helping them, relieving their stress, making their to-do list smaller… it maybe sounds all fake nice or something to an outsider but it’s real and it’s powerful.

otm. my last boss was very much the opposite of my previous one - the boss I had when I first moved over here was an establishment asshole, she frequently reacted negatively to you sharing concerns, stated you shouldn't 'make noise', and even intimated PTO could be 'unapproved'. Frequently made decisions that fucked over a lot of people and didn't give a shit. last boss would move mountains for you but wasn't a pushover either, and firmly believed in work/life balance and helping achieve that.

it really does trickle down. I'm a team player to begin with but ultimately found myself being more willing to help my teammates out when my basic needs were being tended to. it actually meant a lot to me to hear so many of the people I'm coaching say they appreciate how I make myself available and go out of my way to help because once upon a time in my career, I was considered to be a Terrell Owens.

ok something a little more relevant to map’s specific revive: even thought I really like my colleagues and managers a lot, I would be terrified to have a “social hour” with most of them because I am very guarded irl and have big time vulnerability hangovers (s/o brené brown). BUT, the two “work development” retreats we’ve had have been really wonderful and uplifting and just super good feels, heart emojis all around.

But when I worked retail with some other music obsessives, we would ALWAYS go out drinking after work but I was in my twenties and it was just a totally different dynamic, and it was cathartic to let loose together in a way. And I mean, I bought weed from one of these people.

Yes, Execs, abruptly shifting almost all of our proprietary or semi-proprietary software to commercial cloud solutions all around the same time was a monumentally stupid idea, not least because you often need to reach out to a third party to diagnose issues but half of the solutions you bought made previously simple processes much more complicated.

Enjoy your increased stock prices though.

(If I get the new role I'll be leaving this cesspit thankfully)

feeling pretty pissed today. i have to present to a committee almost every month on behalf of government agencies who want to get r3cords ret3ntion sch3dules approved. one committee member in particular is just out there, a grandstander who frequently loses focus and goes off the rails, doesn't really have anything at stake (useless journalism professor at shit local university). he was needlessly antagonistic to my agency today. i didn't say anything out of line but i was rolling my eyes and mouthing things pretty hard during the virtual meeting with my camera on. he sent me an email shortly after the meeting ended with a bunch of questions that he wanted "addressed in the next meeting" way beyond the scope of the matters being discussed. i replied that his questions were best directed to the agency, and that "with all due respect, you might see a more productive outcome with a less antagonistic tone." my boss was cced on all of this. she's the kind of person who will absolutely throw you under the bus at the faintest breath of someone more powerful than you. no response from anyone. can't stop replaying all this bullshit in my head. i don't get paid enough to deal diplomatically with these stupid jerk offs. i find it impossible to just let them run over me. at this point in my career if i can find a somewhat tactful way to say 'fuck off' to these kinds of people i will. i feel really at the end of my rope right now. might take some sick hours tomorrow morning. i hardly have any left because i have to give myself breaks from my awful boss so often. FUCK

still trying to parse out how much of a mistake that email response was. i clearly sound upset and didn't respond to any of his questions but the point isn't invalid. i need a break from this meeting, not going to be attending next month's if at all possible. and i gave myself two hours off tomorrow morning for an 'appointment'.

So I have a job that is officially split between two different roles (but probably closer to three in practice), one of which is more straightforward project management and the other is a behind the scenes role that keeps our workplace management system software up to date. The former requires your usual collaboration and meetings with consultants, etc etc. The latter is very much more a solitary thing, lots of updating CAD floor plans to reflect built conditions, populating occupants, running reports for various departments, etc etc.

Anyway, this particular co-worker keeps making comments in meetings along the lines of, "jon/via/chi 2.0 has plenty of time to chip in, his calendar isn't very full!" or, "you've got nothing to do today, do you? that's a completely clear calendar!". When, in fact, those no obvious meeting days are amongst my busiest because that's when I'm able to cram in all of the behind the scenes stuff that builds up while I'm doing the other half of my job. I've reminded this coworker politely several times of this dual role and my other responsibilities, but they keep making these dumbass comments and it makes my skin crawl - especially when other people's eyes light up with ideas of tasks they can pawn off on me. Ultimately the important people (i.e. my boss and leadership) know what I do and understand the importance, but this newer employee is a blatant ladder climber and sees any opening to diminish what I do as a chance to inflate their own importance. I'm just afraid my friendly reminders are going to become less and less friendly.

tl;dr version - the volume of meetings one sits through every day does not necessarily reflect the level of effort one puts into their job, so stfu ding-dong

if you proposed in one of those meetings that you'd have more time if you had someone sharing that secondary responsibility, would they volunteer themself?

if not, might be fun to throw out there to call the bluff

Have you done the passive aggressive “as we’ve discussed already… yadda yadda” when they offer you up for projects?
If you’re worried they are making you look bad, I’d probably talk to my superior (or theirs) about their behaviour, since you’ve talked to them directly. Maybe suggest they hire a dedicated person for the solitary job if people keeping wanting to send you extra work?

update your calendar to reflect what you actually do.

lol I like the idea of calling that bluff mh, not sure how well received it would be. Definitely have tried the passive aggressive route, but this particular coworker just seems kind of oblivious. I know I'm not the only one put off by their communication style. Mostly just triggers the part of me that hates when anyone judges the quality of one's work solely by the amount of meetings they suffer through.

"jon/via/chi 2.0 has plenty of time to..."

Stand up, slam your hands on the table, shout "TAKE MY NAME OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MOUTH."

haha, i mean...

something along the lines of "bitch, i'm busy" is what i would say. maybe without "bitch." but i seem incapable of setting my boundaries without scaring other people. on the other hand, scaring other people has been somewhat effective for me!

a little show of teeth can be very effective ime

"i need you to stop volunteering my time, i do important things you don't need to know about all day, every day."

is this Outlook? cos this would be a great time to like, create a private meeting for all day, every day, so you appear busy all day. though that then makes it impossible for other people to know when you're free.

or you can just update your daily calendar to reflect all the tasks that you do and make the contents of your meetings only visible to this co-worker. you can create them all passive-aggressive, like...let's say the co-worker's name was Stewart:

9:00 - 10:00 am - "Review Files that Stewart is too stupid to understand"
10:00 am - 10:30 am - "Think about how stupid Stewart is and laugh"
10:30 - 11:00 am - "Fix each thing Stewart screwed up"
11:00 am - 1:00 pm - "Continue fixing the things Stewart screwed up"
1:00 pm - 1:30 pm - "Lunch, and also thinking about how stupid Stewart is"
1:30 pm - 2:00 pm - "Work on Excel file, which Stewart could never understand"

etc

haha

if your manager is of the right temperament you can always say "you can ask my manager about my workload at any time"

yep - not a bad idea there too!

kinda glad my team isn't really like that. we go through ebbs and flows, and most of us offer up our free time to each other when someone needs help, but nobody demands it from anybody, which is how it should be (and fuck it, even if you're not all that busy, you should be able to enjoy those lulls, because you sure as fuck aren't going to have them forever).

in 2011, I was part of a team that handled tickets, and managers used an Excel tool that estimated the daily work hours for everyone. The creator himself admitted it was a flawed tool that largely couldn't take complexity of tasks into account, but managers treated it as gospel. If you assigned four tasks to yourself that the Excel tool estimated as 4 hours of work, but you took 8 hours to do it as one or two of them were complex tasks, you got chewed out for taking on "too little work".

We complained about it, managers were not listening to our complaints, so I gamed the system. I knew the Excel formula assigned one hour to any call-review ticket, so my last two months, I would deliberately find tickets with one call to review that lasted 5 minutes or less, assigned 8-10 of them to myself everyday, and got praise for all of the 'hard work' I was doing. so the system would show me doing 8-10 hours of work when I'd be doing maybe 1-2 hours of it. felt zero guilt for it either - they decided to reward the appearance of doing work, so many of us made it work in our favor.

then the department dissolved and I moved to a department that gave me an instant promotion/raise. win-win.

"i need you to stop volunteering my time, i do important things you don't need to know about all day, every day."

Should be a sign to hang

i'm giggling at this one (mostly cos it's not my problem to fix).

we rolled out new telephony software with a live date of 3/30 for this team. during requirements, they specifically asked the dev team to record their personal, non-business lines, because they often give out their direct # to clients. during the training sessions, the trainers and I repeated that these lines would be recorded per their request.

Yesterday, one of the managers comes to the dev team panicked, saying "there's a government agency we call where the call can't be recorded, how do we turn recording off?", and the dev manager is pissed, telling them you can't just hit a button and turn it off and on, and showing them the requirements they agreed to, and asking how nobody thought of this in the 1.5 months of development.

this week was rough. i've decided i'm actively looking for a new job now. my boss is a huge problem who makes me very angry. it turns out you can't be a wannabe tyrant, executively incompetent (adhd?), pretend everything is fine and not your fault actually, and have anyone sane like you, unless your own boss is a slimy coward who benefits from the dysfunction.

best of luck and hope you're able to find a new job. your manager sounds like a nightmare.

little more of a serious thing today, but an HR complaint came out in regards to a class I supervised (but did not lead) recently. not necessarily anything to do with me or the trainers (I have no idea what it's about). But one of the trainers, who works for a partner site that we work with, was invited to a confidential meeting to discuss the complaint.

She wasn't sure if she should attend, largely because she's technically not an employee of my company (and I have no idea what the co-employment laws are in regards to HR compelling a testimony). The correct move would be to ask her manager, who would reach up to the leader of her company if needed, but instead, she inexplicably asked me, while also sharing a screenshot of the invite, making me aware of a confidential investigation that I wasn't supposed to know anything about.

it's probably not a huge deal, as it didn't have any specific details about the investigation, but nonetheless now puts me into a position where I have to be careful to respond correctly, otherwise it'll give the appearance that I interfered, albeit accidentally, with the investigation.

eventually just pulled back and said that neither me nor my manager should really be giving direction here, and to reach out to their manager/location leader, who can follow up with my company's leaders if they need to.

of course, 30 minutes before me taking three days off, lol.

(most likely, the complaint is about one of the students, who probably broke the code of conduct at some point or something. who knows)

the chair of my department, a nice enough guy who seems in over his head and also seems blazingly incompetent as an admin, has consistently scheduled events and meetings during one of my classes that many of my students are compelled to attend.
at first i thought it was just a quirky thing, but it actually seems to be a weird pattern— there are few to no events at other times. i am guessing that the day of the week is the best time for him, schedule-wise, and so he basically just forgot that other classes exist…even tho he makes the schedule lmfao.

at this juncture i can’t complain too much— but jfc it is tiresome and really disruptive to deal with students having to leave or miss class all the time. one student even said it seemed akin to bullying!!

The correct move would be to ask her manager, who would reach up to the leader of her company if needed

gonna guess this is the actions of someone with a lousy manager they feel they can't trust

possibly.

in other news, STILL haven't had an interview scheduled for the new position, and it's been almost a month. I checked with the recruiter a week and a half ago and was assured (with somewhat of an annoyed tone) that I was still going to be interviewed, but the interviewer was in and out of the office the past few weeks. unless the guy spent a month in Cabo, having a hard time understanding how he couldn't even SCHEDULE the interview yet, even if it's set for far in the future.

having been through this cycle on both sides, as interviewer, and interviewee, this is abnormal, as usually you get interviewed a few weeks after your pre-screen. it feels like something is amiss but holding out hope. not the end of the world by any means, I still have a job obv.

pretty much had a warning meeting today, presented as 'performance coaching,' but from my manager's follow-up email it looks like a semi-official write-up. she had the director there / on her side. do some agreed upon in writing things or risk getting fired. lots of other stuff too including some snaky things from an unnamed "coworker". feels like she wants me fired. putting all the energy i can into search for a new job. in the meantime need to doggy paddle at this one to hold onto it because i have no backup right now and i don't want to be homeless.

thankfully "stop posting to ilx" was not a listed item ; )

can't sleep, feeling like such a stupid fuck-up. time to move on but the future looks worse. years of twiddling my thumbs, no skills, i hate my career choice but i have no idea what direction to move in.

boss takes a week vacay, despite assigning no backup to a class he was supposed to be supervising, so we got a frantic email from one of the instructors asking why two days in, no preparation had started yet. because I asked the big boss about it, now I've been asked to take over, because whomever smelt it dealt it.

he also randomly assigned me two classes to 'support' from tomorrow through next Tuesday, without telling me and without giving me any instructions as to what I'm supposed to be doing.

this is all very much inspiration fuel for my interview on Monday.

Ugh, that's obnoxious. Sending all of the good luck vibes for Monday, you'll knock it out of the park.

Feeling completely overwhelmed here now. My boss resigned suddenly about a month ago for a better position (win in the long run, but making the short term hellish) and we've got one key team member out on maternity leave for another few months. Despite constantly acknowledging how short we are, boss's boss (now my boss for the near future) is just cramming through new initiatives and launching new projects left and right. Everyone is super stressed and I can see imminent burnout on a few people as I type, but every meeting starts with, "I know we are all struggling and behind, BUT I'd like to start adding XYZ to our plates...". The disconnect is infuriating.

map, wishing you luck in your search for a new job. it sounds like you're stuck with a manager that will always impede your growth so hopefully you'll be able to find less choppy waters elsewhere.

jon, I hate 'acknowledgement culture', where people think acknowledging the problem is sufficient relief for beleaguered employees. that and "gift cards" to thank people for going through needless Hell. I know boss's bosses are often very disconnected from reality and the needs of those on the ground - how well do you know them, are they receptive to feedback or are they more the dismissive type? and is there a search for boss's replacement?

Just wondering if meeting with teammates behind the scenes and then trying to unified present your concerns would be helpful, or if this boss is the more dismissive type? at the very least, they need to answer for what they plan to DO about the fact that you're all struggling/behind.

hope things improve for you all soon!