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

to the tune of Um Bongo?

I work in the database maintenance team for a library, and my coworker summoned me to look at some problematic records. When the titles came up he announced non-ironically "oh, what a lot of nonsense, they're all in French."

His screen was full of longwinded scientific titles with lots of umlauts and Ks and Ws and "von" and "die" and "über" and 20-letter words ending in "-ischen" etc, i.e. very obviously in German.

Which would be no big deal, except circa 2008 he spent over a year living and working in Germany. I don't expect you to come back fluent, but surely most people would recognise the language after a year of being surrounded by it?

hahahahahaha

this thread had a lot of "annoying" and not enough "stupid" but that story just rebalanced everything and then some

our database tables are in flemmish - wtf
I do like seeing the word GEEN - mean s NO
sometimes I think to myself - GEEEEEN!

xp I don't know if they spoke German or English at the company he was with (it's not an English/American company) but I like to imagine everyone talking German at him for a year while he just stood there smiling and saying "what." in his completely non-question-intonated way

(this is often his response even to instructions in English)

"It's odd, most people in Germany speak French..."

most people in lungs speak flemmish

I did not know that other countries MANDATED vacation time! I just thought that they had a different work culture. FOUR WEEKS!!!! That is truly insane. Here the norm is that for an average, generic office job, you would have to work for many years before you got four weeks (my opinion based on what I've seen, YMMV).

At my work, this is the vacation policy:

YEARS EMPLOYED AS OF JANUARY 1st

Less than 1 year: 1 Week (40 hours)

1 full year but less than 3 full years of employment: 2 Weeks (80 hours)

3 full years but less than 5 full years of employment: 2.5 Weeks (100 hours)

5 full years but less than 7 full years of employment: 3 weeks (120 hours)

7 years or more: 4 Weeks (120 hours)

- Vacation hours do not roll over from year to year
- It is accrued throughout the year. If you get 40 hours, and you use it all in January and you quit in February 1, you owe the firm for 36.92 hours worth of the vacation time that they advanced you.

i had to put in 10 years at my old job for four weeks and then they bent me over once i hit my ten year and told me they changed the policy! fuck off bank

I get 25 days a year of vacation/holidays/sick days - its nice beacuse you can work on a holiday then take off time when you'd rather

my wife has something like 7 weeks.

That work ethic is why America is Number -- hey, wait a minute...

I take three days per year as "passion holiday" when I wear purple and sweat heavy and take erotic bath

Current job: 2 weeks, accrual basis, rolls over; 2 personal days, 2 weeks sick time. New job: replace all 2s with a 3! Stoked :D

HAHA mike.

it took me 10 years of working in this industry before i was able to claw my way up to 3 weeks.
my last job, when they laid me off, subtracted the vacation time they advanced me from the severance package.
i work in Canada but blame the US for our lack of vacationing.

last time I checked I had accrued 6.5 weeks of vacation

Yeah aus is p much same as nz - 4 weeks a year, 5 sick/personal days, and various state& national public hols, Xmas etc. Of course these days a lot of ppl get worked so hard they don't get to TAKE said leave, and in fact some workplace pollie was in the paper recently urging ppl to go the fuck on leave more often.

We've even a tv show here called " no leave no life"

Our sick time used to carry over until we were acquired.

I kinda like that it doesn't anymore cuz now it urges us to use all our vacation in a given year and the managers can't say "your time's just gonna roll over, why d'ya hafta go on vacation NOW?"

last time I checked I had accrued 6.5 weeks of vacation

I checked last Friday and I have 14.25 weeks of paid holiday and 11.75 days of time in lieu for working crazy overtime back in Dec/Jan

Yeah you get worked like a dawg, man :(

We were meant to get an extra person for the last three months to ease some pressure / use up EOFY budget, but me and supervisor pointed out that we would get even further behind by taking a week to train somebody

discovered this week that my manager didn't even know that I've been doing all the higher duties that someone else has been getting paid HDA for for the last two months

D: Theyre gonna rectify that, right?

so this person is neither stupid or annoying.
i guess her behavior is annoying - but she basically does no work. shows up late. isn't "ready" to take on a project (there's a pool of jobs/tasks we all pick up) for at least 30-45 minutes while she cruises facebook and her blogging site. or shops online. like she'd spend DAYS looking for a new pair of shades instead of taking on work or helping out when it was obvious some people were swamped. she's always out the door at 5 whenever possible and when she does get burdened with something that would prevent her 5 o'clock dash, she would (i think intentionally) do hurried, shitty work. sometimes sticking whoever was around to deal with her mess (me often). she vanishes often for hours at a time. mid morning or afternoon. she'd come in from an extended lunch and when someone came to her with something would announce she'd take care of it when she got back from getting a coffee (another 30 minutes).

and everyone there loves her. she's attractive and crazy popular and no one seems to question her work ethic.

it's been affecting my own work ethic, in addition to my job getting more stressful from other factors. i had been thinking i'd made a mistake accepting this position and today i found out she's leaving.

SHE IS LEAVING!

fucking sweet. i have the additional satisfaction of knowing that where she's going is small and she's going to HAVE to do alot of work! :D

xpost - and what is "HDA"?

and can i eat it.

higher duties allowance (i think?) - govt roles often get covered by someone else if someone goes on leave etc and instead of being promoted you just work at the higher payrate til its properly filled. At DFAT they used to call it "acting up" which always amused me.

xps I totally had someone like that at a past job, although we were all part of the same team of lowly admin people so she didn't really have much to do. Actually it was the kind of place where NO WAY could you just walk out in the middle of the day but instead she'd just sidle up to people and start distracting them saying she hadn't been given any work to do (even if it was true, she should have helped someone else on the team). The thing is she was crazy pretty, but totally knew it and wore tons of make-up etc when she didn't need to. The supervisor and every single guy on our team was kind of entranced by her, which I know is a total cliche but I didn't really think actually happened til she started there. She was actually an OK girl but as my o/h put it, "the kind of person who has absolutely nothing to say".
She kind of had a rep as being a funny one-of-the-lads kind of girl (but hot obv) but she never said anything funny, just catchphrases off tv and stuff like 'I'm bored dot com' and you just know if she was average looking everyone would have thought she was lame and annoying. Oh and her phone wallpaper was a pic of her and her chump of a boyfriend in a kind of naked embrace and if we went out for work drinks she'd just leave her phone out on the bar really conspicuously.

I have that coworker but the schadenfreude
is coming soon

dys will you be able to get news back on lazyass mcbitchface and find out if she crashes and burns?

I enjoy a good schaden soda way too much.

i know no one there. it's a double-edge schaden-sword because if she does do well she could be a dept head (if they eventually hire more people to do what she "does" under her).

but since all my coworkers (girls included) leeeerve her so much, i will know right away if she's looking for new work in 6 months.

that's right re HDA

and the other person will be doing some of it for the remaining month of our current contracts, but I did get fed up of having to fill all these gaps every week and went ahead and got heaps of it done til variously September / Christmas / EOFY 2012 so...

You got paid up as well tho right? :/

I am already getting paid up for other higher duties I am meant to be doing, doubt I will be able to argue to get more for doing all this as well, but maybe it will be useful at performance appraisal next year.

this year's was due in January but hasn't happened yet btw. and I don't have a job plan for the role I'm in...

I have to vent about crazy control freak girl today

We had a volunteer outing with a small group of coworkers. This one woman had volunteered at the place we were going, and offered to give us some input on what to expect, etc.
Which I anticipated to come in the form of an email, maybe a googlemap link, directions, etc. RONG.
We get a pointless half hour MEETING yesterday where she bragged for a thousand years about the fact that she'd done this all before, gave us long, manic, stupidly detailed instructions about getting into the parking lot which included stuff like 'you'll see a sign on your left, but don't go that way, go to the next road and then go past where you think you have to go and go to the other place that's hard to find, we all went to the first place and it was fine last time but you should go to the other place because that's where they'll want you" and I'm like holy shit CAN I BUY A PROPER FUCKING NOUN. Also WHO WILL EVEN REMEMBER THAT. So there was all of that...and that was pretty much it. My co-worker and I walk out looking at each other like okay so why did we just have that meeting? And I could tell she was going to be kind of a nightmare. She's very friendly and outgoing but she has the crazy eyes, and then with these obvious control-freakish ways, I just knew we were in for it.

We get there today and she leaps into 'action', signing us up for duties that are already taken and then walking around with the clipboard asking repeatedly for the woman in charge who we'd already established WAS NOT THERE and makes a very big show of being organized but in such a frenzied disjointed way that makes you kind of afraid to be near her much at all and you just know that nothing is actually getting done. Basically the human equivalent of someone pedalling very fast in a very high gear on a bicycle. Finally the volunteer in charge kind of takes us in hand and explains everything, and we go off to our assigned tasks, but she says that she'll 'check in' with us to make sure we are okay. EYEROLL.
So for the rest of the 2 hours she'd randomly flit past us in the kitchen and issue these bizarre non sequitur instructions for things we 'might' be asked to do. "Just a heads up, they might need 2 people to work the line so if they ask you, you ask the person if they want the food item, and if they say yes, you serve it to them, and if they say no, you don't give them any." All told in a very intense HI I AM ISSUING INSSTRUCTIONS way that was just fucking bizarre. My co-worker and I look at each other, shrug and keep right on doing what we were doing. Because if they need us on the line, they'll tell us!
The whole time we're there she's walking around very fast telling people meaningless things and just making a big show of being very busy NOT WORKING.
But luckily my co-worker and I had figured that she was crazy from the start so we figured we'd just pay attention to the head cook and the volunteer in charge and go where they told us. Which saved us SO much sanity. Also choosing to team up with my coworker in the kitchen largely away from Little Miss Captain Crazypants was the best move ever. Because we could just eyeroll at each other after she walked away and keep working.
I don't really interact with her in the office at all, I really only knew her to say Hi to. Now that I know more of the total package, I thank christ I don't have to work with her. Holy fuck. O_O

I had this co-worker get angry at me once because I forgot to change my away message back from "Lunch" for 3 hours and he said he had questions for me the whole time that he hadn't asked because he really thought I was away at lunch all that time.

...

I sat in the same row as the guy. He saw me. He had to know I wasn't eating for three hours.

...

his hair looked like a chia pet

so if they ask you, you ask the person if they want the food item, and if they say yes, you serve it to them, and if they say no, you don't give them any.

LOL did she seriously say this wtf.

oh man, self-righteous do-gooders are the most disgusting savages imo. they're so busy patting themselves on the back for how awesome they are for being 'down in the trenches' that they either a) never actually do anything b) are the worst worst worst for being selfish and self-centered in every other aspect of their daily lives or c) both of the above.

If ever there was a thread to make me glad that legally I cannot work right now...

Actually there have been a few times I've really had to restrain myself from venting on this thread about ppl at my volunteer job :(

all-time worst moment was when she had us gather for a fucking photo, in the kitchen, while people around us are working. The idea of taking a photo at all is bad enough (it was requested for our office newsletter so she gets a slight reprieve for that)...but taking it THERE. Like that? Ugh. It was awful.

so if they ask you, you ask the person if they want the food item, and if they say yes, you serve it to them, and if they say no, you don't give them any.

LOL did she seriously say this wtf.

lol at me and my posting skillz

yes she seriously said that...my coworker and I just stared at each other for a while after that. Like, "whaaaat the fuck is even happening"

Dear lord.

Ive met people like that tho, nosey motherly types who feel the need to spell everything out to everybody as if they are all brain damaged children.

"we have to be flexible"

yes, you have to be flexible on holiday for the next 6 days and i have to be flexible in the office on a saturday.

also hate the way they assign you new things when you're halfway through the previous one. especially when it's coding so you've a sandbox with lots of half-things in it - often makes it impossible to check in the new thing without undoing the old thing (and then having to redo it later).

honestly, the whole "be flexible" thing is one of my 'oh, fuck off!' phrases, because they want to say you're not flexible if you express any (valid) concern over a decision that was made, or if you dare to point out that you are unfairly having to sacrifice your own personal time so that someone else won't have to.

like I mean there are times where it IS valid, but it seems to always be uttered when someone's getting fucked over.