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

yeesh

I sure love having a main client contact whose response to every question is "What was I supposed to be doing with that?" or "Remind me what you're waiting for?"

In other news, I'm mentoring some poor kid at work, ha

Hey, when you're warm enough in your roomy office the ground floor, why not just turn off the entire building's heating, instead of just the heating in your office? That way those of us forced to work in cramped shitholes in the basement can just freeze to death.

Ugh, these guys aren't stupid, but they're flustering me today. I'm leading a project and I make most of the contact with the client. I have no problem with this as it is easier for me to do all of the communicating rather than keep sending the dude to 7 different people for answers. All I've ever asked is that I be kept in the loop for those key decisions where I wasn't part of the decisionmaking. In return, I've proactively shared my plan with everybody, as well as made sure all of the other team members were copied on everything and not excluded from meetings.

So the topic of staffing comes up, and I'm given the original plan, but the team responsible for making this decision has kept changing the plan without telling me. One time, only informing me of a change I wasn't aware of in the middle of a client call (one that significantly altered our training plans). I asked them again to keep us in the loop, but they kept on making changes and I'd only find out secondhand or by accident. Eventually, I told my project manager I couldn't own this communication anymore with the client, since I wasn't being kept in the loop, and he agreed, so I asked those in charge to have those communications, and they agreed that they would.

Client then asks about staffing again because they're confused, and these folks just sit there not answering the question and again, I had to step in and schedule a meeting and force them to share it. Now, yet again today, after my second, more stern email, saying that I need to be kept in the loop on all staffing changes, YET ANOTHER discrepency has come up that I can't explain, due to another apparent uncommunicated change.

This time, I told them that I won't be replying and that they need to do it. Three strikes, sorry guys.

How do you not know what subtotal means.

very old story: i worked in a deli in college. there was a girl who worked there briefly (she was let go for calling in sick for a sunday morning shift, after explaining to the manager on the phone she was "hung over"). initially i kind of wanted to stick up for her, as town-gown relations were not great, and the other folks who worked at the deli (even tho it was a hippy kind of place) thought we were all clueless rich overeducated layabouts. but i quickly started to hate working with her, because she was terrible at everything, and didn't seem to have any idea that we was terrible at everything.

but the really dumbfounding moment was when she took a mid-shift break for lunch we were allowed to make items of food for ourselves, within reason. she asked 'how do i make a sandwich'? the rest of us thought she was asking rhetorically, like, what kind of sandwich might i want right now? but no, she was literally asking us how to make a sandwich. the human act of putting meats, cheeses, vegetables, breads and spreads together in a pleasing fashion had never been asked of her before, and she didn't know how to do it.

mind: blown.

in a ... a deli?

rule #7 - this rule is so underrated
keep wheat bread and pastrami completely separated

I just don't get it: We spend time nearly every day hunting down documents, information, or transactions which frequently turn up in a stack of unsorted crap on someone's desk or in the file (having been stuffed there without being logged or scanned). I have worked and begged to put simple processes in place to track stuff, but the response is always, in words or in effect, "That's too complicated/too much work. We just need to keep track of things better."

e.g., spreadsheet to log payments received w/ dates, amounts, check numbers or last-four numbers of CCs. Boss: "I appreciate your work, but it is a lot of extra work. I just need to be more diligent about crediting accounts as soon as I deposit checks."

Today: client wants to know why their payment isn't reflected on their statement, so we download bank report and work out which deposit (probably) contained their check.

Tomorrow: Repeat with another transaction or document.

IT contractor keeps telling boss to buy a new computer b/c hers really starting to crap out. Today it had a major spasm. Boss: "Do you think he's not maintaining it right so that I'll buy a new one and he'll get commission? I mean, the Haggia Sophia is still being used after 2600 years but he can't make a computer last more than 5 years?"

I told her by that standard, she should be asking her vet to make her dog live to 70.

Haggia Sophia reference surprising from someone so dumb

wait goole worked with lex in college?

pretty sure captain awesome over here is cheating on his wife with one of my other co-workers, and the dude has a little kid. it's become something of an office joke. there's always something up with people who seem way too nice on the surface. oh well, guess it isn't any of my business, aside from pissing me off for my own personal reasons.

It's currently 30C in our office and we have the air-con on AND all the windows open. The office manager refuses to countenance the idea that maybe this is fucking stupid. Apparently the air-conditioning company told her to run it with the windows open. We used to have a meeting room with the door shut so we could go in for a few minutes to cool down but she insisted we open the door "so the rest of the office gets the benefit". End result - meeting room now boiling hot too, rest of office exactly the fucking same as before.

What on earth is wrong with your office manager? That's just mind boggling.

The nice thing about office managers is that you can ask them to fix it. Then you can tell them to fix it. If it was your department manager, you wouldn't have that luxury.

Asking/telling doesn't actually achieve anything in this case.

Unfortunately there's no maximum office temperature in the UK so I can't even down tools and go home.

Apparently the air-conditioning company told her to run it with the windows open

this is the most confusing part of all

I suspect that might be a lie.

Replace "air-conditioning company" with "power company" and it makes perfect sense, though.

Later, the water department called and said, "You'll get better results if you just leave all your faucets on all the time."

The gas company suggests running the heat along with the AC while keeping the windows open, and also keeping all your stove burners lit at all times so they are always ready when you need to heat water.

I just don't understand at all. What is that office manager trying to accomplish? Was she cold? Has the situation been resolved?

Maybe the A/C leaks toxic gases into the room, so the only way to not kill everyone is to leave the windows open.

I really don't know. There's been problems with the office temperature the whole time I've worked there. It seems to be slightly cooler down her end of the office, but it was still too hot. There used to be an issue with a woman who would complain she was too cold all the time but she left last year so I really hoped this summer would be different. She really seems to be labouring under the impression that closing the windows would make it worse.

The situation has not been resolved and likely won't be until this heatwave is over. I didn't do any work today apart from write a couple of trouble tickets and help my colleague find a couple of bugs, I just couldn't think straight. I tried to stir it up a bit and get my colleagues to all say they would work from home until it was resolved but after some initial murmurings nobody would bite.

Eh, this is England, it'll be freezing cold in a day or two, but until then, yuck. I appreciate some people do better than others in hot weather, unfortunately I can't stand it.

I know in some buildings it's beneficial to leave a couple windows open until the A/C has started to cool things due to airflow, but then you're supposed to close all windows.

I did read that somewhere and thought she might have latched onto that but not realised it's only when you first start it up.

Pretty sure A/C works best if you offer the viscera of the office manager to the dark lord of freon.

Just had to listen to a client/colleague reveal they're Birthers, derailing a previously fun evening

so did anyone teach the girl how to make a sandwich???!?

that was a real fishes and loaves type opportunity there!

she was sacked iirc

but for the hangover thing

this isn't about coworkers per se, but... the company i work for has been trying to hire someone for months now, and i'm kind of shocked at the applicants we're getting. it's an entry level job with a pretty high starting salary for the industry, and it includes great benefits. not a bad gig for someone who doesn't have much experience and is trying to break past that "how do i get experience when no one will hire me?!" phase. if that phase even exists anymore. the applicant pool so far has been full of people who half-ass our application process and then complain that the process takes too long. did the economy in san francisco suddenly recover and now everyone good has a job?

My workplace reveals new depths of dysfunction every week. A few days ago we learned that one of the overnight coworkers is reporting to our boss about conversations between swing shift employees that are critical of said boss. Luckily this coworker damaged her credibility recently when she tried to get another coworker fired because they had a dispute over who would pick up an extra shift.

To the co-worker who is loudly complaining at length that they have a sore throat: a) it might be a good idea to STFU and save your voice, alien as that concept might be to you, and b) everyone has a scratchy throat because of the shite air quality caused by this heatwave

This woman is having a long, drawn-out phone conversation with a man about the pants (trousers)he's wearing to the club tonight and somehow I feel terribly, terribly embarrassed. She's gone behind this wall where people have loud personal conversations apparently believing it is a magical sound barrier

Come the fuck on. We have shared Outlook calendars for conference room reservations for a reason. I'm tired of having to scramble last minute for an alternate location because you can't be bothered with the four seconds it would take you to look at the calendar.

Posting this here because, unfortunatly, the person that keeps doing this is so far above my level that I really can't do anything other than give him a gentle reminder every time this happens (which is like every other week, minimum).

Dear coworker,

I would not mind so much being told that I took too long to make a report and you just dug up some old out-of-date data from who-knows-where instead IF you had not sat on the report request for over a month before forwarding it two days ago, or IF you had asked if we were ready to send ASAP before sending crap data instead, because actually the work was finished and waiting for someone else's quick sanity check before we sent it on to you

ho hum.

Boss still unlearning fundamentals of technology. She is working from home where she can't get on the internet, so she called me for help.

First off, she had been trying to access Lexis Nexis, and it never occurred to her try another website in case it was a problem w/ Lexis.

She tried and couldn't get on any websites, so she said she guessed she'd have to go to Best Buy and get another modem (she knew that word).

I suggested she should call her internet provider for help or to see if there was an outage.

"Oh God.... how would I found out who that is?" Well, it's either a phone company or your cable company..... "But wouldn't it be an internet company? Why would I call the phone company about internet?" (I know FOR SURE that as of last winter, she knew who her internet provider was.)

Then the coup de grace: "Anyway, how could there be an outage? I've got electricity!"

Oh god - she's trying to figure out who her internet provider is but she still doesn't get how the internet can be down when her electricity is working.

She should check the kitchen taps and the natural gas, since utilities all get to the house in one conduit.

Stop messing with my chair on my day off! I come in, sit down, chair is about 9 inches too low, hurt my fucking back.

"why did you reject this order, sales are complaining it was for no reason"
*looks it up* "...uh, according to the notes I see right there in the order its because the fax was completely unreadable and I needed the credit card details"
"ok"
"why do you ask us to write clear notes if no one reads them and just asks for explanations?"
*crickets*

FUCKIN. WHY. DO. I. BOTHER.

'next time I'll make up a credit card #'. geez, seriously :/

several years ago, project teams' access to set default case assignments, which they'd had for years, was revoked, and handed over to a single administrative team, which at the time, I was a part of. The explanation was that project teams had been inadvertently screwing up the settings in the system, and by relegating it to a trained administrative team, we could eliminate these kinds of errors. Likewise, it was advertised as being able to 'free up people's days' by taking the mundane out of their hands and doing it for them.

But it was a lie. It was really just a way of manufacturing dependence on a department that didn't need to exist. One that was eventually dissolved. However, despite the dissolution, the project teams never got their access back. Instead, a new department that splintered off of the defunct one, but was much smaller, kept control. To do this work, you had to submit them a request or it couldn't be done.

These case assignments, depending on size, could take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours, but were generally quick-hitter tasks. However, this administrative team has a default turnaround of FOUR business days. Not one, not two...FOUR. I had to submit a task that I had hoped could get quick turnaround the other day - of just two days. It wasn't a large request. I got basically told "we'll try, but we're slammed and generally our standard turnaround is four days".

So...you've taken a process that used to take 15-120 minutes, and could be easily updated by a project team ad hoc when urgent issues arose...and have now handed it off to a team who is so poorly staffed, that it takes them 4 days to get to it, and cannot adjust prioritizing for more urgent requests.

Fortunately, in my situation I worked it out where they temporarily gave me my access back so I could do it myself, but seriously - how has this improved anything when you've slowed down the process so much and provided little in the way of benefit?

not to pull focus from yrs though, Trayce. that kind of shit is infuriating, where people don't understand procedure, or that you're not 'rejecting' things for your health, but for valid reasons that could be easily mitigated if the transmitter took the time. I feel for you!

We've been explicitly TOLD to reject orders for things like "the order form is an unreadable blurry fax". So I did, with notes to that effect, and the very same TL who told us this asks me why I rejected it!?

how involved in your daily operations is the TL? is it someone who sees the process up close, or someone who makes decisions from a distance?

I find the latter are almost always the type who issue edicts, then forget they issued them.

should be banhammered!