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

We are having a big old building-wide fire drill today that requires everybody to exit the building completely and go outside, and they close the building to the public, and then let everybody back in. It takes about an hour.

It's also our agency's bring your kid to work day.

A coworker just rushed out into the hall, breathlessly exclaiming, "The kids are here?" Then she did a weird screamsigh, because she saw the kids, and ran up to one and said, "HIIIII!" in that awful way that people who talk to kids like they are dumb woodland animals instead of people do.

I have a headache.

But speaking of PDFs, a firm where I used to work during law school (so about six years ago) approached me about a year ago about a job and told me that they still use the horrible Word Perfect software that they had when I was there, because it's the only way to create PDFs. I told them that you can save as a PDF right in MS Word now, but she didn't believe me.

Got invited to a fancy award ceremony by a guy who I send my company's reports to. Manager told me I should turn down invite as there is unspecified drama. Month later, owner sponsored a table, invited most of the girls but me. :( It's tonight, so everyone is dressed up, giggling, there's a hint of exclusivity (they gather around the desk of the girl beside me and whisper excitedly about it) and I want to be all WHATEVER BITCHES I WAS INVITED FIRST. :P

Bright side: I left the job where my boss would email me to look up things she saved on her own computer!

I'm going to stop griping about my job for a while. I like my job and the frustrations could be greater, but they are still frustrating.

ca, I was hoping you were going to say that that person screamed in panic b/c she wanted to save the kids from the fictional fire.

No, but I heard one kid in the hall just now say, in reference to a very randomly placed (at kid height, even) fire extinguisher that appeared on the wall outside our office a couple of weeks ago, "If there's a fire, I'm going to spray that on it and put it out."

Thanks, kid.

we had a pizza party yesterday and someone claimed all the leftover pizza. there's just like 4 slices left, but someone wrapped them all in cellophane and put a red dot on it. seems odd to do that, i think...

coworker posted ' (X) Awards tonight. Common (brand she manages)!!'

Naturally manager & I began DMing each other Common People lyrics with the brand name stuck in. Heh.

argh! every time i see that pile of hoarded pizzas, i have to fight the urge to just take one.

Do it!

Also Je55e I hope you keep posting about your coworkers/bosses because it gives me the lolz and makes me feel better about myself and my colleagues! It is a public service!

replace the red dot with a sticker with another coworker's name on it.

put my name on it!

hehe. i wanted to put a green dot on it. maybe i will go do just that. (i wish it had the perpetrator's name on it!)

i agree w/quincie -- je55e's co-worker related rants are always amusing.

(i just did it. i feel kind of guilty!)

no the green dot is classic - just enough to fuck with them :)

excellent move!

Who pays for this pizza, anyway? Unless it is the pizza hoarder, idgi.

haha. it was an office party (yesterday was administrative professionals day!) so i think the office paid for it. my ex-catholic guilt is creating scenarios in which the red-dot was completely justified, but i think i'll just repress for the next 5 minutes and forget about it on the ride home.

green dot is innocent enough, i'll have none of your catholic guilt!

LOL. rayuela, I think you did the right thing! Unless that red dot was there to signify infection, it pretty clearly is a sign of a claim on the pizza and that seems totally messed up. It's community pizza.

and thanks for making me feel better about my complaining.

Haha. Thanks everyone! I no longer feel as guilty.

well, i just got offered a new job today, so i won't have to put up with stupid elephant powerpoint presentations for long. i have kept most of the stories about my awful current job out of this thread due to paranoia, but GODDAMN am i excited to be leaving!

Always the best feeling, knowing you can jump with impunity! :)

Ugh chip-crunching boss is sitting behind me making these constant very loud sighy deep breathing sounds. Its very weird and distracting, either she has a cold or she's trying not to cry/has been crying, the room is so quiet tho, its all I can hear. Why must I be so easily set off by these things *jams on headphones*.

Not to point fingers but didn't you say you made weird breathey noises yrself?

Yeah, well spotted haha. but I dont do it all the time, and mine are actual sighs (that sound like annoyed sighs). this was a constant heavy breathing kind of thing, like she couldnt breathe, it was going on for ages. It was weird because it isnt normal for this person.

I'm back.

- Phone calls to our firm go to one of two secretaries in our remote office.
- Everyone in our office prefers written (emailed) messages instead of voice mail (email is immediate and half the time I or somebody else transcribe and email voice messages, adding room for error)

- Secretaries are terrified to tell a caller that someone is on vacation (even when instructed to do so)
- Secretaries are terrified to request that the caller leave a message with them instead of a voice mail (it's not scary or difficult!)
- Even when they do take a message, the secretaries are terrified to ask:
1. Person's last name/spelling of person's name
2. Why they're calling
3. If they need immediate assistance
4. For basically any info except what the caller volunteers, including a phone number where they can be reached

Thank you for listening.

Seems like they are bad secretaries.

seems like they need to be MORE terrified of something else. if you catch my drift.

They're pretty bad. But their direct boss is terrible and he has encouraged their badness. He does virtually no work, so he's really paranoid about them telling people he is out of the office.

They should be terrified of me mushroom stamping them and their boss.

I don't know what mushroom stamping is, but if it is along the lines of green-dotting pizza I encourage you to pursue this.

i have no idea what it means either but it makes me think of super mario

1. A mushroom stamp 594 up, 127 down
when a male slaps his penis off the forehead of another individual, leaving a mushroom-shaped mark.

buy mushroom stamp mugs & shirts

like in super mario?

i don't remember super mario doing that!

i'm talking about the super mario movie.

the famous scene where bob hoskins slaps his penis off of john leguizamo's forehead, leaving a mushroom-shaped mark

oh right. yes.

My mushroom stamp is in the shape of a portobello.

With spores.

Hush.

nothing beats watching your boss slack off for the majority of the day and then tell you at 5:30 you have to work late because we're behind on our jobs. >:(

Oh I didn't realize it was native to word now! For some reason thought that function was some relationship btwn acrobat & word

― rayuela, Thursday, 26 April 2012 05:08 (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It is if your company still makes you use Office 2003.

I'm a bit worried about the integrity of a penis that's actually able to leave a visible mark on a person when whacking someone's head. What are these people, Iron Man?

> It is if your company still makes you use Office 2003.

*SOBS*

that said, any documentation i write is always better done in html than Word but then i think this is universally true.

It is if your company still makes you use Office 2003.

― gyac, Monday, April 30, 2012 11:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thought it was at least better than 2007, but 2010 is moving further into the past.
The ECDL courses held locally are just running their last 2003 based courses before moving onto the 2010 after the summer,. Does that make me feel the course i'm on is even more futile? I dunno, was glad to get a day off today even if it was cos I was ill.

Yeah 2003 is a relic. I wonder what percentage of largeish offices still use it & are never going to upgrade? I read somewhere that XP is still incredibly popular, like 50% or something of current systems still use it.

I am a secret rebel holdout of still using 2003 at my work, we were meant to upgrade to 2007 last year (!) but I fear my undeserved office reputation as the "Excel guru" will evaporate once I install 2007 and spend the next 6 years going "where the hell are my menu options"

also in 2003 I can create VBA macros that run on 2003 or 2007, but when I gave the task to a coworker on 2007 he couldn't get it to work. but he probably just chose some completely random file format to save as, because I probably said "I think you have to save as .xlsm because that is for macros, but I don't know because I'm still on 2003" and all he heard was "I don't know" so he thought "well I know everything so I am going to pick 'save as Lotus Notes 1983 edition'"

seriously we gave him books and training materials etc when he started and he flicked backwards through about 3 random pages from near the end and said "well it's all very simple because I already know programming", and I assure you he did not "know programming". and he tells us every day how he knows a lot about computers and is very logically and technically minded, and it doesn't seem to have crossed his mind that anyone else in an office of computer programmers might also have any level of computer knowledge, or that the screaming fuckups he makes daily might possibly be slightly incongruous from such a logical mind

(deep breath)

I'm XP and 2007. Holding out until it is a "convenient" time for me to get used to a new OS and MSOffice, which c'mon that will never be convenient.

I wish they'd upgrade me to Windows 7 so I could use all of my RAM. XP can only use 1/2 of what is installed.

Please. Stop saying "What say you?" in your emails.