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

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!

HR would probably be best. Might be worth it to mention you’re worried about losing promised wfh days as an unfair punishment.

lol just join in the crying and watch her freak out

That is actually the best idea

So I’m a freelancer and submit invoices after I’m done a project. Normally payment comes through within two months from the different shops I work for.
This absolute dunce sat on two of my invoices for two months and then quit. So three months later I’m not getting responses to my emails asking her what is going on. When I saw on LinkedIn she’d moved into a new job 4 weeks ago (somehow landed a better position despite being the WORST producer I’d ever worked with) i was so fucking if annoyed. Who does that?! Did she know she was going to quit and just not bother doing her job for an entire month?!

we usually teach customer care agents but they gave us four licensed Series 7 financial advisors to teach, so honestly they probably know more than us about 401k, but it's just to teach our systems.

these boomers act like they've never seen a computer in their life. it's almost hilarious watching them not being able to do rudimentary things.

like you're telling me the financial companies you worked for prior to us didn't have a web presence or require you to use computers? seriously?

Are they extra proud of not knowing how to use computers, or just a little smug about it?

they seem like they think it's 1997 and expect us to join them there

People used computers for their job in 1997! They were even more complicated then!

I’ll never have to type a command line again and lovin’ it

latest edition of 'dumb boss chronicles', so they did a significant redesign of health benefit coursework while we had several classes already going on. standard process is to let them continue with the course curriculum that was in place when class started, and then we deploy the new curriculum separately, and only retire the old one when all of the classes using it have ended.

Instead, they accidentally overwrote all of the existing coursework with the new courses, so trainers who had prepared were completely lost as to why the materials looked different. Then, instead of archiving the activity materials from the old class so we could still get to them, he deleted them all from the database permanently.

every hour I get a new question about something that unexpectedly changed. and boy do I enjoy telling my boss about it when it happens.

“dumb boss chronicles” would be a sick thread tbh

What was that wonderful thread where somebody recorded all their mad boss’s utterances/singing?

A thread for Steve n.'s list of songs that his boss sings

one of my trainers sent me a mocked up schedule showing which trainer is leading each topic at each time for the next six days.

she is the only trainer in the class.

what in the world was the point.

there are 8 or so of us on the on-call rota, so we have to do a week roughly every 2 months. but people have been booking monthly slots or slots 3 weeks apart, which is squeezing people out. (it's quite lucrative - the rates have just gone up 250% which is probably why)

they decided to only align one instructor to this class as there are only four learners. the reason, however, that we usually align 2 is because people get sick, have emergencies, etc, and it stops the class dead every time if you only have one instructor.

as expected, our first instructor got sick three days in and had to be replaced. Then our replacement instructor was only available for one day, so they put another one in. Now that person had system problems and they had to replace THEM, so now four different people have presented in 8 days.

compounding things, today, we had the learners read the material on their own, telling them we'd debrief it, and I told the replacement instructor to find out how far everybody got in the reading, and then find a good place to debrief/pick up from. he instead started from the beginning. it's a four hour lesson and we were supposed to be finished an hour from now.

really feels like babysitting, i swear lol

Working on a piece about Prohibition and architecture, which entails sekf-financed travel.

I requested a pile of books for my research.

This is what I went to school for.

What I get is "can I get a copy of the musuc you're writing about"?

I'm not a music writer, dumbfuck. No I'm not going to paint a mural for you or write poetry.

What I do on my own time is my business until it's finished. Which may take two years the way things are going. You don't finance my work so fuck off.

They have a new media librarian at my old job she is so bad.

A professor asked her to order more 80s "college rock" for his class so her master list is a Replacements and Warren Zevon and Syd Straw anything Peter Buck played on like she looked it up in five minutes. It was like very dad rock corporate frat boy - no British or Australian music or anything.

I said the director has to go the place has gone to shit everyone meaningful is gone, all our hard work down the drain.

Thank you ledge!

one of the things we are supposed to go over in training for new hires is the customer website, so they can guide them. for the second straight year, the link to that site in our training environment has been broken for months. last year we lost it for about 2.5 months. this year, it's been down since early February, almost six months.

the former person in charge of fixing it was the worst, basically would deny it wasn't working even as you demoed it not working to them, and then would do nothing for 3 weeks and then ask you 3 weeks later "still having the problem?". but they took her off and replaced her w/ someone who...does even less.

You know, when I was a teenager I thought no-show jobs were a mob thing, and then I started working in corporate environments where shit just...doesn't happen, even though there's a person in charge of making them happen. It's incredible, sometimes.

we have a job configured in our build system that lets you type in an error and will find other builds that failed with that error - "disk full" for instance. it will turn optional requeue those builds and hopefully fix what are usually temporary errors.

manager asked me to write instructions for him so he can run this and look like he's doing useful work. today he tried it for the first time...

...and didn't specify an error, left the field blank. so EVERYTHING matched and EVERYTHING was requeued, 1000 things.

lmao

software is so good

put me in my fucking grave already

stop fucking with me

lol I got a bonus for my work on this pilot project and then a week later they dismantled it and decided not to continue any further on the pilot.

well at least I got money out of it.

boss's boss decided to mess around with site permissions on Sharepoint without fully having an idea of what they were doing and now nobody can get into the daily documents they need to get into. they keep trying to figure out how to fix the site permissions to what they want while not keeping people out and I was like "can you just revert what you did so we can get back to doing our work and figure it out some other time?"

Excel dorks may enjoy this.

My boss spent over a month creating this new training class report. One of its new features is auto-calculating class attrition, which I tested after he'd already rolled it out, and noted that it was incorrectly showing 100% attrition no matter what I entered. I looked at the formulas and saw why.

The attrition calculation formula was fine, basically divides final class size by original class size, subtracting that total from 1. But it's where he pulled the final class size from that was the problem.

Instead of doing the smart thing, like having the report count every learner that had a "Yes" under Completed Class Successfully column, he programmed it to count the number of people who were marked Present on Day 21. problem is, most of our classes are 19 days, and Days 20 and 21 are marked 'optional' for the rare class that is 21. so we're instructed to input "n/a" in the attendance for those days. The report is then finding a result that is other than "Present", and since everybody is marked n/a for that day, it's returning a 0 result, so the report is thinking everybody got fired on the final day of training.

I know how to fix it but I'm going to let him do it since he didn't properly test this thing before he rolled it out.

Bwhahaha!