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

it's worth sending an initial message with the barest bones of what you're thinking to see what direction your coworkers will misunderstand things

human communication is difficult if not impossible

re sarah’s predicament

i find too this happens so much when coworkers get asks from higherups

they refuse to draw on information they already have ~especially~ if the answer is “no we don’t have that”
instead they just push it down the chain VP IS ASKING FOR THIS DO WE HAVE IT so that i am then the one on record saying “no we dont have that we never had it and if one more person asks i’m taking you all with me”

it’s like they think the seniority of the person asking somehow magically changes the answer idk

magical thinking for sure

some of said people are probably pedants that think it's ridiculous that it was wrong the first time and subconsciously manifest that resentment into forgetfulness about subsequent instructions, but that's probably a huge oversimplification.

― linoleum gallagher (Neanderthal), Monday, July 31, 2023 12:07 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think this is a perceptive observation tbh

also I rarely do multiple drafts unless it's a super sensitive thing where I am representing others and they should have input, though I re-write and edit as I go ... and then have to go back a final time to make sure I don't have any grammatical errors from rewording things.

My "key thing" is to always put the thing I want the other person/people to do/respond to in the first paragraph.

If they have to spend more than 2 minutes reading/looking for what I expect them to do/hope that they will do ... I have noticed that they will be way more prone to ignore the whole thing.

Of course, if your goal is to have them ignore it or just realize it isn't worth spending the time and you clearly have it all thought through and know what you're doing and they would be thrilled to just let you do what you are proposing to do so that they can avoid it ... (which sometimes, tbh, is the goal) then definitely bury the lede.

more like "bitch about your asshole co-workers" but today that person is me.

I was rushing around all morning putting out all kinds of fires for my team and that's when I tend to make mistakes. so I mistakenly report that someone didn't take an assessment (despite them insisting they did the day before), only to find out they did, but it showed on a different screen, which I knew but forgot in the heat of the moment.

obviously I rushed to announce I had made a mistake, took accountability, and said I will do better next time (fortunately within minutes of the notification going out), but I feel like a humongous asshole. that could have gotten someone in trouble if I hadn't been quick to catch my mistake. :(

i mean i'm not afraid of repercussions or anything, I have no problem saying "shit I fucked up", but it is just upsetting to me when I do things like this carelessly that could impact other people.

Two months ago I was invited to sit in an hour and a half training for software that I will never use, designed for a department I never work with, in a capacity that is about as far removed from my actual job as anything could possibly be. I was invited because the third-party software vendor worked with me previously on developing a completely separate software solution. It was a wasted 90 minutes for me, but these things happen. They've been trying to schedule a 2 hour follow-up for several weeks now and since I was on the the previous training session, I've been copied on all the communications for trying to set up the new one. When questions of scheduling came up, I clearly stated several times that they should schedule without me as there is no need for me to attend. Last Friday the software vendor contact in charge of setting up the training even called me to ask if it was fine if he left me off the invite, I responded with an enthusiastic yes.

Fast forward to yesterday. A co-worker forwarded me the invite, copied everyone even tangentially involved, and added, "Oops! Looks like you forgot to include jon/via/chi! I'm adding him now". As I was drafting my response about not attending, my boss' boss hopped in with, "Great! I'm so glad jon/via/chi can attend now, I can jump on a different, conflicting call instead".

Infinite facepalms and an afternoon's productivity lost.

i often wonder about people who have jobs where they have the agency and autonomy to fill their work schedules with totally pointless activities that are mostly trainings and meetings. As in, they choose these things. They somehow see them as productive and relevant. Perhaps they have their own message board called MDXor.com where they complain about their co-workers who are people like us?

mdxor 1: I can't believe jon doesn't want to participate in this training. So what if it's something he will never use? He should just do it because YOLO
mdxor 2: otm - who doesn't like learning about all the software solutions?

lol yes, the co-worker in question who snitched me into the training absolutely looooooves trainings, she volunteers for them and watches the ones she can't attend on replay later (there's an argument to be made that this is due to a failure in our management to give her enough to do, but that's a separate type of complaint I have)

is she a "live laugh love" person too?

meanwhile yesterday I filled out a survey for one of my workplaces, because we were going to get paid to do it. No one else had responded to the request, so I did it. One of the questions was about our "governance structure" ... options were "hierarchical", "distributed" and "other" ... I chose "other" and put "non-hierarchical/chaotic"

xp - ha, now that you mention it... not exactly, but i can see how she's whatever the younger millennial version of that might be called. like 10 years ago she 100% would have been a "live laugh love" person, but is young enough to consider that tacky so it's all "notorious RBG" swag on her desk.

here they've changed the training system so everyone has to do the mandatory training again. it's like it's lost all our saved games.

my week summed up:

"You've been leading this training class for years - why are you making mistakes like this is your first time?"

as a callback to talk upthread about people who willfully don't want to learn current processes....

whenever there's a GUI issue, there's a simple process for starting a ticket. I shared these details over and over again with the same people, who sometimes asked for them even after they'd already successfully submitted them. it was tiring.

they changed ticketing systems earlier this year. our boss told us all months ago to get used to it, register, and make sure we understood how to use it.

so the GUI issue comes up again and I was out yesterday and my backup hasn't learned how to use the new ticketing system, so he reports the issue via email to the guy who usually fixes it, and of course, nothing gets done.

Ugh … do you need more duct tape??

srsly. and now of course since this didn't get done yesterday, the issue persisted into today, and now the person who needs to fix it is otherwise distracted.

it's sure fun trying to run a training class when all of the standard processes we have in place for catching up learners who miss time and people who are at risk are being vetoed by our partner client (when they don't really have the authority to do that), and yet nobody higher up in my dept wants to step in and actually talk to them. so I promise to my instructors these things will happen and look like a liar when they don't.

that and banning OT a little over a day before training which turned everything into a logistical nightmare = I'm literally LOLing at how bad this is going.

so tired of this same old song and dance:

Step 1 - person x makes out of left field request that is only tangentially related to what our department does, has an unrealistic deadline and will take significant resources on our end

Step 2 - department head internally says to our team, effectively, "no way in hell, that's not our job, we don't have time for that"

Step 3 - department head responds to person x's initial request "sure, we'll get right on that!"

Like I don't know what happens between steps 2 and 3, but oh boy it would be nice for that support of our team's resources and capacity to be expressed externally even just once, for a little treat.

xp - ugh, sometimes LOL is the only sane response

xp jon -- do you ask? Like, perhaps this is me envisioning a sane functional workplace that does not exist, but, in this hypothetical sane functional workplace, I would ask, "Yo, Chief, didn't you say there was no chance in hell we would do that? What's the story? Do we actually have to do it, and if so, why?"

And I am no stranger to having to do other people's jobs for them as well as things that aren't my/our department ... in just this one job where I've been part-time (and before that a contractor) for 5 years, the list of these things is ... long. Some of them are like "this thing seems worth developing the capacity to do" which leads to "let's spend countless hours learning about this thing and getting supplies/software so that we can do it" ... and most of the time, we don't end up doing it more than once.

Like, three years ago the thing was "Property Needs Assessments" ... and I (on the request of my co-worker) spent many hours researching PNAs, what they looked like, what went in them, how the reports were formatted, what the underlying methodology and standards are for conducting them, summarizing these standards in google docs, explaining them to my co-worker, and then we ended up doing all of two PNAs. ... Granted, the stupid ASTM methodology guide was useful in re other things as it gave me a checklist of all the different building systems and components that I will use when doing walkthroughs and other things.

I've actually gently asked in the past and gotten some variation of the, "well so-and-so thinks this is important, so we better do it". Which I totally get and that will happen, senior leadership wants to push through pet projects, etc etc. My frustration is more born out of the fact that we (using "we" as our department, in general) consistently cave immediately to the slightest insistence that THIS one is the important one. It just would be nice for someone with any leadership weight to say even, "listen, I know you think this is important but the last time you asked us for a rush plan, you ended up sitting on it for six months. given our current workload and priorities, I just can't promise the turnaround you're asking for right now but we can revisit in a few weeks". You know?

yes ... exactly ... that's the type of thing that I tend to do ... I am the person who will not cave. However, I end up getting pressured by other coworkers (and clients) to cave or get painted as the "bad guy" ... getting to say "I told you so." is a pyrrhic victory I know well.

today is a wfh day for me. i had to run into the office really quick this morning around 10:30. i forgot to bring my work cell phone with me. someone called that line & i don't have a voice mail set up. they called my supervisor. she sent me a chat saying "i helped them with their question but you don't have a voice mail set up". no information about who it was, what the question was, not even a direct request to set up a voice mail, or an offer to help point me in the right direction. I responded, "OK thanks." I'm not going to fill in your void today, lady.

is this the missing chair or someone else?

lol missing stair lol

yes

i outright stopped working for about 2 hours today. just got too overstimulated and said fuck it and just spent time reading ILX threads or doing other stuff.

(this is in MS Teams chat)

Tweedle Dee: I can't see any chats
Tweedle Dum: Me either.

...

almost as good as the time when a manager asked over the phone if a trainee could hear him and the trainee wrote back "no"

i actually cracked open a beer. perks of working from home.

two zoom links in the email which is correct?

neither of them!

lmao.

at 2 minutes past you start to wonder why there are only 4 people and not 10. and someone goes to check the second location and finds nobody there making you slightly more sure you are in the correct place...

we had a trainee who had to get moved out of the last class as in 5 days, he couldn't get logged into the network/his systems, despite multiple password resets.

he got moved back a week, and two days in, still can't. they say they've unsuccessfully reset the password several times and are "baffled" as to what the problem is. lol...come on, you know what the problem is.

how well do you think he's gonna do in a job that requires signing into multiple programs daily if in 7 business days he can't manage to key in a password that's written down for him correctly once.

we used to have an internal, proprietary tool that we used to grant licenses/access to various applications, and it was super easy to use. It was also easy to do bulk jobs. we never had a problem.

then we moved to a new cloud-based tool and the bulk process is sensitive to the point where if one of our 15,000 colleagues uploads a bulk job with one bad piece of code, all access requests stop processing for the entire company for days.

great design.

lol ... i am currently dealing with the fact that quickbooks online says it can copy a file from one account to another, but it only copies some of the data ... so, this week is less about "stupid annoying co-workers" and more about "stupid annoying software I have to use at work"

their desktop version ... you can copy, you can import, you can export ... it worked ... the cloud version ... seriously ... meanwhile earlier this week, my co-worker was dissatisfied with Google Drive and permissions and explained/complained about how stupid it was to me, and I thought, "I am glad I don't have to deal with something this annoying." And now ... lol

3:30 pm ET

"hey Neanderthal, M!ke is probably not going to be in tomorrow, I need you to take his Delivering Virtual Training class tomorrow at 9 am"

"cool, well, you could have likely figured this out and made this decision at 11 am. now there's two hours left in the day and I've done no prep for it, nor do I know who's even in the class"

i was technically listed as his backup a while ago for this reason but

a) this was done in an email and not documented anywhere else, an email I easily forgot about as it came during a chaotic week and

b) I haven't had any time to prep anyway because I had multiple classes going on last week and had to teach one myself, and also had a bit of a shocking personal situation of my own come up Thursday (that's now resolved).

one of the seasonal hires in one of our classes, management noticed was idle for extremely long periods of time (like, HOURS) and asked them about it, and the individual feigned ignorance and said they'd been doing all of the assignments, even the recent test. a quick records check indicated that no, this did not happen, and in fact this person has done no work since last Thursday. hadn't even touched any of the online courses, did not take the test or even open it.

so they let her go today and she began harassing people on the side and commenting about it publicly in the classroom.

one every year.

more "stupid, asshole co-workers", but I got passed feedback about instructors in a class I'm not supporting, but basically one of the BIs just decided to make a series of thinly innuendoed American Pie-inspired dick jokes in a training class chat.

stopped the training recording so it wouldn't show up on that, but one (very rightfully upset) class member screen-capped it and sent it.

waiting with bated breath to see if this person's manager actually handles it right, because it's pretty obviously sexual harassment/hostile environment type thing.

otherwise, if they don't, I gotta go to HR and make an anonymous report.

two minutes after I address another class unrelated to the incident, asking them to be watching out for any inappropriate behavior and reporting it as appropriately, one of the female training supervisors made me aware that one of my trainers invited her to chat w/ him privately on WhatsApp. not about anything untoward, just poetry and life and stuff, but....obviously that is still crossing a line with a colleague he just met.

WHY IS EVERY MALE TRAINER ACTING SO DAMNED CREEPY THIS WEEK?!!! this one was probably a little more naive about it and the supervisor didn't want any disciplinary action taken but I have an obligation to report it regardless so I will be.

I feel like “privately” is carrying a lot of implication there, should he have invited a chaperone to a WhatsApp chat? I’m not sure how that’s creepy?
If she felt uncomfortable, 100%, but if she felt she should mention it because it wasn’t routine, well maybe not?

my dad is retired but does some work with the carpenter's union and one of the presenters at some meeting got his position in the union nuked from orbit

while it's an old off-color joke, it is definitely not appropriate to introduce a female floorlayer with "here's Y, here to tell you how you can make a living on your knees!"

my suspicion is this was not the first time that guy delved into inappropriate territory