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

i get it that people that grew up without computers aren't going to get it as quickly, but jesus fucking christ. it's like i go outside to grab a coffee but i accidentally take a left instead of a right. i realize that i'm at the wrong intersection. what do i do?! what do i do!? i could just recalibrate and walk the proper direction but instead i call a cab and go home, go to sleep, wake up again, go back to work, and then go back outside to get a coffee. THIS time i'll take a right instead of a left.

My boss asked for help attaching photographs from My Pictures to an email using Outlook. She

This is the point when I knew who posted this.

Haha, yes. Post about someone behaving very much in character.

ZS, yes, tho today she was extra, super special. She definitely knows most of the shit she couldn't do today, but it was like she was senile! I was felt a touch of genuine concern, but she is otherwise completely normal. She just came down with an acute case of the dumbs today.

it's like i go outside to grab a coffee but i accidentally take a left instead of a right. i realize that i'm at the wrong intersection. what do i do?! what do i do!?

And here's what our co-workers do:

CO-WORKER: I think I'm at the wrong intersection. Could you give me directions to the coffeeshop?

YOU: Sure. It's fairly nearby. First, just go back to –

CO-WORKER: Okay, this bus just stopped and I'm giving the driver my fare. What next? *doors shut*

Well, now I know who the undecided voters are.

Although one girl does like Ron Paul.

Grr.

I spend a fair amount of time analyzing my bosses' behaviors and I think her deal is that when it comes to computers, she can't seem to transfer knowledge. I.e., she knows how to select text in Word (to copy, cut, delete, whatever), but more than once when she was online, she called me into her office to ask how to select text from a web page. I remember telling her "Exactly like you do in Word," and her not understanding. It's like learning to drive from scratch - from the point of training wheels on a bicycle, even - when you go from a street to a freeway.

Also, is there a thread for bitching about stupid fucking vendors and clients??

this seems close enough

I'm a candidate for a support engineer job but the people I'd be supporting are software developers and system administrators and the systems I'd be supporting are Linux servers, but maybe it will turn out that there's a more-advanced version of this I'll have to deal with.

But yeah computers are really difficult for people and it isn't necessarily their fault!

Why are people who are paid so much so frequently senile/forgetful/cbf ? Mine yelled at the entire support team a few weeks back for an "unauthorised" purchase of 4 hard drives for a server RAID array. Hard drives he'd recommended and approved purchase of mere days earlier. This was pointed out to him but he didnt apologise.

He bailed me up last week to demand I send him some info on certain supplier accounts ASAP OMG NEED IT URGENTLY.

Which'd be fine... except it was info he already had, had been sent to him by me TWICE, and had taken me some hours to write up :|

I just re-sent it to him. With the relevant bits bolded. Honestly sometimes its like that Simpsons episode where Mr Burns keeps demanding Don Mattingly shave off sideburns he doesnt even have. This guy can be told to his face "YOU HAVE THAT INFO ALREADY" and he just yells "DONT COMPLIN JUST DO AS I ASK".

FFS.

Also I did lol massively at ""SAVE VS. SAVE AS - HOW DO I EVEN".

Sometimes I can see where I could start getting that way with computer stuff. There is a shit-effin-ton of industry specific software and proprietary add-ins that I've never seen before and I managed to learn the very basics of it but there's just so much and I'm kind of crazy busy and I get a little "Why doesn't this just do exactly what I want it to do right now?!?!!!?! Fuck it I'm calling the service desk" about renaming a file in the document management system. (Right click, select "properties," change the name. :/ )

The software etc is at the new job. I forgot that part.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: a little part of me dies whenever I hear the reporter behind me say to someone over the phone, "Hey there, just wanted to give you a shout..."

GIVE YOU A SHOUT
GIVE YOU A SHOUT

BASTARD IN A BASKET
BASTARD IN A BASKET

He also writes somewhere in his copy each week: "The sush and such deal tipped the scales at $780,000...." EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

Also I did lol massively at ""SAVE VS. SAVE AS - HOW DO I EVEN".

Ha! I didn't know what you were talking about b/c I somehow missed that post, and yes, hardy lol. Plus I just now re-read i could just recalibrate and walk the proper direction but instead i call a cab and go home, go to sleep, wake up again, go back to work, I LOLed so hard I spewed food pizza all over my monitor. Can I excelsior that even though this thread is deindexed?

xps

food pizza as opposed to that liquid sort! =)

oh - lol - I changed it b/c it rhymed, not to differentiate from Play-Doh pizza.

yeah i worked with someone who'd say "give you a shout," fucking annoying

Liquid Pizza would be interesting.

Wait, that would be Pizza Soup.

I was thinking like Liquid Smoke but pizza flavored.

Our side of the building is mostly empty except for a row of 5 of us, a few managers and a woman in the corner office adjacent to the fire escape. It's a pretty quiet area.

EXCEPT. The woman by the fire escape has the most annoying habit of shouting from her office at whoever is passing by. She'll keep talking to someone who's just left her office HEY DON'T FORGET TO BLAH BLAH BLAH. Or if someone she knows walks anywhere near her office door she'll caterwaul HEY DID YOU GET THAT THING I SENT YOU? WHAT DO YOU THINK?

And if she gets no response she'll repeat the same thing 10 times. At the same volume. It's horrific.

I get dejavu because she sounds EXACTLY like my across the street neighbor, a terrible woman who screams from inside the house at her children playing in the front yard.

Like, she NEVER gets up from her desk!! She will not walk to the person to lower her volume. She just uses her horrible shrill voice like a tractor beam to drag people into her office. It's insane.

Every day I want to go over and shove a sock in her mouth.

yeah i worked with someone who'd say "give you a shout," fucking annoying

I say this without even thinking about it - why is it annoying?

Unless the person actually means shouting, a la Veg's co-worker.

oh she'll give you a shout alright, lol

emil.y, what if you said in every single fucking post.

This guy's on the phone, making calls all day. And in every single phone call, he uses that phrase.

Sometimes it's a variation, like "I want to give you a shout back after we talked the other day…"

It's more widely used in the UK I think.

Yeah, sounds like it. Here it's pretty much interchangeable with "give you a call", "let you know", "ring you back", "get in contact" etc. Don't think anyone would even notice that you were using an idiom rather than a more literal phrase.

Maybe I'll anonymously email him your post and say "Here are four other phrases you can use."

Hahaha.

If it's not in not in widespread use I can see it being some sort of hideous affectation, I guess.

yes, like my usual gripe about 'mericans saying "cheers" and "no worries" — especially if it's EVERY OTHER FUCKING WORD

that would be unweildy

I think "no worries" is pretty normal in the U.S.... I certainly use it regularly (interchangeably with "no problem") and I hear it said commonly.

It's mostly just annoying because you always say it with the comedy Australian accent.

nawurries mayte

Sometimes I can see where I could start getting that way with computer stuff. There is a shit-effin-ton of industry specific software and proprietary add-ins that I've never seen before and I managed to learn the very basics of it but there's just so much and I'm kind of crazy busy and I get a little "Why doesn't this just do exactly what I want it to do right now?!?!!!?!

Ha I feel you on this. As a programmer I probably ought to be better at keeping up but I know Excel 2003 pretty in-depth and I am secretly still running it 6 months after IT upgraded everyone else to 2007 (not 2010, that would be far too up-to-date for our IT dept) because fuck it I can't even find anything in that ribbon shit.

Also I started Powerpoint today because someone asked how to do a Powerpoint macro and I got all "I can do Excel macros and Access macros and Word macros, how hard can it be?" and then within ten minutes I was like "what is this shit I don't even, how does anyone use this" because it took me a minute to find the damn "start presentation" button and because macro stuff is different in Powerpoint for some reason

yeah i worked with someone who'd say "give you a shout," fucking annoying

i say this a lot, more like "give me a shout if you have any problems".

i feel a bit of sympathy for people who say annoying shit all the time, when you are in charge or have to send people emails all the time, or when there are 2/3 emails you have to send every day ad infinitum, it's very hard not to lapse into your own personal clichés.

i always imagine my team taking the piss out of me for this behind my back, except they're all so dead inside i don't think they ever hang out.

i often spend a lot of time trying to rephrase a daily email like "can you all send me your streams"

my biggest clichés are

"it would be great if" or "if you could all .... then that'd be great."
"let me know if you have any problems with this."
"any problems with this just give me a shout."
"let's go with... for a lead at 11am"

The ribbon is the bane of my existence. I went from an MS Word power user to a total chump.

I actually like the ribbon -- but it did take a little getting used to

worst is when you're scrolling up and down and all of a sudden you're racing through the ribbon tabs and you're left on an unfamiliar one

Do not fear the ribbon
The ribbon is out friend

You ribbon apologists probably miss Clippy, too.

oh snap

xp No. Clippy was unforgivable. :)

I'm not sure if you could do this in pre-ribbon editions (I only learned about it with latest version) but the ability to add shortcut buttons to things like paste values/border formatting below the ribbon made life soooo much easier.

I've been using the shortcut buttons for years #braggin2012

:)

clippy was a douchebag

*makes "whatever" fingers at VG*

all my menus gone
what do i click on?
IT staff don't fear the ribbon
nor do the keyboard shortcut nerds

I could possibly sort of miss the little cat/dog that you could replace Clippy with. Or the half-hour when I discovered you could trigger all the assistant animations via Access macros and watched them all instead of doing any work, anyway.

iirc you could customise toolbars in pre-ribbon versions? I've never really done it though because then I have to look even more dumb than usual if I use someone else's computer