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

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.

Another thing that guy does that makes me want to give him a wedgie is he uses open windows as his primary/only running to-do list. I would bet $5 that right now he has no fewer than 10 emails open and as many Word files. So, when the power fails for longer than his UPS battery lasts or his computer automatically restarts itself after an update at night, he gets pissy b/c he can't remember what he was supposed to be working on.

I have people my age who can't figure out google docs but the issue is that PEOPLE DON'T TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT. So many times I've had people come by my desk to ask for how to do this or that, and the reason they don't know is because they didn't take any time to see if they could figure it out by themselves. I feel it's more of an approach to how to learn things than whether one grew up with technology or not. Also 99% of questions related to Microsoft Word are googleable.

PEOPLE DON'T TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT

^this. so frustrating. lately when people call me over to ask things like "where are the watermark settings in Word?" i say "I don't know" (even though I do), and then i use their keyboard and type out "where are the watermark settings in Word?" into google and click on the first result. it's kind of a dick move i guess but i get really sick of being the office's beginning computer tech guy.

also, watching someone sloooooooooowly move up to the Edit menu, then sloooooooooooooowly click on Copy, and then slooooooooooooooooooowly move to another part of the document, and then slooooooooooooooowly move the cursor up to the Edit menu, and then slooooooooooooooooowly click on Paste is sloooooooooowly making me want to rip my eyeballs out

there are all these bullshit trainings that people take all of the time (how to resolve conflicts, how to "think on your feet", whatever) that never have any discernible impact on their work habits. i always want to suggest that they take a 5 minutes and look up keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, save and undo. just take 5 fucking minutes

if you really want to go crazy, learn how to press print screen and paste the screenshot into an email rather than requesting permission and $149 to buy screenshot software

sorry. *rips eyeballs out*

haha. the slooooooowly thing drives me NUTS but more than that, I'm usually sitting there like, is this how you interact with your computer every day? my immediate supervisor knows that keyboard shortcuts exist, he prefers not to use them. i'll be sitting at his desk, and he'll be showing me something in a paper, and he'll scroooollllll through the entire document (usually 40+ pages). i'm like, pleaaasse just hit ctrl-f and type in the phrase you're looking for!

I have a couple of notoriously smelly coworkers, who smell bad to varying degrees, and one of them walked past me today and I am not kidding, he smelled like people who smoke a lot for a long time and get that awful death smell about them, plus dank and mildewed basement, and filthy, filthy butt. I like this coworker and as he walked past me he smiled and said, "Hey! There she is!" and I started to smile back and then I smelled him and it was like in cartoons when bad smells make flowers wilt and die.

I feel it's more of an approach to how to learn things than whether one grew up with technology or not.
No lies detected. I am an adult who has her own work to do, not your personal remedial tutor.

I quite often get screencaps or images sent to me embedded in Word docs. That's infuriating.

I called my super recently to ask her to forward me an email I didn't have, and she complained that it would take her too long to find it (this was so I could do her a favor btw). The reason? Because she doesn't use the "search folder" function on her emails and never has. She scrolled through probably 4 months of mails to find it.

omg. a coworker of mine screencaps EVERYTHING. and i have to use the data in the screen caps, so i just end up having to type it all out. not to mention that you can't use the search function to find what you're looking for when you have pages and pages of screencaps. also she can't seem to save files with any sort of consistent naming strategy, usually just saves it as whatever default file name pops up. so many times i've needed info, and she's said (somewhat passive aggressively) "did you check the folder?" and i'm like, you mean the folder that has a zillion files that are all named random things that indicate absolutely about the content of the file?" i even went in once and reorganized a folder, renaming all these files, and she thought it was fabulous, but continues her crazy practice of not naming her files at all.

I answer emails on the helpdesk of a library (the librarians email us, not the readers) and many of our queries take the form "hi I can't place a reservation on a book! what is going wrong?" without giving any details of what book

so then we ask for the database ID number of the book, and then the reply is usually either a screenshot in a Word doc that we have to squint at and retype the number from, or they give us the title instead of the ID, except they misspell a few words so we can't copy and paste, and hey, why not do it from memory and rephrase it slightly, or maybe the title is just something like "Annual Report" which is no use for identifying the actual record whatsoever

anyway I don't want to bitch about the people who write to the helpdesk because helping them makes me feel like a good and useful person whereas the people I actually have to share office space with make me want to shout and punch things (ok, really just one of them at the moment)

I'm amazed that so many tech-challenged people know how to take screen caps!

i've never been treated like a stupid person before but it's been going on this week and it's breaking my will. Pro tip, my young supervisor friend- if you took maybe two hours to give me some basic training on monday morning then i wouldn't need to put so many ppl on hold to ask you questions that i don't have the answer to. Ps they can get rid of you in a flash, but i'm on a particularly stiff contract so if this turns physical they'll prob take the easy option, consider that before rolling yr eyes at me ever again.

oh yeah btw i'm on a helpline, that's a telephone helpline, without training. I'll pick it up as i go along, apparently, and i'm helped along by an email after every call telling me what was wrong.

Now *that's* an efficient use of both of our time, you'll go fucking far quickly, you will. Three storeys at 9.8m^2/sec for a start.

Another thing that guy does that makes me want to give him a wedgie is he uses open windows as his primary/only running to-do list. I would bet $5 that right now he has no fewer than 10 emails open and as many Word files.

aaarghhh the old tech director here did this. And hes *really technically skilled*. But you'd tell him something, he'd go "ok, lets address that later" and then open a fucking new email on his Macbook, address it to me, type up half his notes and then alt-tab (or etf rver the Mac version is) and fling it into the pile of 29835784256837 other things he has open and half finished.

And then 3 months later completely have no idea what you're talkng about cos he never sent/read/actioned various emails... grrr.

Darragh, anyone you can informally reach out to above your young friend there, or would that be perceived as hostile escalation?

Yeah Darra I'd be ropeable too, I'd say something like "look this is wasting my time and his, take an hour or 2 for training or supply me with notes or SOMETHING".

training today apparently, should be goid

he uses open windows as his primary/only running to-do list.

Is this bad? If I have a reply email waiting on my taskbar, I know it's something I expect to do sometime today (or before I next turn my computer off, at worst), and I regularly scroll through these open emails to keep on top of urgent stuff. Right now I don't have any open replies, but that's the exception, not the rule. Even so, I have 11 open tabs - 3 Word docs, 1 excel, 1 pdf, Act, Outlook and three emails.

I do have a to-do list on paper, too, which has 20 times as many things that need doing as I could even fit on my taskbar. Don't judge me.

To-do Bar in Outlook has become my friend since the got the 2007 Office upgrade. So much easier than a paper to-do list.

Oh god yeah the todo list combined with the outlook calendar and reminders is my effing BRAIN at work.

SO easy to just click in the little task line "check blah blah for update", hit enter, add a "9am tomorrow" reminder.

Mark, the key is:

/he uses open windows as his primary/only running to-do list./

Versus your:
I do have a to-do list on paper, too, which has 20 times as many things that need doing

One of the girls at work is planning her birthday party, and is inviting (mostly?) everyone from work and people who used to work there. I don't want to go to this. Especially if she is charging money for this and the only people I know are going to be people who are always fighting with each other.

Oh, and she asked if had heels, because we are all going to have to dress up and wear them.

"That is so sweet of you to invite me! Thank you! But unfortunately I already have plans*. I hope you have a great time!"

*She needn't know these plans involve sitting at home watching TV and not dressing up and wearing heels.

Or maybe I will get lucky and have to work that night.

Even better! Then it's ironclad and you don't run the risk of, "Oh! What are you up to???"

I would rather pull out my fingernails with pliers than have to go to some girlie night - with WORKMATES - that involved having to wear heels.

Hi Jesse! Thanks, and I guess you're right (update: 13 Outlook tabs, 2 PDF, 3 Word)