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

smh

yikes jon, that sucks. nothing worse that when they leave a mess in their wake and there's nothing you can do to them.

Okay our new interior designer is either a) a future SNL character in development stages, b) straight up irl trollin', or c) really crazy. She is a dead ringer for Bjork when she talks and is just overboard as hell in everything she says.

Two examples just from today:
Someone left a paper for her on my desk, so I took it over to her and she said, "Oh thank you, you are an exteremely kind and generous person to bring this majestic paper to me. Such a wonderful, happy thing". I shit you not, this is fucking verbatim.

I overhear her on the phone talking to a client saying, "Yes it has made my day full of joy and glory to be able to speak with you and get to know you. I know our working together will be fruitful and will make us both majestic."

I keep waiting for the hidden camera reveal.

Jesus. I wonder if she is into some of this sort of stuff ❀ the cult of: ➥motivational speakers ➥life coaches ➥personal growth gurus ➥new-age charlatans ➥AWESOMENESS FEST

i wish i could be made majestic

Have jvc bring you a sheet of paper.

Maybe I just bring majesty into everything I do?

Haha I thought of that thread the first time I met her, maybe when I build up my tolerance a little I will broach the topic and bring new insight to that thread.

I seriously am excited about this prospect.

Is she ESL? Or just nuts?

Well, I'm pretty sure she is ESL but it genuinely doesn't feel like just wrong word choice, she is just really exuberant about the tiniest things.

She's Elvish!

Yes! That one crossed my mind too, she is definitely pixie-ish.

I work with a dude who starts every request with "in principle" and then gets out of the said request. I don't need an pathetic excuse, I need a yes or no. Fucktard.

posted this in the chicago thread by accident:

So tired of people not being able to get their shit together. We were supposed to be practicing for an interview for a new project today and as of last night, we were told to get here early today to start practicing. Got in at 6:45 this morning and finally heard at 8:15 by the partner in charge of the interview that "something came up" and the practice was delayed. Same thing was emailed at 9:30 and 10:45. Now we were just told that we would be starting practice at 5:45 tonight, "so make whatever arrangements you need to be able to stay really late tonight". Yes because its always easy for everyone to completely rejuggle their lives because you are a horrible planner and completely unable to prioritize.

I'd suggest that "whatever arrangements" involves "you're providing dinner, boss."

That remains to be seen, but I sure as hell know he's not covering the cost of the babysitter I had to hire last minute. Nor, y'know, getting equivalent time off to spend with my son now that this will make 6 straight work days that I've had to stay at work well past his bedtime. All of this to help repair other people's fuckups, mind.

Don't snigger and try to make jokes in an 8am meeting introducing upcoming job losses in our department, you utter fuckwit.

Fuck this shithole.

The really really annoying one is on his way out.

Although who knows what his replacement will be like.

So that nutty security guard who washes her keys? I'm walking down the hall today and she stops me to express surprise and pleasure that I'm wearing a skirt (fact: I wear skirts or dresses ~90% of the time), tells me I should wear skirts more often (like, in the shower?) and then caps it with, "I wish I had big legs like that."

Doesn't everybody, though?

Wow. In case it wasn't mentioned earlier, this security guard washes her bags of chips in the nasty public bathroom sink.

wait, waht

She buys bags of chips from the vending machine.
She takes the chips into the bathroom and washes the exterior of the bags with soap and water before she opens them.

Once as I was leaving the bathroom behind her she turned around and went back in muttering, "I forgot to wash my keys."

She puts newspaper down before she sits on chairs. All chairs, including the one she exclusively occupies.

That all makes her sound too sympathetic. I mean, I don't wish her any ill but her weirdness extends far, far beyond potential OCD behaviors. Like, I could write you a ten page treatise on her wig choices alone.

She's wearing this long, straight wig today that is mostly notable for being constantly cock-eyed, but my favorite is her long, curly red hooker wig. She's a church going grandmother, btw, who endlessly sings hymns in the bathroom. In her curly hooker fetish store wig.

Oh she also always wears two pairs of pants and starts the process of unfastening them in the very public hallway outside the bathroom.

And she does some weird chinchilla dust bath thing with dry paper towels in the accessible stall where she'll take two huge piles of tri-fold paper towels from the dispenser into the stall and do go knows what but its like nonstop paper rustling and hymn singing for at least ten straight minutes.

I mentioned she's the security guard, right?

Once a very very old coworker of mine collapsed in the bathroom and I found her and called the security guard and told her to dial the emergency number for our building and she proceeded to run back and forth across the bathroom threshold calling "JESUS CHRIST! OH JESUS!" and was still helpfully engaging in hysterical prayer when somebody else came along to keep an eye on the collapsed woman and I could go call the emergency number myself.

I think she needs her own thread.

Sales boss and sales person currently having shouting match in closed door office, which we can all notice. Overheard snippet of "you're always like this, you have a go at me EVERY SINGLE DAY"... can't blame the guy tbh. Said boss is a snide, rude, unfunny "dry-humoured" English asshole.

"English" would suffice

Two pairs of pants? Is one pair like PJ pants? Livin the dream if so.

training this week's going great, but this one utter dolt on the team that nobody likes (and few know what he actually does) emails me (and CCs the project manager) on this deliverable that my group hasn't even agreed to do yet (and if we do, it won't be me, more than likely)...and he basically says "we need to get moving on this now. What will your role be?".

I was tempted to send him a pic of an animated bear shrugging, but everybody told me to just ignore him.

Pants: she wears a security guard uniform over street clothes.

I think she needs her own thread.

She wears 2 sets of clothes!?

She sounds like she has some..erm... rather serious problems?

I'm in an exam room with a patient who is standing around in his underwear when my coworker knocks on the door. I yell, "one moment!" and continue to evaluate the dude. She knocks again, pops her head in and tells me it can't wait. I excuse myself and step outside. The big emergency? She was running to Starbucks and wanted to get my coffee order.

I don't even drink coffee.

omg

Yeah thats not on. Actually that reminds me, of a witnessed co-worker suck I guess. I was in the waiting room at my physiotherapists, and one of the head older physios came out, and proceeded to rudely, loudly chew out the receptionist in full earshot of all of us in the waiting room, for disturbing him while with another patient. The guy was pissy at some other patient who'd apparently turned up late, he was all "five minutes late is LATE, its not good enough, I dont care if he's sitting in his car stressing out, do NOT disturb me with a patient again do you understand!?"

He was so rude I almost wanted to make a complaint. I just sat there quietly glad he isnt my actual physio.

(he's done it again since, I think I now know why the receptyionist seems to change every few months).

OMG. The woman today that is walking around the entire office letting each and every person know just how much of a trooper she is for coming in when she is "sooooo sick" and "feeling absolutely awful", while she sneezes, coughs, and generally spreads sickness everywhere. No one is impressed, stay the fuck home next time.

someone put letterhead paper in the printer (one I don't use) and while I'm waiting for my print job to come out, she's like hmmm there's fancy paper in this one. is it supposed to be like that? and i'm like oh yeah, that's probably a mistake, and she says hmm, someone should change it and then she walks away. ugh. why don't you just change it? everyone in this office is like this. so i just changed it.

Ugh, why are architects so stupid? We got a call this morning from a (potential, not current) client asking us to do a rush exercise to create some marketing materials for a presentation they have this Thursday, as in just a couple days from now. In their infinite wisdom, the powers that be have decided we'll do this for free, "just in case they ever decide to bring us work in the future". WTF kind of business plan is this? Its annoying. I realize the market is still shaky, but giving away your services is not the solution.

agghhh. my colleague NEVER gives me a clear idea of the task she wants me to do. I read her emails where she asks me to do something, and unless it's something very simple like "update the website with x", it's always EXTREMELY confusing. I can't even pinpoint where I don't understand what she's saying. Maybe her language is too vague? And she sent me this email 5 minutes before she leaves for the weekend, and no response to the clarification questions I immediately sent. How am I supposed to do what you want me to do if you can't even tell me clearly and aren't around to answer my questions about it?

she sent me an email once while she was on holiday, forwarding me an email saying "can you please take care of this", and I have absolutely no context or knowledge of what was being requested, and my entreaties for more background info went unmet. Ugh.

and my entreaties for more background info went unmet

I'd just make sure I CCed my boss into all such entreaties so as to cover my arse

not co-workers, but a fucking CLIENT.

when we train call centers, we always give our clients the ability to call in and "test" the representatives knowledge. We also do our own internal testing. This is done using a controlled environment, with scripts, and specific answers we are looking for. The testing comes at the end of training, and is one way of measuring the readiness of teh representatives.

As a result, we always tell our contacts not to ad lib, because that kills the 'controlled' environment, and makes calibrating the results more difficult. In addition, sometimes they throw out a question that would not be confusing in a real life environment, but that would be in a controlled test environment (example forthcoming)...or they ask an invalid question that the representative couldn't realistically find the answer to.

We had our first round last week, and it went well, so I was expected similar success, as the training went very well. Within minutes of today's client session starting, though, it was clear that something was amiss. One of the client contacts went completely off book and started asking "trick" questions about other services that this call center didn't handle (and the correct answer was presumably to offer to transfer the call to the right place). Now, in real life, those representatives would know to transfer that call or give them the correct number to call. But since it was a test environment, they all thought that it was a REAL LIFE call that got misrouted, since they weren't supposed to be getting calls like that, so they all got confused as to what to do.

In addition, one of the callers asked a question that I had specifically omitted from the question bank because there was no possible way for the representatives to answer it as the test software didn't have the necessary information in the test environment...and there was also a tool we were building for our representatives that wasn't done yet. If I'd known they planned to ask this question, I could have put together a 'temporary' means of getting the info to them, but when they went rogue, obviously I couldn't.

One caller adlibbed a question that we don't have the answer to because THEY NEVER FUCKING GAVE THE INFORMATION TO US (and it's not something we should be expected to know ANYWAY).

I don't know if this was their attempt at playing "gotcha", to ask 'off' questions to see if we were truly ready, but if so, this is NOT the way to do it. Now they pretty much rattled the representatives unnecessarily, and made it impossible to truly assess the individual reps since they sabotaged the calls.

I was so angry I left before the 'feedback' came in because I was raging too much and was afraid I'd say something nonprofessional. Any 'negative' feedback would be a joke -- how can you broadside someone and then turn around and complain about it? And even if they don't, and give us 'weighted' feedback in light of the problems, they've rendered the whole exercise useless. It's no-win either way.

Frustrating as it was a great training class and I enjoyed teaching them, and hate that it has to end on a sour note.

Basically it was this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=NYgrHQVBWb0#t=463s

I THINK THERE'S BEEN A RAPE UP THERE

love that Office episode lol

Ugh, my boss has asked me to send out a generic sales email to a bunch of existing and potential advertisers. I hate becoming a spammer.

If someone is going to send out an email announce the death of a coworker's parent, maybe compose a subject line like, "Death of Bob Smith, Court Reporter Jill Smith's Father" AND NOT "Death of Court Reporter Jill Smith Father Bob Smith." (sic)

While I'm at it, my boss is notorious for projecting his Irish Catholicness on to everyone around, ie just presuming that all white people are Irish Catholic (and all people who aren't white are Catholic and wish they were Irish). So I'm eating leftovers at my desk and let's not even get into how annoying it is for him to decide this is a great time to come over and talk to me about work, but anyway, the leftovers consist of braised kale, roasted potatoes, and roasted chicken. He looks at my food and says, "Oh, you've got a little corned beef and cabbage leftover from St. Patrick's day!"

Is this guy actually Irish or is he American?

That's not how (Irish-)Americans think....