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

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

xpost I left out some details, but basically they were chatting about work things in a group chat on MS Teams, but the convo drifted into poetry and writing etc, and he said something like "we should totally chat on WhatsApp", i.e. DM her about non-work things. similar to saying "hey you should hit me up on Facebook Messenger" to a co-worker like an hour after you meet them.

finding colleagues on social media is fine when you know them well and trust them but she barely knew him for a few hours.

perhaps not 'creepy' but a little too forward and familiar. i don't generally seek co-workers out on social media unless i've known em years and trust them.

or we become close friends fast or something.

he's not really in trouble or anything but she felt uncomfortable by it.

"here's Y, here to tell you how you can make a living on your knees!"

jfc

i don't get people who seem to ignore Teams messages all day. is it an object permanence thing, if I don't look at my messages, they don't exist?

we have a training supervisor who is supposed to be attending training to supervise the trainees but communicating with us to navigate through any trainee-specific issues, and they haven't read a single message, private or group, in two days. now having to email her to gently nudge her to....read Teams messages.

we hire from all over and there's one trainee in Tampa, FL, and of course, hurricane coming, but I guess they weren't paying attention and got an email about it from their apartment complex and started freaking out, thinking the hurricane was *already here*. saying "I'm already getting high winds and lights flickering!". we had to inform them that, uh, no, it's not even past Cancun yet and hanging around Cuba, none of that is the hurricane.

(we are very good about letting people have off before and after hurricanes as needed, no questions asked and paying them for it, so that's not an issue. just don't know how they had no idea about it and then also thought it was already here)

stupid dipshit trainer, despite us putting out an emergency notification to turn off all banner notifications a month ago, and me addressing this exact issue with this same person earlier this year, noticed their banners were on throughout today, opted not to fix it, and as a result, the private group chat many of us had to discuss learner behavior/performance, including people who had resigned or separated, was visible to everybody. and we don't know who's seen it.

this person has been an instructor for years and was supposed to be showing a brand new one the ropes, but all they've done for the last three weeks is show them how to be a colossal fuck up.

while screensharing that is. that's why I use a Window when I screenshare, but for whatever reason she shared the ENTIRE SCREEN with the banners on

"hey I need to put in a report to see how many people impacted by hurricane yesterday in a few minutes and let them know how much time we need to catch them up, can you get that for me?"

"sure, I only just received a list of who was in Florida 5 minutes ago and we have about 300 trainees, let me get right on that"

i have totally forgotten what it is like to have a boss/manager overseeing my work and that of my co-workers. In many ways it's cool not really having to answer to anyone. In other ways, the levels of absurdity and lack of accountability (for everyone, me included tbh, though obviously, mostly for them lol) starts to make me feel like I'm living in some insane alternate universe.

i must be one of these stupid, annoying co-workers. I got passed up for a promotion/raise by someone who was hired later and has a much lighter workload/fewer responsibilities. and neither of our work loads or scopes are changing after this! wtf. it’s like my boss changed from dusty baker to bob gehren overnight

I shouldn’t post about my personal life here :-(

Maybe you’ve made yourself too valuable and irreplaceable in your current role by taking on more responsibilities etc. and your ability to function at a high level in this role is being taken advantage of

a manager from one of our third-party partner hire classes reached out to one of my colleagues who is supervising those classes today. she asked if the colleague could send the training invite to one of the trainee's personal email address, because they were waiting for the equipment that our company sent to arrive.

This third-party company is a Bring Your Own Device client that requires their hires to supply their own equipment. There is no equipment coming. How the hell did one of their managers not even know this?

(not a comment on the ethics of 'bring your own device', which I feel like is really cheap and stupid of companies, but this third-party partner hire is a pretty shitty company and I've told friends not to work there before if possible)

totally an uptick in abusive, toxic seasonal hires this year. we've had to be careful about modifying MS Teams settings to require admitting everybody in from the lobby because when they are eventually let go for their multiple conduct abuses, they like to try and rejoin the meeting and sabotage it by saying whatever toxic, horrible bullshit they can before they're kicked out.

Here's a example of something that is GOOD right now that illustrates how STUPID some of our leaders are in their decision-making.

So right now, we are in the midst of our busiest time of year (Open Enrollment). Most years, I dread it - it's usually a three month period of exponentially-growing frustration. Instead, it's been the smoothest Open Enrollment system basically ever for me.

The only reason: I'm aligned to our newest partner organization (joined last year). In terms of competence, they're world-class - they are very organized, consistent, and easy to work with. As a result, they are the lead partner organization, and handle most of our third-party hires, despite having barely been working with us for a year.

They took the mantle over from our previous lead partner organization, who was dismissed for cause last year. They were with us for 6 years, and they were always terrible at everything. Their servers could not handle our systems, got frequently overloaded, and caused agent desktops to crash multiple times per day. They also lied about their server's capabilities over and over again.

They hired managers who were often underqualified and gave them terrible training, to the point where many of them expressed confusion their first week as to whether they worked for us or the partner organization, or what they were even supposed to do. They had telephony technology (pre-pandemic) that routinely froze up and had hundreds of calls pool and get routed nowhere MULTIPLE DAYS of the year, every year.

But nevermind this partnership costing us a ton of money and reputational hits over these six years, they only (finally) got fired because they jeopardized a one-million dollar contract with one of our most important clients. It took them screwing up the processing of system credentials for 200+ people, delaying training by almost a week and pissing said client off, for one of our Execs to fly over there and tell them YOU'RE DONE - FINISH OUT THIS YEAR, AND WE DON'T KNOW YOU ANYMORE.

shoulda happened five years ago!

for fuck’s sake, search outlook before you throw me under a bus you piece of shit

SAME DUDE AS ABOVE FWIW

ugh, sorry brimstead but in my sad experience

for fuck’s sake, search outlook before you throw me under a bus you piece of shit

is an evergreen post

co-worker emails yesterday afternoon: Can you deal with this group coming in on Sunday, I'm sick and don't have the capacity to handle it

a few hours later on said co-worker's social media: pictures of very tasty looking margaritas with a friend

... I'm only mildly annoyed because I am fine with covering for this person as they have been getting a lot of criticism from other people at work, but ... don't say you're sick if it's really just "I need a motherfucking break from this bullshit." ... which I totally respect

because it is likely that one of the people criticizing this co-worker will use that discrepancy to further criticize this person.

my co-workers and managers were incredibly supportive during my bereavement time, and it was my boss who encouraged me to take two weeks.

I get back today, to find out they aligned me to co-facilitate a class that started last Friday - I don't actually begin teaching until Friday, but now that means I get zero time to actually meet my co-instructor and talk about how we're going to divide things up, and have to jump into the class to help despite having 500+ emails to read and trying to re-acclimate to everything. and I'm on PTO two days next week.

what the fuck....thanks for giving me no time to get re-acclimated, guys. they're like "we thought this might be a good experience for you", i'm like...maybe ask me first? idk. I haven't taught in months and now I'm forced to hit the ground running before I can take a breath.

and like I don't 'teach' until Friday, but I'm expected to be in the class and helping do administrative tasks. which I didn't get a chance to communicate with my co-instructor.

on top of this mom is going out of state on vacation and her car has a potential starter issue that wasn't caught until today, so I have to take it in for her during work one day this week, while she's gone. happy goddamn Monday.

One of my workplaces was called out by Stalinists as racist and Zionist… they had just hired a contract marketing and outreach person but had not mentioned anything during the interview process about conflicts with aforementioned Stalinists. New hire sees call out post and quits before onboarding

that sounds awful

Jesus!

It has been stressful to say the least… I am co-producing an event there this weekend and was fortunate to only have 2 bands cancel and get one Stalinist troll comment on Instagram… I work for an org that has space in the building owned/operated by the org in question. The Stalinists had been a member of the org but recently got expelled for … various things that are apparently ok in service of the revolution??

Oh and the margarita co-worker upthread got seriously dragged by the Stalinists…

damn, california stalinists

so like what is involved in being a stalinist in the usa in 2023?