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

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!

so re: boss's fuckup this week, it looks like he's trying to frame this as "well, this class's dates weren't finalized so I had no idea when class would start before I went on PTO", which is complete bullshit because you can see in the Tracking Chart's version history that he himself updated the training dates last Monday, indicating a 4/24 start date. Even if these dates weren't final, that should have been enough for him to reach out to the people sponsoring the class and tell them "Reach out to my backup once details are finalized, they will schedule preparation and take care of all of the tasks", and then tell THAT person what they needed to do.

instead he just peaced out and told nobody so now there's like 5 managers working on this. Boss's boss is doing the thing where she's dropping pass agg hints that she may be talking to him about this when he's back, without outright saying so.

re: new job front, it will likely be at least a week or two before I find out the result after I interview (and sometimes there's a second interview). but I think that's fine as I have a really busy May so me starting in a new role in June would be perfect.

good luck!

xpost - thanks, this particular person is open to talking, but one of those things where you walk out of the office feeling heard but then... nothing. I'm not along in that assessment. I figure I'll take another run if (or when) things calm down a bit, right now I sense some instant defensiveness (like, "I'm doing the best I can!") when certain topics come up. Others have totally noted and expressed frustration with the same thing, but haven't had a chance to discuss broaching it as a team (again, the whole busy thing).

We'll see, it's just been a really stressful few weeks and constantly hearing "I know we're busy but..." is killing me a little each time.

"...but what? but what are you gonna do about it? *Flips table with Herculean strength*!"

while they're sitting on it

xp - jon - I think the unified front is a good idea, as well as one of the following:

1. collectively determine what your team feels is possible and comfortable and what you believe the priorities should be, and then framing it as, "helping the boss' boss get a clearer sense of this team that is now their direct responsibility to handle"

2. if your team doesn't have a clear sense of or consensus around it, tell the boss' boss, "As you know, our team is struggling and is feeling a bit overwhelmed right now, what do you see the priorities as right now? We are trying to do all the things, but what are the (pick a small number) of things that are crucial?"

I have a tendency to end up in positions where I'm having to quickly fix problems that former leaders/managers have made (who have either quit or been fired) as well as ... fixing messes in general, so I can kinda relate to the boss' boss position? Maybe? But like, having a good sense of what and whom I'm working with, what resources I have available ... really helps save time and energy from a "new" manager perspective. ... Unless the person is an arrogant asshole who just wants to impose their perception of reality on everyone because "that's how things should be"

is this manager the type of person who will forget all of the things they've assigned you and won't notice if some things aren't finished when they asked?

(cos if so, that's always an idea...lol).

Yeah, I mean I'm sympathetic to the boss' boss also being in a rough position with the relatively abrupt departure at a bad time of year, but there's just no effort to communicate with us, it's just add to the pile, add to the pile, add to the pile. I brought it up lightly and delicately in my last one on one, just to get it out there and test the waters, but the boss' boss immediately switched to a defensive mode that really wasn't productive, so I didn't push it.

Trying to work on the united front thing but it's hard, as a result of the increased workload we are hardly ever in the same together at the same time, much less even schedule time to talk.

I mean, I get it and anticipated this transition period to be a struggle and a little rocky, I just think a productive discussion about the realities would be helpful for all of us. Like, the boss' boss is ultimately the one who looks bad when things fall through the crack, so you'd think they'd want to have a grasp on what feels reasonable.

Yeah, there are definitely some minor things that aren't ultimately important anyway that fall by the wayside, but not enough to make my plate feel any lighter.

that's kinda what I was thinking in a way ... like, if you have a tacit agreement about what things are the most important, then the other things, if you drop the ball and just pass the buck without acrimony ... the "without acrimony" part is key tho, because otherwise you end up with circular firing squad of "well, B didn't do that," and "Oh, you're one to talk, C, you didn't do that other thing."

I feel like managers in general get tunnel vision with their stress rather than 'sharing' the stress with the people below who are also impacted (probably moreso) and turning it more into a team-building opportunity.

one results in everybody being unhappy, the latter results in reduction of stress and finding solutions

sarahell otm.

I just think a productive discussion about the realities would be helpful for all of us. Like, the boss' boss is ultimately the one who looks bad when things fall through the crack, so you'd think they'd want to have a grasp on what feels reasonable.

exactly! no one enjoys failure. So ... let's figure out a way to not fail by being realistic.

Yeah, sarahell definitely otm, the difficulty lies in that working in an academia serving capacity, it can get really tricky to navigate which ones might or might not come back to bite you in the ass. Definitely run into a few cases of someone casually asking me for something and adding, "but only if you get a chance, it's totally understandable if you don't have time now" turn into two weeks later an email to senior leadership about how their request was being "ignored".

oh! that's really great ... ugh

ultimately the goal at work should be to accomplish a task, and when something doesn't go according to plan, to figure out what happened and if it's preventable next time. actually casting blame at an individual should only be a secondary necessity, where in the course of investigating what happened, a significant gaffe or performance issue was identified.

but with wages being flat alongside inflation and growing living expenses and the 'at-will' states many people live in, not to mention the hair-trigger tempers of Executives, I think many employees have sort of been conditioned into a "point fingers first to get the heat off of me" type work environment. (note I'm not excusing this behavior - management and leaders exist so they can create a culture of trust so people DON'T do this backstabby shit - but they themselves are often just as guilty of this if not more!).

Oh it definitely happens a lot, particularly when you get into the complicated relationships that evolve once you have contractors, owner's reps, architects, engineers and others all doing their thing. Fortunately I learned this lesson very early on in my career and I've gotten to be really good at documentation and keeping the receipts.

One of the perks is watching someone shrivel down after their ill-considered finger pointing attempt is stymied by literally one email I've kept.