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

any time I take a half day, someone will do something inexplicably bad that will require me drafting lengthy feedback for them, and the person who's supposed to fill in for me when I'm out will lose their internet for the day.

fuck you Murphy! lol

An old friend of the family got me this part-time job at the local library for special collections and exhibits. It isn't much but it's getting my foot back in the door. It's great.

I get invited to library fundraising and social events. Unfortunately this means I have to socialize with a board member who literally hit on me even though I was clearly with someone else.

Someone brought it up to him and now he's all "I'm cool with just friends", however I still have to see him.

It's not a huge deal to go to a two hour event but so thinks he was crushing pretty hard and as a muckety muck, it was maybe inappropriate. Also "I know you through xyz person" is borderline creepy.

I have stayed home from some gatherings because of it and I don't think I will stick with this job.

this would be something you would bring up with your supervisor! You shouldn't have to stay home! Ughhh ... I am so sorry you are dealing with that and that you feel like the burden of behavior modification is on you, rather than the board member.

"Neanderthal, can you create a pre-test? and find some test accounts to use in it?"

"ok"

"hmm good first try but I don't think I'd put the test account scenarios in this pre-test"

....

Not a co-worker, but I want to vent about companies that are really bad at the holidays. So we had a consultant drop by our office this morning and make a big production about hand delivering expensive bottles of wine to our department. Which would be nice and maybe thoughtful, except they were only given to five of our nine staff members. Do people not see how thoughtless and insulting this is to make a public production out of handing gifts out to just some of the staff right in front of everyone?

For fuck's sake, send a basket addressed to the entire department/team/group. It isn't hard.

if i was receiving I'd have to pop it open on the spot. there's no other way

xp Maybe the public display is the point?

I'm sure it was the point, to make a big deal of generosity. But it's really landed poorly. This is a consultant that every single one of us works with on a daily basis, so it's not like there was a rhyme or reason for who got the gift.

To be clear, I don't give a fuck. But I now have two co-workers who didn't get the gifts vocally and openly very pissed off and one, who did, very embarrassed for being put in the awkward position. My point is more that sending one large gift basket addressed to the whole group would have avoided all of this shit.

that's completely tone deaf and ridiculous. pretty much just asking to create fissures in the group by doing that.

boss, who is giving me feedback on an MS Forms questionnaire I created: I'm not sure what you mean by this question, can you explain?
Me: This is literally your question, I copied it from your source document verbatim.

lol, what was boss's response?

"oh my god I'm just doing too many things this holiday season"

No shit.

I had a boss once who would have taken the gifts and placed them in a box, first come, first serve.

Plus some people are tee totalers anyway, isn't wine kind of politically incorrect? I've seen clients just give a big box or basket and you can take wine or cheese, first come, first serve.

It's like candy - some people are diabetic. You ask if people want chocolate boxes - if not, have an alternative.

I don't want to bother my poor supervisor with this about randy board member - only if the topic comes up. I don't know her that well. Everyone is traumatized from local politics these days.

I grew up with the nabobs from the neighboring city and it's always been this pissing contest whose clout is bigger. I mean I could badmouth the guy to the school superintendent and he would be OVAH, that's kind of sad and scary to be so lethal.

Oh and someone wanted me to compile a list of Iranian films - which normally I'm happy to do, but it kind of stinks that they do this now because they "feel bad" that they had been previously ignorant about Iran.

"Neaner Neaner, can we add these two people returning from a leave of absence to your training class? they've been gone over a year and were relatively new at the time so they've forgotten everything"

"um...we're on Day 8 already. how are they going to make up 60 hours of material without feeling completely lost?"

*receive 6 Out of Office for the holiday messages, including one from the person who asked me, radio silence from the whopping 2 people who are actually here*

"we're not having class on 12/26, as the class is based in Canada, who observes Boxing Day"
"actually, only Ontario observes Boxing Day, and we have 6 people outside of Ontario who the system will not let bill this day as a company holiday"
"have them use a Floating Holiday"
"Canada's policy is people hired in December don't get them until January"
'have them use vacation'
"also does not accrue until January for December hires"
"uhh...."

my boss is the king of "making up rules on the spot". and not documenting things.

for people provided special coaching due to poor performance, there are differing policies for how to deliver and conduct these coaching sessions for agents based in San Juan, PR, and Canada. this has been true for years.

none of it is documented anywhere. he just expects people will know. he also created sample documents for the HR-required emails we have to send to offer this special coaching, where the business case is made for why it's needed, and his examples all showed simple one-sentence bullet points, and now he's giving feedback to my report that they should be writing several sentences for each observation...which is just something he arbitrarily decided right now.

benefits in Canada are different than health benefits in the US. we frequently hire people in Canada, often to staff US-based clients, but sometimes to staff Canada based clients. There is nothing in our client list to tell us which clients are Canadian vs US-based, and as a result, the default assumption usually is that they are going to US based clients.

so we hired a bunch of people in December that were going to Canadian clients, and nobody had the discussion about possibly matching the curriculum to that (since we have a Canadian benefits training curriculum too), so now for weeks our instructors have been teaching Canadian hires about US benefits that they are not going to be handling...when Canadian benefits take much less time to cover.

and I'm being told 'ehh this is normal who cares'.

ok!

1) Fuck you
2) Birthdays are for children
3) Are you trolling me by asking mind numbing obvious questions?

Stop. Messaging. Me.

otm

We had a Christmas party after hours, and I wanted to curate the music.

The list I submitted had something for everyone, but I included The Fall's Hark the Herald Angels Sing among other things.

The planner said my list might be taken as "disrespectful". Okay fine but who got to DJ the party?

Captain Schmoozo of the SS Horndog, the aforementioned board member, who played a "tasteful" selection of canonical jazz and "respectful" folk.
Miserabilist.

We had a contest for who could DJ the Holiday party.

The list I submitted had something for everyone, but I included The Fall's Hark the Herald Angels Sing among other things.

The planner said my list might be taken as "disrespectful". Okay fine but who got to DJ the party?

Captain Schmoozo of the SS Horndog, the aforementioned board member, who played a "tasteful" selection of canonical jazz and "respectful" folk.
Miserabilist.

I mean, personally I think "Please, Daddy, Don't Get Drunk This Christmas" is plenty "tasteful". What's your problem?

I don't know why, but the sound of a plastic spoon continually scraping the bottom of a plastic yogurt cup is one of the most irritating sounds to me.

when I was off for two weeks on bereavement (and then another 1.5 for PTO), each time I was given an assignment to start the day I returned, with little to no instruction or guidance, and expected to hit the ground running like, that day.

meanwhile, I was given a class to kick off for someone else who was on PTO to take over. I gave him a detailed layout of where things are now, what I'm doing, what he needs to do, and he has yet to even acknowledge or respond to anything midway through the day. I have to hand this off as I have another assignment I had to ignore while I took this last week.

we don't get very many emails in our role, so he can't be still 'catching up on emails', particularly since 60% of the office was out on PTO the weeks he was gone. hell, I didn't have that many to clear when I was gone two weeks during peak time of year.

I don't know why

I suspect it has to do with the "continual" quality.

I don't know why, but the sound of a plastic spoon continually scraping the bottom of a plastic yogurt cup is one of the most irritating sounds to me.

I had a family member who did this a LOT. You can expect 5, maybe 10 minutes of this once he gets to the end of the cup, and it's the most fucking irritating thing in the world if you're alone with him and that's the only thing you hear. (FWIW, it's almost certain he's far into the Asperger's spectrum, and this is the least of his many habits that suggest this. We've thought about getting him tested or something, but he's so advanced in age that it wouldn't be worth it at this point.)

I got an assignment to do a page for an online collection, yay.

However, someone at the library asked me to put together examples of my design work for a staff exhibit.

I balked - I am too busy to assemble this bullshit on short notice. The This is the second fucking job where mgmt has demanded off the books personal contributions. Not to mention the fact that I had an arm injury, Im in physical therapy, and it's just depressing to revisit my old work right now.

I hope I find something new soon.

Disco, do you get shit dumped on you and told its a "compliment" because you know what you're doing? And find there is no one around to help you?

Happens ALL THE TIME.

when you announce a new process last September, but as of yet you still haven't documented the process in our SOPs, and you continue to insist we should be using this new process, but as of right now, the only documentation of said process is an email from last September that is missing details and occasional word-of-mouth mention in meetings, I will ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. especially when I pointed out the lack of transparency back in October.

I have a coworker who is such a grumbling, miserable troll with an all-encompassing hatred of change and new technology, that if someone pitched her as character for The Office they would get laughed out of the writer's room for her being too unbelievable.

Anyway, back in 2019 we finally convinced her to let us dispose of the old fax machine that had sat in our copy room, unplugged and gathering dust for at least a decade as I was told. Walked in the office yesterday to overhear her on the phone with purchasing trying to get permission to buy a new fax machine because, "you know some of us don't think scanning works right and I just don't trust it, these people who complain about fax machines are just dumb kids that never used them and don't know how much better they are". All of this despite several of us, repeatedly, showing her how our copier can be used to fax things if she found it absolutely necessary.

I'd hate to see her apartment.

So would I, considering the state of her workstation alone.

This is the same co-worker who wanted to share the slides from a virtual meeting with us and did so by taking photos of each of the slides with her phone, emailed each photo to herself in individual emails, then printed each of the emails, then scanned them in to convert them to PDF and emailed them each to us. Individually.

I wish I could be making this up.

omg

lol old school fax machines are riskier from a security standpoint because people leave confidential documents at them all of the time.

xpost omfg dying at the taking pics of the slides with phone

Know who still uses FAX machines? The IRS.

xxxp that's outstanding

"why are the slides all crooked?"

'sorry, I thought this class wasn't going to all be members of Big Photocopy, this presentation is over"

a new hire lost her father in December. I wanted to make sure she got to take bereavement time AND keep the job, so I worked with leadership to create a plan that she could rejoin after bereavement and get caught up on everything she missed. I also secured a trainer to lead a one-on-one training session for our phone systems scheduled for her on the 22nd. everything was going fine.

this afternoon, one of our other leaders comes in, says starting Tuesday she'll move to the next phase of training, despite her being nowhere closed to finished (there's still 4+ days of prerequisite material she hasn't learned). it's like telling someone they begin training with the varsity basketball team next week when they haven't even finished learning the rules of the game yet.

she also says "hey Neanderthal's special phone training is on 1/22 but we can move that no problem if need be". nevermind the person leading it might not be available another day.

i was calm in my response but...pretty damn heated.

"so, don't name this new Class after the file format, ie GifHandler, because that's not important and we may have other methods later that used the same file format for a different thing, name it after what we use the contents for."

PR is raised, new method: GraphicsInformationFormatHandler

I'm out tomorrow and Friday. this has been on the Tracking spreadsheet AND my boss's calendar since November, and I sent my entire team a reminder today.

my boss is out from 9 - 11 tomorrow and he puts on his out of office message and lists me as the sole contact for three things, then left for the day. really hoping someone tries to msg me during those two hours tomorrow so he gets called out on it (which...wouldn't be the first time)

Use a payphone and a disguised voice to leave 6 increasingly panicked messages for him.

"mein name ist...Karl Magnite. I vas looking for sur colleeg and hees not here."

I have a 401k loan that I need to pay off so I can take another one. hate to, but it's necessary in my circumstance. this is a fairly easy process - you request an invoice, it gives you three different payoff dates to choose from, and your payroll deductions for the loan continue until paid off, in case you change your mind. So the payoff amounts are supposed to decrease for each payoff date, reflecting those deductions.

I requested mine, and my payoff amounts went up for each payoff date. This is usually something you'd see with someone on an unpaid leave, so, obviously a mistake. I actually administered this process for 401(k) clients at my company for 7 years, so I did some sleuthing and seemed to have figured it out - back in 2022, someone accidentally changed my job code in the system, and as a result, they had to issue my paycheck off-cycle, so there was a delay in reporting the payroll deduction, which must have reamortized the loan.

so I put all of this detail in the ticket, with screenshots and old paystubs. they assign the case to the wrong team, ignore me when I point this out to them, let the ticket sit for a week and a half, and then closed it saying "we can't figure it out, just pay the extra amount and we'll refund any overage to you".

Nevermind the fact that I'm not going to just pay more than I owe by like $250 only to have to wait several weeks to get it back, there's the possibility that the processing of the payoff might be delayed, and there's already a 16-day wait period before I can take a new loan....this is 5k we're talking about here, I can't be out of pocket that much money for more than the three weeks I'm already committed to.

so now I have to re-open the ticket. if it wasn't against the code of conduct I"d ask for them to give me access to my own account and I'd fix it in five minutes.

I wouldn't trust them to give me a refund of the overage if they're that screwed up on the loan.

yeah I mean that's the other thing!