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

lol always fun to look back to see the mess you escaped

I finally managed to extract myself from a horrible freelance ghostwriting project yesterday and man, that felt good. The client disappeared for an entire year, making it impossible to keep up any kind of creative workflow, and the subject matter was repellent anyway — I didn't even want to be writing the book. It would have made me about $10K by the end, but it was just depressing and awful and as fucked up as this is to say on a board where a lot of people are struggling, I didn't actually need the money.

each of our clients has a legally binding security document with us, outlining call security protocols. There are mandatory updates that must be made whenever one of our practices changes or new features rolled out. it's fairly easy to keep up with.

I access said document for a client today, one I actually brought on board in 2007-2008. Find the document is dated 2011, and has our prior company name/logo on it. Not a good start. Read further, full of references to features we no longer use and processes that we no longer follow. ugh.

I dig deeper, and find it was actually last updated in 2020, but the morons editing it ignored all version control protocols and never documented date of last update each time they updated the doc. Likewise, whomever was in charge never updated the document to the newest version in over 13 years.

so this legally binding document is essentially a useless pile of shit, that could get us in trouble if the client ever took legal action for any security-related disputes. tempted to send this Legal's way and wait for their screams.

Xps thanks everyone!

I’m signing up for Rover as my next career. I don’t have any skills that I could use to get into a “real” career - my job was mostly garment dyeing and managing an online store, and my prior jobs were waiting tables and retail (both of which I will do anything to avoid).

nice. walking pups is cool!

i admit that i am actually okay with my life at the moment, tho it’s because the job that isn’t that great money-wise is really where i wanna be personally… which, yes, it’s the climbing gym. i am one of the oldest employees. i don’t care, it’s great, all my co-workers are super friendly and most of the people who come in to climb are friendly, too.

plus, yknow, i just clean and climb and ring up clif bars

I've spent most of my working life without or barely seeing my coworkers. It's an odd feeling.

once again, my boss takes impromptu PTO and then in his OOO email, lists me as a backup on something I had zero involvement with, and he didn't speak to me once about before going on PTO. he's been given feedback on this and keeps doing it - fortunately in this case, unlike previous times, I'm unlikely to get a lot of questions and things are slower atm. but it's the principle, come on dude.

I'm having a really hard time with my new(ish) boss. He's a highly competitive dude with a huge ego, which, whatever, I've dealt with that combo in managers before and while it isn't fun, it happens.

Problem is he also just loves mind games and divisiveness. One of his favorite moves is to make vague references to "winning" the "game" at work. Whenever one of us calls him on that bullshit and straight up asks what "game" he's talking about, he says things like, "well, if you don't even know what game you are playing, I can tell you right now you won't win". But even more common is telling each of us wildly different things in our individual one on one status meetings. Like two of us will have back-to-back meetings with him and he'll tell us both exact opposite facts/updates. I know he's not stupid enough to think we don't talk amongst each other and check in, so I can only assume it's some mind game he's got going on. He also turns everyfuckingthing negative, even undeniable good news he will shit on. Like just last week I had this exchange:

me: "Yeah, good news on that one, we actually wrapped it up three weeks ahead of schedule."

him: "That's disappointing, why wasn't it done four weeks early?"

me: laughing, thinking this is a joke, "well, I thought three weeks was pretty good, I'm happy with it"

him: "Don't be. I'm serious, work on that."

And I know he's done similar to all of his other staff. It's just so annoying and maddening. Like, what's the end game? Keeping us all unsettled and nervous? I guess mission accomplished, but jesus christ I do not have the time nor energy to figure out these games. I just want to do my job and go home at the end of the day.

I'd just be like, "I guess there's no incentive to finish things ahead of schedule!"

Or alternatively, just add at least one week to every timeline and you got your four weeks, buddy

I mean this is totally the "flair" discussion from Office Space, only I guess he saw that movie and sided with the Mike Judge boss character instead of realizing he was the butt of the joke and not Aniston.

I quit my job :)

She was not happy that I gave no notice - she thought I’d give them more time for a handover - and I just replied “well you’ve been cutting my hours for awhile now so I don’t think there’s much left to handover”. Her response was that the hour cutting was temporary because business was slow and that she wished I’d told her I needed more hours. Like, what? I’m not gonna be at the mercy of how badly you’re running the business at any given time.

Jon, your manager absolutely sucks. What a piece of shit.

fuck yeah just1n3! congrats - it's funny how much they shrivel up when they realize they no longer have any power over you.

Thanks! I’m on vacation in Finland right now and this is the first time in yeeeears I haven’t had to check in on customer emails, answer staff texts, talk my boss through something, and have just been free. Except I’ve spent 90% of my time here sick 🫠

That last bit is rough. Was in Germany a few months ago and was sick the entire time.

Yes way to go justin3!!

just1n3 even!! xo

worse than scheduling a meeting for 8:30 am, requiring me to log in earlier than usual - rescheduling it one minute before it was supposed to start.

with one of my bosses, "can you do a quick peer review" means "can you write the entire last portion of this document for me, I did the rest but I got tired and didn't want to finish"

boss has assigned me a new class to supervise and he keeps repeatedly communicating the wrong dates to our partners. which if not caught soon enough would lead other people to plan around these wrong dates.

yesterday he sends the group that is supplying the trainers the wrong dates and I questioned them because they didn't match our tracking spreadsheet and he initially doubles down, then says "oh shit wait you're right sorry" and corrects it.

today he creates the ticket to coordinate class operations and writes down a second incorrect set of dates. his excuse is always 'i'm doing too many things' but idk maybe focus on one thing at a time so people don't have to keep cleaning up yr mess. lol

same boss tells us this morning "hey we updated this curriculum, if you're prepping instructors to teach this, please highlight the changes for your instructors", without indicating in Version Control what changes were made, or even sending us a summary of what was changed.

I haven't supervised a class since January and even then didn't have the courses memorized - the fuck am I supposed to know what changed? also, there was a pretty major deletion of a course that I had to figure out by process of elimination. so I called him out on it in front of the team lol....

Well, I think today I was given the brightest, most glaring sign that I need to GTFO of my current work situation as fast as humanly possible.

(tl;dr background - our manager says we have a shortage of offices and workstations, but we don't. We have plenty of open spaces, but it would require those in management to do their jobs and enforce remote policies and have hard conversations with recalcitrant employees who should be moved to other floors and buildings but don't want to go.)

Anyway, we had two new interns start in our department today. We've known that we were coming and came up with 3 different solutions as to where they could sit, all were rejected by our manager. So we ended up being told to cram them in with two of us in our existing workstations. Since mine is one of those that are marginally larger than others, I was directed to have one of them move into my cubicle. Fine, annoying, but whatever. Now today I learn that it's "important" that the two interns sit next to each other so they can "collaborate better". Which... isn't wrong. And is in fact why we suggested some of our other seating options. Anyway, now it turns out that BOTH of them are squeezed into my work station.

Apparently the easiest solution for my manager is to triple people up with me rather than, y'know, be a manager and make the hard decisions.

i got a snide remark from someone today in regards to a polite request I made, so I spent all this time restructuring my follow-up sentence to make sure I kept it as neutral as possible, and in doing so, removed a key word accidentally, the word "because".

the resopnse was supposed to say "I said what I said because", and instead said "I said what I said", making it sound like I was some snotty person on Twitter. I never say "I said what I said", i hate that phrase, ugh.

So a weird update on my workstation thing noted above. Turns out it was NOT my manager who made the decision to put them both in my workstation, it was a decision made by a different coworker. I came in the following morning and my manager actually pulled me aside and apologized to me and said that was not his solution and he notified the other coworker that it was unacceptable and another solution needed to be worked out. So at least I'm back to just one additional body in my workstation.

Funny thing is though, I had not yet said a single word to my manager about the seating arrangement when he apologized to me. I was planning to later in the day during my weekly one on one with him, but he brought it up before I did. Anyway, said coworker that made the dumb decision in the first place has made a giant production about not speaking to me since this all happened, because they are a petulant baby and upset that they got (rightfully, imho) told off about a (terrible) decision.

my boss is a perfectly nice guy, he's not toxic and he's very friendly, but he's not getting any better in the disorganization department.

he scheduled a meeting at 8:45 in the fuckin' morning, which is before my shift even starts, for no reason (and it could have been an email). he bumped up a meeting by 3 hours, which forced me to take a short lunch. he always gets the dates wrong when communicating assignments, leading people being allocated to classes that they're not actually available to teach, which we then have to fix.

he double books people on assignments, he double books reservations in our training environment, and this one particular issue with the training environment, he continues to try and solve by doing the one thing I told him will not solve the problem and pleaded with him to please stop doing ...over and over...for four years. I've even forwarded the same how to document ten or more times.

he's not stupid. and he loves me so it isn't hurting my career, but man, I'm just baffled as to how someone is this sloppy and running a department.

Crown Prince Dickrod of Painfully Sincere Folk Dickdom telling me that garage bands aren't "punk".

Uh lol wow

That is serious RONG

my boss's boss asked me last Thursday if I'd present a quick 5-10 minute presentation during a meeting today. I got this email while I was in the midst of handling an escalated situation in training (basically, some dork accidentally shared private learner feedback w/ the entire class).

somehow, I was the only person in a team of 50+ people left off of the invite (despite the fact that we have an Group set up in outlook to prevent these types of situations). I only found out it was already going on when my boss messaged me when only 10 minutes remained to ask if I was still presenting today.

passive aggressively emailed them the To and CC fields to show I wasn't on it so they can't claim I 'declined' the meeting.

team lead wants us to tell him, and everybody else, what we've been doing. it's like he hasn't been paying attention in morning meetings. feels like homework.

and he's done this by putting a word document on dropbox. so now 10 people have downloaded a copy of this word document and will all try and upload it ahead of the meeting. he could've put this on confluence, or used dropbox paper, noth of which we use and which support concurrent editing by multiple people, but no.

noth / both

boss managed to somehow miss an entire training group when he organized our training plans, so we're 21 trainees more than planned and are outside the mandated teacher-student ratio. and it is now too late to fix it.

passive aggressively adding the missing class to his stupid logistics chart felt good.

one of our partner site managers decides to ask our instructor if a specific learner left class, stating she knew she was having pregnancy issues. just blurting out private medical details to strangers.

so cool....now I have to report that this morning.

hey the boss is at it again!

so two weeks ago, fucker triple books me. I'm supervising two nightmare classes that end 6/12, and he inexplicably gives me a certification class that runs 6/11 - 6/13. and on 6/13, I'm supposed to begin prepping 14 instructors to teach 7 classes. Before I can go "what the fuck", he goes "don't worry, I'll back you up".

He didn't do JACK SHIT. He was nowhere to be found the last two days of nightmare class training. I couldn't check in on them because I was leading my own class! so I'm not there to be able to ensure the instructors send the final report to the managers doing the next leg of training, nor to send a warning email to those managers about some of the behavioral issues. and I can't do it the next day because I'm leading certification all day, and the day after that, my first four hours of the day are earmarked for prep sessions.

so of course it slipped my mind. so now my boss comes to me today to ask if I gave any warning to the managers, as they're complaining that the bad trainees are still bad. Despite all of the things that didn't get done due to him triplebooking me, the issues were well-documented in the ticket, which auto-generates emails to everyone on the ticket, which included those managers. There was a week's worth of discussion on the problem children of the class.

manager insinuates this wasn't enough. I remind him that he was literally supposed to be backing me up and he goes silent as if...he didn't even remember he did that to me.

on top of that, I just remembered...he was the official manager for both classes, and I never should have been the one handling this shit at the level I was anyway. the other manager I'm working with on my other classes always tells me "I got this" when the problem hits a certain level of severity, whereas my boss just leaves it for me.

we have about 10% of our learners without power due to Hurricane Beryl and the project lead decided to offer to extend training a day to catch up (a great idea, which I supported).

one of my instructors is pissing and moaning about it all day, like boo hoo I'm sorry I put you through the trauma of teaching an extra day, a lot of these learners have water damage, spoiling food, no power, and are sweating their asses off. wanna trade?

not to mention - some of the people who were supposed to do the next round of training...are also without power, so they couldn't start their training tomorrow if they wanted to.

Was working a new set at the gym today, on my day off from working there, and my co-worker comes up and says, "hey, k is in hospital because he got heatstroke, can you cover his closing tonight."

and i said "heat stroke huh? how did k get heat stroke, i mean it is hot but"

and co-worker responded "he got drunk last night and then didn't drink any water and fainted in (most populous public square in our city)"

i looked at my co-worker deadeyed and said, "no."

i love these kids, even the one who fainted, but jfc i was NOT this level of stupid at their age.

i realized that was convoluted at the beginning— i was working on some boulder problems that had just gone up on the walls, but i also work at the gym. anyway.

it’s me, hi, i’m the problem it’s me

loool tabes

when he comes back to work you should all pitch in & gift him one of those 10 gallon water jugs

he's in training to become a pilot, and the other day i asked him what type of planes he wants to fly, and he talked about becoming a bush pilot in Alaska, and i was like "wow that's so dangerous" and he had no idea? he's just not the brightest bulb, but he's very nice and is good to work with.

I know a guy who does that. He's also a jazz bassist; he was in Jaimie Branch's band.

Hurricane Beryl issue has lead to six classes becoming a nightmare. not because of the learners still without power, because what the fuck can you do about that, but because the grown adults I'm working with can't simply have a discussion about how to ensure they get caught up when they return. making decisions without getting other people's ok first requiring us to cancel those plans moments later.

and then one asshole makes a comment suggesting maybe some of them are actually no call no show and should be termed and i'm like REALLY, dick? do you not know how many people are without power there?

so the assignment that was stressing me out that was supposed to end yesterday might now extend out another three days. all because my boss decided to give me double the work everybody else.

i really...better get that fucking bonus now.

i am just finishing work now. I was supposed to be off 3.5 hours ago. all because of the ineptitude and sloppiness of a number of people and my boss not thinking through that 150 people transitioning out of our class at the same time is actually very hard for one person to handle.

(best believe I billed that fuckin OT baby)

I've complained about this particular co-worker in the past but, well, here we go again.

So our department (and not even the whole department, just the half I'm in) has stupid rules for working remote - only allowed one day a week, can't be Monday or Friday. Whatever, annoying and less than ideal, but we've learned to deal with it. I've usually had mine on Thursdays for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it's the one day I for sure don't need to be involved in any in-person meetings. Unfortunately, for a variety of project meetings that need to attend in person, I personally can't ever do Tuesdays remote. So that leaves me only Wednesday and Thursday as options.

This summer myself and said co-worker got randomly assigned the task of overseeing some student interns. Again, totally fine and it's been an interesting experience. When they started our boss told us we couldn't take the same remote day, as one of us would need to be in the office with the interns. Once again, fair enough.

So for the first few weeks of this, we would have a quick conversation about which days we'd take remote and about 75% of the time I switched mine to Wednesday. But there were two occasions where I really needed Thursday and explained this to her. Both times she started crying and made me so uncomfortable that I didn't know what to do and ended up switching mine again (okay, yes, my choice to give in, but I was so uncomfortable I didn't know what else I could do). But this week, she went in to the shared calendar and claimed Thursdays for herself for the rest of the summer. No word to me, no heads up, nothing.

Genuinely not sure how to handle this. Our boss always likes using "taking away remote days" as a threat and I'm fairly confident there's a very large risk he'll just tell us we both don't get remote work days if I bring this concern to him. Past direct conversations with this co-worker have ended with her crying, no matter how lightly or gently I approach the question. (side note: there have been other complaints about this particular co-worker "weaponizing" her tears and she self-reported to us that her last performance review spent a significant amount of time on the frequency with which she cries in the office) I think it's bullshit that she can just unilaterally claim every Thursday and that's just it, but I'm not sure how to resolve it.

tell her you need to take some thursdays and to suck it up

I can't think of a neutral way to ask "is there a way I can ask you normal-ass questions about our work schedule without upsetting you to the point of breaking out in tears?"

on the bright side, maybe she's blocking off Thursdays to finally go to therapy?!

to quote Hootie: let her cry

like just sit for as long as she cries for and then ask her to help you come up with a workable solution

or better yet, take it to HR. that’s what they’re there for!