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

Boss:"Ronan could you comb your hair next time you come to work"

Me:"eh in fairness the contract doesn't say anything about me having to comb my hair"

Boss:"yeah but I mean you're a student now yeah? this job isn't so bad. they look after you well, it's a good wage, I'm happy with my lot"

Me:"I don't think there's any chance of me ever working here for a living, long term"

Boss:"Yeah and they pay your health insurance, it's not too difficult a job either"

Me:"Yeah no I'm never going to want to work here, to be honest I was planning on quitting as soon as I start college, or maybe even sooner, you needn't tell the main boss that"

Boss:"Oh don't worry, whatever is discussed here stays here. *long David Brent style lecture* I know what it's like to work WITH people and AROUND people, and I know that this station is not being run as effectively as possible, it's a clique, and I'm sure you can see that too Ronan. But quitting isn't going to change that. You quitting will not make this a smoother operation.

Me:"Eh I don't care about this job, I'm not sure what your point is"

Boss:"All I'm saying is, think about what I've said to you yeah? Just think about it"

Me:"............ok"

CEBCWTJCW: Morning Rachel!!! Oooh! What have you done to your NOSE??

Me: What? Oh yeah, it's a spot.

CEBCWTJCW: No! You've cut yourself or something! It's really RED.

Me: No, really, it's just a big, shiny, noticeable spot.

CEBCWTJCW: It looks really BAD!

At this point I gave up all hope of having a good day.

Woman At Next Desk: Oh, you used to live in London? So did I. I moved back after my daughter started school and, to be honest, I'm really glad I did. The education you get in London is terrible.

Madchen: I've heard inner city schools are, er, challenging.

WAND: Oh yes. I mean, she was one of only three white faces in the class.

Madchen: Oh. (Mutters something under her breath about 1 in 4 Scots).

Office twats who preface statements with 'I'm not being funny' should recognise that everything following the phrase comes with its own virtual kill file.

My other suggestion would be to canvass other coworkers for a pizza delivery one Friday and exclude her blatantly.

I work in a room with two people. Person 1 said to me all the stuff I wrote above. She thought nothing of saying it to a stranger (the assumption, I guess, being that I would think the same). Person 2 laughed along merrily. Also, I have come across numerous people in Glasgow who tell me they get scared in London because there are so many black people around. Again, the way they express themselves implies they feel no sense of shame whatsoever - they just don't see there's anything wrong in expressing obviously prejudiced opinions.

I'm not denying for a second that racism doesn't exist elsewhere (and I'm not forgetting that the survey found 3 in 4 Scots aren't racist) but this is the only place I've encountered bigots who have the expectation that my opinion must be the same as theirs.

reply from me: "actually, on Friday we both determined that we had the wrong CD and would have to special order a new copy. On Monday."

reply from my boss: "There must have been some miscommunication here."

yeah, between your ears and your brain. moron!

What the fuck?

Despite the fact that she's obviously still pregnant.

However, I AM authorized to purchase them, however I want, whenever I want.

What does that even mean?

SUBJECT LINE: I gotta get outta this place
...if it's the last thing I ever do (feel free to hum along.)

After a delightful morning spent discussing why someone:
1. Shouldn't open a printer paperfeed drawer, while the printer is printing;
2. Shouldn't send emails to everyone on their mailing lists about Church-related emails;
3. Should let others know when they need the printer instead of deleting documents in the queue;
4. Shouldn't tell someone "this is urgent" so they work really late to get it finished, when really, it isn't urgent at all and in fact, doesn't need to be done at all; and
5. Shouldn't take someone else's lunch from the refrigerator and leave it on the counter to make room for "extra drinks in case we have visitors,"
I have now experienced the conversation to top them all (and really, you have to laugh at this one. I did. Once I calmed down, imbibed chocolate and nicotine, and thought "well, at least it's not quantum physics?). So....here it is:

A Dialogue between "M" (yours truly) and "S" (Otherwise known as Scarett/Princess/Arch Nemesis/The Scarf Lady/etc.)
S: Hey "M"!
M: Yes?
S: You know how to work that digital camera yet?
M: Yeah, figured it out last week.
S: How long does it take to get those photos developed?
M: What?
S: I need some photos really fast, so I can photocopy them and make notes on the back. And get duplicates too, in case they get messed-up.
M: What? What pictures do you need taken?
S: I need to you take pictures of my computer.
M: Why?
S: I need to know what's on my computer.
M: (sigh) You are looking for a file?
S: No, I need to know what is on my screen thing.
M: (dawning awareness) You need screen captures?
S: No, I need pictures of my computer.
M: For....?
S: I need to know what's on my screen, 'cause these instructions don't make sense and I want to make notes.
M: Okay, then you need a picture of the information on your screen, that you can print and add notes to?
S: Yes.
M: Okay, we don't need the camera for that. We can just do screen captures. It's easy.
(M walks over to other office, taking deep and soothing breathes all the while, and explains how to "CTRL+ALT+PrtScn" - runs into trouble with explanation of holding down all keys at the same time. Eventually resolved and screen is captured.)
M: Now open Word and set the page to ?Landscape.?
S: My computer won't do that.
M: What? Yes it will.
(M goes through brief discussion of "portrait" vs "landscape" and how to perform operation in Word. Discovers part of problem is that S doesn?t know how to open Word because the icon isn?t on her desktop.)
M: Now just hit "Shift+Insert" and your screen shot will be inserted.
M: No, you need to hold down both keys at the same time.
M: I don't know, that's just the way the program is designed.
M: Yeah, it is find of frustrating.
M: Okay, now you have it. Just insert a new page for each of the next screen captures and then print the file.
(M returns to own desk and gets back into rhythm of formatting proposal.)
S: M! It isn't working. I want you to take the pictures for me.
M: I don't have time to take the pictures right now, I have to get this back to _____.
S: Well, I don't have the time to use the camera, so I guess this won't get done and _____ will be mad.
M: Yeah, I guess ___ will be mad, but I'll explain the problem to him.
S: Can't you do these thingys for me?
M: No, not right now. I have to get this done.
S: You know, it's your job to do this.
M: No, actually it isn't. I am sorry, but I really can't do it right now. If I have time later I'll come over and see what we can do. In the meantime, why don't you look under the "Help" menu to see if those instructions are better.
S: Oh, my computer doesn't have any "Help" on it. I keep telling ____ he needs to fix it, but he won't.

(M decides, for sake of sanity, to not try and figure out what that last comment means and returns to her editing, swearing all the while.)
End of original email.

And here are additional interesting tidbits about ?S?:
She claimed on her resume to be ?Microsoft Certified,? but was unable to explain what that meant;
She wrote all of her correspondence in Excel, because she didn?t know how to open Word (the icon wasn?t on her desktop);
When she came into work each morning, she made herself a pot of tea and sat in her cubicle reading household decorating magazines and drinking tea for the first two hours: and, best of all
She was once asked to provide a file that she had finished working on to another co-worker. The file was not on her hard drive for, as she explained, she ?didn?t want to fill it up with things? (and it was a 20 G HD!) File was eventually determined, by her, to be on a floppy. But floppy was blank when co-worker opened it. Eventually ?S? showed supervisor where she stored all of her floppys containing important info. She was attaching them to the metal parts of her cubicle with large magnets, so she ?could always find them.?

~ Laura (who is thankful that she can claim to be a happy rat, that abandoned the sinking ship in time to move to a much cushier and affluent ship, and is now ridiculously happy with things)

I've met a few people who have done basic "computer literacy" courses at colleges and Adult Ed. places who do this. What seems to happen is: the college says "don't store your files on the hard drive [of our lab computers], use a floppy" and the person absorbs this without understanding *why* they're being told it.

These sort of courses always seem to produce people who can't do anything except exactly what was on the course, and then only if their computer is set up exactly like the college ones were. Hence, not being able to start Word if it doesn't have a desktop icon.

(of course, the other stuff shows that this person seems to be a fuckwit regardless of that)

The ex-receptionist at my office once printed out an email so she could type it up in Word.

it's a sappy day.

1. "What does agriculture mean?"

2. "I was so annoyed. Someone threw themselves under my tube yesterday. People that do that must be mad."

3. Me: "Just tell them to put the web address in and it will take them straight into the site."

Her: "What address? Their address?"

Other things he did: worked at his cube standing up (making everyone around him very tense), unbuttoned his shirts halfway down his chest, commented on every phone conversation I had (work related or not), talked to himself, and played horrible CD-Rs of cabaret tunes he wrote and produced. I think the whole experience inoculated me against ever being annoyed by co-workers again.

Unfortunately something this stupid is uttered in my office at least once a day...

Punisher skull tattoo complained about China trying to kill Americans with fentanyl this week AND about Trump's Secretary of War shit, the military-industrial complex and ICE raids. In summary, my co-worker is a land of contrasts.

We have a supervisor who refuses to learn where anything in the plant is so when we're short a body in the control room (radio base that sends people to fix stuff) she sends people on unnecessarily long walks and climbs when another person is already closer - or when the task isn't even their job. Which wouldn't be a problem but if anyone pipes up and says "that's a level 9 job, not a level 7 job and we have two level 9s currently looking at their phones so they're not occupied" she snaps at them. She gets rude with people on a regular basis for other things but that's less problematic for me than not knowing the job.

I can't imagine trying to supervise in this atmosphere with poor people skills - you have no real authority, we have a strong union (discipline-wise) and making all the mechanics dislike you means they work by the book and half as fast on your shifts.

So, I didn’t get the facility manager job I had applied for, which I mentioned either here or on another thread.

Right now, a team is giving the gym walls a much-needed repainting. The route setting team, which I am a part of, is helping with this on Tuesdays, our usual setting day… but in the meantime, walls that have already been painted are being reset on Mondays by two members of our gym’s team and some outsiders from other gyms.

One of the people from our team is the person who got facility manager position.

In essence, I just feel really unappreciated and like I can never catch a break, but if I express that I think the regular team should be setting in addition to helping paint, it comes across as angsty and childish. Like, we won’t be setting for most of this month, and we’re doing MORE painting in December. I just started as a setter!! Let me set and learn!!

Just feel like I am wasting my time, pondering quitting just to spite everyone.

Sorry if that’s hard to follow. TL;DR: the person who got the job I wanted and would be better at gets to have fun and continue to hone her skills while I am stuck painting and doing shit work that no one ever recognizes or cares about.

A co-worker got food poisoning and I rushed to the gym on the morning of my fucking birthday to open up, ffs. Just totally unappreciated

If you have experience painting walls, you can get a job at an art museum! Sad lol.

But yeah, I can totally relate to what you’re describing. In fact, 8 years ago, I was doing wall painting and maintenance while my colleagues were hanging out talking about how they had UK dual citizenship and upcoming European travel, and here I was doing manual labor that they didn’t feel any inclination to help with. So I felt like I was beneath them, and they saw me that way. But it was just in my head.

I actually find painting walls kinda meditative… I have had some major insights while painting walls.

If you have experience painting walls, you can get a job at an art museum! Sad lol.

I am guilty of taking a short video clip of some guys rolling white paint on to a wall at the NY MoMA which I sent to a friend who worked at an art museum with the caption "interesting performance piece in this installation!"

Forearm Punisher skull was talking about paid protesters in Chicago. They’re actually a traveling organization, like the Dead.

Shit's pretty calm at work finally but the one grifter I mentioned upthread continues to provide "innovations" nobody asked for that are useless.

There's a rollout of a new feature in one of our apps on Monday. This feature was documented in a 4 slide PowerPoint anybody can use. It's 5 minutes of information, tops.

This grifter took the PowerPoint, created a training module basically plagiarizing most of the PowerPoint but added a professional recorded 25 second audio file that just summarizes everything in the doc.

This module requires you to create an account on the website it's hosted on. She had to post an SOP on how to create an account in the email.

My friend and I ignored her stupid presentation and just gave everyone the PowerPoint instead. Which requires no account and no reading an SOP

i was able to successfully chance cubicle locations at my job without having to explain the real reason i wanted to move was because the person across from me was humming the melody to Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" multiple times every goddamn day.

haha... sorry and congrats
my dad has been whistling the riff from Call Me Al for as long as I can remember!

get asked to supervise a last minute class starting tomorrow. wait all day for a roster that never comes. Unless something changes in 9 minutes, I leave at 6 ET without having sent anything or done any of the pre-work for tomorrow to be possible to start on time. enjoy, guys! not able or willing to sacrifice my night for you

A partner and I got assigned to update training modules to create versions specific to a new tool we rolled out.

I finished mine pretty quickly, but partner was quiet on his progress. Yesterday he tells me he 'finished', but I don't see that he did any editing.

I then realize he went into the review links and simply added comments telling people what changes needed to be made. He was supposed to actually author them himself - this was explicitly explained during our meeting. And he knows how to do it-he's done it before!

Not technically a coworker but:

Them: could you contact shared client about their ongoing issues ?
Me: I only have contact info for people who are no longer there. Could you give me new contact info?

Haven’t heard back in two days

This guy's not a co-worker exactly, but I need to bitch.

I emailed a publicist I know - someone whose clients I have written literally scores of articles about, had them on my podcast, reviewed albums, etc., etc. over the years - and asked for about a dozen email addresses for European jazz magazines that I was not familiar with but wanted to contact about reviewing my label's releases in 2026.

His response, in part:

"I feel really weird that you are asking for media contacts just for free. I have spent large amounts of money and time collecting these contacts...I mean I know you've written about a lot of my stuff over the years and paid me to promote your book but your ask feels kinda wild if I'm being honest."

I wound up searching for the email addresses myself, and found all but one easily enough. I was basically using him as a short cut. But I feel like given the smallness of the jazz world, this is a pretty fucked-up attitude on his part. I am not in competition with labels like Pi, Aum Fidelity, Clean Feed, We Jazz, etc., etc. We're all making records that are reaching a few hundred people worldwide, and I want all of us to be able to continue. But this guy seems to think that this publicly available information has resale value! Fuuuuuck that shit. I already have a database of about 500 writers and publications covering the kind of music I release, and if someone asked me for it, I would send it to them without hesitation, for free. If that explains why my label continues to be a money sink, then so be it. But I can't even imagine being that kind of person.

“Sorry if my request crossed a line. Turns out I was able to find the email addresses I was looking for on my own. I will be sure to only reach out when absolutely necessary going forward. Thank you.”

That was the politest way I could think of to phrase “thanks for nothing you fucking prick”

This guy is undoubtedly having to rationalize and defend the value of his labor quite frequently… especially considering the stuff we’ve discussed on the AI thread. Unless your coverage of his clients has been significantly negative, then his response is “kinda wild” … but there are some publicists I have dealt with who are, to use a Britishism, “fucking mental”

I'm curious how old he is, that sort of weird monetization-maximization things seems very millennial to me.

he views his job as a publicist to deliver the information from the clients to his cultivated list of contacts, and the list of contacts is a valuable asset in his mind. by asking for that directly, he thinks you're bypassing him in some way, as if you hailed a taxi and then asked if you could drive the car when they pull up to the curb

it's goofy because it's just a list of contact info but he seems to view that information as valuable. seems like less of a young person than an older person one, imo

worst case scenario, I could see someone receiving an unexpected email from you, and them questioning how you got their contact info and tracing it back to the publicist and being annoyed they broke some sort of confidence. but again, this is not really the way things work in modern times and you are looking for public contact information, not an editor's personal phone number or whatever

A dozen contacts gratis is a lot to ask of a freelancer colleague - you might’ve had better luck asking for the few you couldn’t find after searching. IMO the publicist was probably disappointed not to be given the opportunity to work on your 2026 releases with those European titles. If you value the professional relationship, apologise.

he should have just replied "five dollars for list @(venmo). thanks,"

Agree w/mh … re older person

FTR, this guy is a few years younger than me - mid-forties, I'd guess. And again, I wasn't asking for closely guarded information; I was basically using him as a short-cut to researching, say, the main editorial email address for Jazzthetik magazine in Germany (it's jazz @ jazzthetik dot de, in case you're curious) and a few others. He's a weird dude, hews to antiquated professional standards on a lot of things IMO and yet is surprisingly successful as a 21st century jazz publicist; his clients get covered often by outlets that usually ignore jazz. We're still friends and I'm sure I'll be covering his clients in 2026, I just found the whole exchange off-putting.

last Thursday, my boss tells me he has a last minute class he needs me to supervise. He gets me the custom schedule for it on Friday, and, as usual, he fucked it up. wrote it for entirely the wrong platform. instead of helping fix it, I had to rush-fix it in 30 minutes so the trainers would have something to use, so it was sloppily done.

Then he drops on me that there's a second class we didn't know about that I had to scramble to prep with 2 hours left in my day. my trainers and I get peppered with a litany of questions from frustrated trainees and their managers because of how last minute it was, none of which we can answer, so I ask our operations team and they're useless as fuck even though they're the ones who scheduled it.

"do you have a list of the trainees' pre-approved time off?"

"sure, here you go!"

*it's an excel doc that lists the number of days off, zero information on which days.

"what manager will this class be reporting to now that they're transferring divisions?"

"uh we don't know"

...............................

sometimes I think my colleagues are AI bots

My co-worker who passive-aggressively puts a question mark at the end of every declarative sentence drives me crazy:

Me: I can't recall, did you email me that file
Colleague: I sent it last week?

Me: Do you need that costing soon
Colleague: Yes?

lol i have a friend that does that, it drives me nuts

wait, does that come off as passive aggressive? because I sometimes do that if I'm not sure of something, like I would respond "I sent it last week?" if I'm like 80% sure I did send it last week. (I mean, usually I would just check my sent e-mail to confirm, but sometimes I'm in the middle of something and don't have time to check right at that moment). I guess doing it all the time is weird.

perhaps not everybody uses it in that way, but one person i know certainly does.

but this friend also feels that "K" is a hostile text which tbh I hate what texting has done to discourse lol

I always have to be careful about letting any passive-aggressiveness in my messages to my boss when I need him to follow-up on something for me, because he always copies and pastes what I write verbatim to those people without reading it first.

like...I'm not insulting anybody or saying horrible things, but man everybody gets frustrated now and then and sometimes that comes through in the message, that is supposed to be between us two. it'd be nice if I wasn't unintentionally writing for an audience when I tell him about an issue.

Silverfish otm … also if I am in a hurry/on a mobile, and typing “I am pretty sure that…” takes significantly longer than just the “?” response

so we had a teambuilding meeting today and we played a Holiday Game where we guessed the names of Christmas songs from emojis. all but 1 were Christmas related. they threw in one song of another faith , and it was

The Hanukkah Song by Adam Sandler

-_-

the upstairs floor where i work used to be blissfully quiet. for no reason (i'm sure my boss was involved, because everything sucky that happens here usually involves my boss), the most annoying person in the office moved up here. she is loud, loudly on video chats for hours every day and loud in many other ways too. she is so positive and upbeat! with a can-do attitude! a huge nerd lol (as she would say)! crazy for disney and star wars hehe!! and so so fucking annoying. and for some horrific reason she is now working in-office every day of the week. so there is no time when i'm here and she is not-here. which is so f-ing crazy because her job, like mine, is nothing-y as hell. but she sure talks in her video chats i have to overhear like someone who has an important job!! the "zomg government is so cool" nerds are the absolute worst people in the world.

i ran into her in the hallway a few days before christmas and exchanged a "hi how are ya". of course she had a santa hat on. she said "i'm pretty good except... i would be SO MUCH better if we could just have a WHITE CHRISTMAS!!" i said loudly "yeah that climate change sure is doing a number on us, huh?" and she just responded "ennnnhhhhhhhhh" sounding a little bit like the shrinking wicked witch from wizard of oz. because she's just so into the dogshit republican state government here lol it's like her brain had to restart or something....

lmao

Wait, white as in … ?

snow. it was 60 degrees all last week.

Ohhh that was uh … my 3rd guess after:
1. Not all the POC have been deported yet
2. Cocaine

you know how many days of christmas there are ....... 12 (a lot).

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude

i’m dying laughing thinking about the noise and brain restart

aint gonna lie adult Disney people give me the biggest ick of any genre of adults besides fascists

every year I usually take most of December off because nobody else is here and that makes work impossible, but this year I burned most of mine in November. right now I feel like I'm in ILX sandbox as every email I send goes into the void, returning out of office messages, usually with no backup listed...or the backup is clueless.

anybody work with someone who very clearly who only cares about giving the appearance of doing work and doesn't care to actually do quality work?

we have a manager who literally makes the most useless suggestions, or comes up with 'innovations' that actually are far worse than the thing they replace only because it puts her name on something that she can list as an accomplishment. meanwhile, the things she's actually asked to do that would help, she misses every deadline and leaves other people holding the bag.

to the point where i don't think they actually know what good work is, where their value system is hostile to good work. yeah my boss! to be fair to her, the entire state government is mostly like that. her boss, our director, is certainly a bird brain who can't tell good work from what sounds good on the surface. these people have no critical thinking skills or value systems because they're mormon and wannabe popular kids.

i do good work when i care to - mostly when it benefits me in some way - and i'm determined to not let their shit fall on me. i've stopped telling myself that that makes me bad and instead i've been telling myself that i'm inherently a good, honest, hard working person even when i refuse to engage in a system that is set up to punish me. i've noticed the result is that other people's opinion of me is higher even as i do less bullshit work. win-win!

Lol same. In fact, I got my first raise in 6 years last year for turning in my most half-assed performance. I had to laugh.

get asked to supervise another emergency class for four people who need 3-days of application training, then a week of domain next week.

as usual, nobody bothered to check the PTO schedules of the 4 they gave us, and one of the 4 is on PTO all of next week. the next version of the class doesn't happen until the end of February.

this has been happening for 5-10 years. everybody acts as if it is simply not possible to check people's schedules before signing them up for training.

thank God i'm not the person who has to care about the lost resource

Last Friday: Nean, you're supervising a class that starts on the 16th. Here are the details.

Monday: I begin preparing the trainers.

Tuesday: Hold off Nean, we're moving it back a week, to the 23rd. I update materials, move scheduled preparation sessions back a week.

Wednesday and Thursday pass without comment.

Friday at 11 am: Nean, someone messed up. We do need to start a class Monday after all. Here are your new instructors. The other ones aren't available.

Friday at 12:30 pm: Nean, one of those two instructors is out and the other doesn't have the necessary prerequisites. Getting you two more.

------------

Starting to think my longevity here has less to do with my performance and more to do with everyone else's ineptitude

The replacement instructors are both out today. They just gave me 2 more.

I'm now on my third set

overheard an online meeting my wife was having where her boss and another co-worker were giving her a passive-aggressive “wish I could take a two week vacation”— referring to my wife’s upcoming vacation with me. Could’ve punched them. Also, they are the type of person who brags about all the vacation time they’ve accrued but say they can’t ever use (but really it means you are a sucker who passes up what is legally owed you). I guess if you die with the most accrued unused vacation time, you win? Hurray for you.

None of the managers have the faintest clue how to run things. Tasks that should have been assigned by them never got assigned so important work never got done, and in true "smelt it dealt it" variety, anybody who reports the problem is then asked to fix it, regardless of their existing workload or ability to do so.

Three weeks ago, a colleague and I were assigned a project at 10 am and told we needed to have our first meetings with our teams that afternoon as we needed it wrapped in a month. Manager left out all kinds of important information assuming we knew what was in his head, so now we've been asked to do rework to fix something we didn't know we were supposed to do.

My colleagues are freaking out. I sent an ornery message to boss's boss today about it, pointing out that clearly communication was poor if neither of us knew of the requirement, but also that I'd actually called out one of the problems 3 weeks before we wrre assigned this project, and they did nothing.

The best part is they told me I got the highest performance rating in the department this year so if they try to tell me I'm stupid, I can say "you're the idiots that just gave me a glowing review, then"