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

I'm glad it worked out well for your son, Jon. That just sounds so young to me.

I got to take a week off when my son was born, but it meant using up the remainder of my vacation for the year.

Yeah, see that's messed up.

Attitudes towards vacation and sick time are so weird in the US in general. I don't think I talked about it here but I recently got called into a meeting (WITH HR) to discuss my abuse of our sick time. I had used 6 of the 11 days we accrue each year and that's considered abuse. WHY DO WE GET 11 THEN?! Also, I was actually fucking sick. I've also been told that while we get vacation time it's sort of an "unwritten rule" that people don't use it very often.

It is so young! It was a really, really hard decision to make, but, in the end, we just couldn't figure out a way to make it work financially any other way. I've always found it weird that so-called "family values" conservatives don't go to more lengths to protect family leave or time off for stuff like this.

Unionise! Educate, agitate, organise!

I'm in a union and we still have the same shitty maternity leave. I'm allowed to use sick time but that doesn't change my deadline driven workload. Staying home sick means working late to make up time later.

As for conservative America, they only care about children insofar as they can be used to punish sluts who have sex. They don't actually care about the children themselves. (See also: use of children with disabilities for anti abortion rhetoric while cutting programs for children and adults with disabilities.)

I recently got called into a meeting (WITH HR) to discuss my abuse of our sick time. I had used 6 of the 11 days we accrue each year and that's considered abuse.

holy shit - i would have been fuming! so they basically accused you of feigning illness? i don't think i would have been able to control my temper if an employer pulled this bs.

In my new job people get four months full pay mat leave plus five
Months at something like 90 percent. And can take a whole year in total. People ask me why I wanted to leave the USA; I can't say this is the only reason but it's part of the culture I just don't understand how people live with it (excise shitty phone typing)

UUUUUUGH

I'm in round 433240978 of revising this document. Here's the latest suggested edit:

The version I wrote starts like this: "Among other efforts, the ___ Program has focused..."
That has been scratched that out, and instead the suggested edit is "Amongst other efforts , the ___ Program has focused..."

In google, if you type "among other efforts" in quotations, you get 4 million results. if you type "amongst other efforts", you get 192,000 results.

And it's not even about whether or not it's grammatically correct, it's more like this is the billionth time we've revised this, and THESE are the kinds of edits that are still taking place?
ugh

and yes, the two words are completely interchangeable, although amongst is more old-fashioned. but god this endless wordsmithing is just fucking nauseating

Somewhat related, one of my coworkers is wearing a short bearing a large American flag that says "PATRIOTISM" underneath.

xp oh god that kind of crap goes on around here all the time. One coworker is notorious for randomly striking or adding "that" as a clause introducer.

is it an editor/proofreader or something? if so, could it be that it's the house style for wherever you are? here we have to make sometimes arbitrary decisions so that our pubs are consistent with each other. but if it's just someone making the decision from a non-editorial standpoint, i agree that that sounds like a pain!

in other news, i am about to go into a meeting. i didn't plan well and am starving. i hope this meeting is SHORT.

Also in US business English, "amongst" is archaic and pretentious.

is it an editor/proofreader or something?

nope, just my boss. she must make some sort of change to every single page, otherwise she doesn't feel that she has "reviewed" it.

It's the kind of crap lawyers who can't write throw around in their shitty briefs* in an attempt to sound smarter than they are.

* I read shitty lawyer briefs for a living and let me tell you, some of these jokers wouldn't even come close to passing the community college paralegal writing class I teach pwith the mess they file.

Tell her she's being archaic and pretentious and let me know how it goes.

My favorite is when I reorganize the entire document according to Wednesday's whim, and then in the throes of Thursday she calls me in and says "I don't understand the organization of this document"

but...you were the one who suggested...and I just spent the entire day redoing the whole...and I ...but..

fuuuuuuuuuuuuu

one of my main problems with the executive branch is that i have to execute everyone else's orders

yeah amongst as a house style would be quite silly

nope, just my boss. she must make some sort of change to every single page, otherwise she doesn't feel that she has "reviewed" it.

OMG this was my old boss when redlining construction drawings. He was just incapable of not marking something up on every single sheet. There were times when it would just be him second-guessing himself on one tiny note over and over because he couldn't let it go without markups.

Just put a single mistake in on purpose so they'll correct it and leave everything else alone.

That is actually a strategy, and yes, it sorta works!

Z S, your boss sounds kind of like mine. ~sympathy~

We should get our bosses to work on a document together, kind of a co-review thing. They'll get stuck in a feedback loop of pointless edits and be stuck there until they retire, and in the meantime we can sneak our stuff through!

"I recommend that we rename the "Background" section the "Overview" section"
"Good idea, and perhaps we should also change the bullets from circles to diamonds?"
"Brilliant. I also want to have a discussion about the Draft watermark - shouldn't it be diagonal?"
"Yes, let's make the change immediately. And change the "Overview" section to "Summary" while we're at it."
"I agree. We'll rename the "Summary" as "Background", and then we should be ready to tackle page 2."

We should get our bosses to work on a document together, kind of a co-review thing. They'll get stuck in a feedback loop of pointless edits and be stuck there until they retire, and in the meantime we can sneak our stuff through!

I have seen this happen and it gets ugly. It doesn't end until one of the parties involved refuses to make further non-substantive changes. But then it gets ugly again when there's another doc to review and the person who got shut down gets revenge via petty, unnecessary vengeance edits.

Does it end with a big fist fight and both parties getting fired? If so, I still say we should try to make it happen.

Oh dear god I am totally this boss.

I don't know how to stop!

So YOU'RE the one!

Does it end with a big fist fight and both parties getting fired? If so, I still say we should try to make it happen.

No fist fight but two of the three got transferred to a place where they can't hurt anybody anymore and the third is probably out of here in Jan.

Quincy! You have to learn to trust your staff and your dirt impressions and let go. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

And if you don't trust your staff, you need to retrain them or get new staff.

dirt impressions? Don't trust Carl. ;)

But but but it is better *my* way!

OK I resolve not to be so bad about this. I don't do much editorial work these days, anyway.

ugh. dude in cube next to me always has these horrible telephone conversations. all i can hear is his angry, lecturing voice. 100% of his conversations are like this, even when it's about something mundane like "did you get the word doc" or something. i'm not a ball of sunshine, but he's so angry about everything in the world, and it's impossible to tune out.

dirt impressions? Don't trust Carl. ;)

Autocorrect! Ack!!!

Just gentle teasing :)

Our HR manager is an idiot.

this is not about my co-workers, but it's from an email that the building management company sent out to everyone in the building about proper waste disposal:

• Paper recycling bins are only to be used for paper intended to be discarded and recycled. These bins are not meant for storage and to ensure the safety of your documents, please do not stack files or papers next to the bins.

This is like people who store computer files in the computer trash. Or a former coworker who would delete emails to get them out of her inbox (bc our work had a size limit) and then go find them in deleted items when she wanted them.

LOL jesus this world is fucked.

Or a former coworker who would delete emails to get them out of her inbox (bc our work had a size limit) and then go find them in deleted items when she wanted them

I worked with a guy who would read through his emails and forward the 'important' ones back to himself so they'd return to the top of the inbox.

He was eventually given a big list of improvements he had to make to his workflow. He did not improve and was eventually fired.

I'm... not exactly sorry to hear that.

did this guy later post here as Leif?

Z S

he ended up not being able to find a job for like a year and then went to work at my company's main competitor. lucky them!

industry historians have attributed much of your main competitor's recent success to the innovative workflow adjustments made by Leif, including his policy that all interoffice email should be printed, scanned, and then faxed back to the original sender as a backup

oh my lol

Did I ever tell you that when I was a union steward, if I wanted to file a grievance I had to: print a copy of a grievance form that our chief steward had emailed to me. Fill out the form by hand. Fax the form back to the union. But the fax number was actually some kind of magic on-line fax scanner that sent the faxed form as an email attachment. When I suggested we could just fill out the form on-line, they were like, Oh no, that will be too hard for people.

I know these are p moderate annoyances to some ppl but shit like that actually makes me IRRATIONALLY ANGRY, like for real, to the point where I have trouble letting it go and just steam abt how fucking stupid it is.

I got pretty irrationally angry about it when I was still at work at 7:30 at night "faxing" 40 pages of grievance docs to this fucking email address, especially since the fax machine in our office is a flatbed scanner that will only accept one page at a time (and you have to push "2" after each page you scan if you want to scan another page, which is super intuitive).

Public sector work is the perfect petri dish to see how much irrational anger about completely effed up and inefficient processes you can take and still maintain some semblance of mental health equilibrium.

I wonder if a lot of it has to do with technology being p much forced on older generations who just don't get it, and if in 30 years when all the execs are from the internet generation things will be better

I told some 19 y/os about the dude re-emailing himself stuff to keep it at the top of the inbox and they almost cried, they were laughing so hard!

no... in 30 years the "older generation" will only respond to emails on facebook while everyone else will have their minds directly connected through megainfograb.nz

xpost

I wonder if a lot of it has to do with technology being p much forced on older generations who just don't get it

The 32 year old associate attorney I work with is pretty fucking bad at everything but very basic computer stuff (e.g., he doesn't know what Ctrl+C, Ctrl=X or Ctrl+V do) which he excuses by saying, "I'm not really a computer guy" and "I'm not very techie."

That is like not being able to do long division b/c you weren't a math major.

I have several female colleagues who also don't CTRL + C, etc. It's quite frustrating. I got my first computer at around ~16, they probably skewed younger to 10-12 years old!

The upshot is that every company I've ever worked at has hailed me as some kind of genius, so yay.