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

The pleasure starts to fade the fourth time you tell somebody that because by that time you start thinking you are doing something wrong.

This is a bitch-by-proxy, but similar to Carl's above; my wife is about to start maternity leave, and had been pestering some dude for information she absolutely needed to get something done. She repeatedly explained that she was going on mat leave (for a year) so it was super important she got it. Eventually got him on the phone and he promised it would be sent by close of business that day. The next day; nothing, so she emailed him for an update. Got an Out of Office as he's on vacation for 3 weeks, getting back the monday after she starts maternity leave.

On the one hand, dick move, but on the other hand I admire his skills at avoiding doing his job and getting away with it.

Not so much annoying as weird: guy singing a (very repetitive) hymn - at least I think it was a hymn - from inside a toilet cubicle. Oh, here's the annoying bit, it was in totally the wrong key for his voice, far too high... why sing out loud in the wrong key?

as a result of last minute sickies, I'd to miss bullshit training this morning to do actual work. failure to show due remorse during a dressing down session led to my immediate manager getting a fit of the giggles in front of the dressing-downer, who had accused me of "grinning like a Cheshire shark" on his way out of the door in a huff.

like I didn't even give any guff tbf I just had to grin or burst

Cheshire shark!

I came here b/c even though this isn't about my co-worker, it's about someone's co-worker. I'm reviewing a couple years' worth of a company's emails, in many of which a manager at global corporation uses exclamation marks at the end of literally every single sentence. (Except those where he doesn't use any punctuation at all.) Usually only one exclamation mark, but here and there two or three (for emphasis, I guess).

Did I already post about this? It's been on my mind so much the past couple of months that I don't know if I've ever mentioned it or if it's all I talk about.

Elaine Benes would approve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyRLFWF2v_U

although it really doesn't sound so bad. I had a co-worker who ended every sentence with at least one or two question marks.

We had a client who did that! It was terrible, especially since that's also how she sounded on the phone.

My Mexican relatives often put two question marks at the ends of sentences in emails and IMs but they don't use the leading "¿" I wonder if the 2nd ? is a substitution for ¿ ?

it really doesn't sound so bad

not so bad?? but stupid and annoying? no??

I'm reviewing a couple years' worth of a company's emails, in many of which a manager at global corporation uses exclamation marks at the end of literally every single sentence.

Does the global corporation make peppermint bath soap?

OMG I used to have this dictator boss who would shriek if we sent outside e-mails that were non-conformist in any way. Exclamation points are appropriate in some corporate settings, I guess. My brother used to work for a Famous Soap Maker, you sort of have to adopt the products like you joined a new church.

I work in the burbs now after urban jobs my whole life. It's, um, different. Like I feel like I'm living and working in a cornfield different. I hope to make a graceful exit some day. It's taught me a lot about unfairness - like how urban students have the deck stacked against them, when they are sophisticated in so many ways that aren't valued. I miss the city terribly. The young folks are great but some of the older folks are resolutely un-urban and dull.

I'm living and working in a cornfield different

I liked when I thought "different" was an adjective modifying "cornfield," like it was a figure of speech. I shall arise and go to work in a cornfield different.

cornfield difference sounds like a BoC song

http://i.imgur.com/SWktNSB.jpg

More exclamation marks: today I found a case online with exhibits including an email from a state labor commissioner to a lawyer. It reads in part:

Dear [attorney's name]

I have bad news for you! We received your letter but the plaintiff has decided...

bold-face in original

Sitting outside in an area where people eat their lunch, guy puts a private phone conversation on speakers so he can keep shovelling food his gob - then carries on after he's finished eating. Conversation included lots of medical stuff about abcesses and 'the cancer was like a hard lump' and was very loud. I work with some weird people.

We lost our lunch room due to too many staff now being employed here, have been given an outdoor eating area instead, which is 5m away from the designated smoking area

Sounds like a passive way for management to whittle the staff back down to a lunchroom size.

So in the early spring our fundraising VP was unexpectedly let go. Strategic differences between his approach and what the CEO wanted. There was a 6 month search to bring in a new VP, during which time my Dept Dir was clearly recognized as The Person Running the Show.

The new VP arrived 90 days ago. There has been a quiet battle ever since between the new VP and my Dept Dir, during which time it became clear the new VP didn't understand what my data analysis department did, how we did it, or why it did any good.

Today, after a long morning meeting with the Dept Dir working out some data problems and a sudden and odd coda about my career path, my whole department was pulled into a meeting and told that the Dept Dir is "no longer with us, as of today."

I had to hold back a snort. They have no idea how badly they've just fucked themselves--the one person keeping this admittedly sluggish train on the rails has been kicked out the door as we head toward a cliff, and they act like they're gonna learn to conduct the thing before we go off the edge.

**job searching intensifies**

Fairly new CIO calls an all hands department meeting, only to have their PA send an e-mail cancelling it half an hour before it's due to happen because the CIO apparently can't make it and has something more important to do than stand in a room with forty already pissed off people. Two weeks later, the same thing happens, only the cancellation e-mail arrives 3 minutes before the meeting.

That's shitty behaviour, although every suddenly cancelled meeting is like a little gift from the gods tbh. as long as you didn't come into the office specially.

Itd be hilarious if that happened at my work, given they pay to fly my part of the team from melb to syd for all hands meetings!

I'd be all "cool, free sydney holiday, woot"

meetings getting cancelled happens daily in my office. standard advertising procedure.

ugh u guys

this is not a specifically 'coworker' post as much as general office lyfe

the company I worked for for 12 years was sold to a competitor in October. we had 3 month transition time leading up to that point, 2 months of which was not knowing if we were going to be rehired or what. Luckily i was rehired, they kept abt 40 of us which was way more than we expected.

anyway. I work in sales. we were all given 'training' on their computer system...except for most of us, training was 2 days of general overview a month before we went live. there was no pre-planning to figure out how large accounts are currently handled, and how they can be handled similarly in their system...it was pretty much radio silence until day 1 of new company, where we suddenly learned that oh shit we can't do aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanything

the old company's computer system seemed sluggish and dated to us; but this new situation is like we've all been beamed back to 1985 and someone's going to come by and give us a stack of order pads. they hand-key EVERYTHING. if anything fucks up with a huge order for hundreds of accounts, pretty much the only fix they have is oh go in to each order line by line and cancel the item by hand

first two weeks were me every day wondering 'ok what am I even doing here, this SUCKS'. I don't think I've ever had a more stressful time in my life than the last 3 weeks.

today was the first day where sun actually came out from behind the clouds & got my head somewhat above water. but there are a lot of people struggling with it still, who are a lot further behind than me in at least accepting what they can and can't do

the thing that I am seeing a lot psychologically is the difference between coworkers who treat a problem as someone else's to fix, and the people who treat a problem as their own and try to master it. I talked to two people today at length and both them were like 'I DONT' CARE WHY IT WON'T WORK WHY CAN'T YOU JUST FIX IT'
which to me just seems so incredibly exhausting & a general bummer

anyway, ~random thoughts~

ok, that sounds genuinely AWFUL--commiserations, vg

Not even close to being as severe as that, but we switched to a gmail-based email system last month.

Now - Richard Nixon was president when I was born. I'm not trying to be lol @ old people here. But for the love of God, we had a training session and I heard the words "Can you run through composing an email?" I also heard "But what if I don't know the name of who I'm searching for? On Outlook, at least I can scroll though it and browse." And "So the folders are labels? Then are those label labels on the side there?"

In my department, all I hear is how "stupid" the new system is. Co-workers complain to the .. ceiling tiles? ... about how they just wish the emails would show up individually instead of in a "conversation". One employee has just given up – I hear her on the phone telling contacts that she didn't get the email from them because the new system ate it and made it disappear.

IT IS FUCKING GMAIL. Which in itself is just a smoother version of HOTMAIL. It's just like your Outlook or Mail except it's operating out of a browser. Now, we can have a conversation about applications like Thunderbird versus having to use a browser, but IT'S THE SAME FORMAT, FOR ALL INTENTS & PURPOSES. Composing a gmail is basically THE SAME. You can be insane and "browse" your entire archive by hitting the arrow buttons! You can adjust the settings to your own personal modification INCLUDING changing the format from conversation to individual emails!

And nothing just "disappears". I wish more things did "disappear." I would wager ... at least $35 that those vanishing missives are in those weird PROMOTIONS or SOCIAL tabs that I admit aren't the most intuitive things in the world, but I AT LEAST CHECK EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE LIKE I DID WITH THE SPAM FOLDER ON THE OLD SYSTEM.

Hearing my co-workers complain about the despairing complexities of GMAIL - A WEB-BASED SOFTWARE THAT'S BEEN AROUND SINCE 2004 for the last month combined with their frequently repeated opinions of the upcoming election WHICH I AGREE WITH FOR THE MOST PART are driving me crazy.

The last time I wore ear plugs at a job was in college when I worked at the hose clamp factory. That changed a few weeks ago.

lol - we have that too!

they have us temporarily on the outlook web app until we move to our new building

the amount of people who are flipping out over it is kind of O_o

no one is a fan of 'conversations' apparently

I don't like them either, but the neat thing about accepting change is that there are usually ways you can change that too.

yup

But yeah. I understand the frustration, but waiting around for someone to fix it is even worse.

One guy would make a scene about his "monitor going black" and call up the art guy instead of I.T. It was very likely his putting the cursor in a hot corner and going into sleep mode, but I sure as hell wasn't going to say anything. Learned my own lesson from that art guy.

like Ed Harris says in Apollo 13

WORK THE PROBLEM, PEOPLE

vg ilu rn

You can switch off 'conversation' view in gmail, can't you?

Oh u said that already

vg, that situation is my nightmare. i don't think a big company has ever changed computer systems and not fucked it up. consultants get paid six figures to manage software implementations, and it still crashes and burns. at my last company, the software transition was botched so badly that we had to redo it the next year and lost an entire year of sales history (which makes life really fun when you're a product manager and need to keep track of forecasts and trends).

it's a crazy mess right now

amidst all of that, the cherry on top is that the culture of this new sales company is a 180 from ours. we both have been doing the exact same thing alongside each other for 25 years, but there was a reason we were competitors, and i see that now up close. it's like night & day

new company = methodical, old fashioned, simple. we're not going to turn cartwheels for you, but if you adapt to embrace our system you will be happy.

my old company = unhappy? tell us what you need & we will build it for u. it was almost unheard of to ask a customer to change what they were doing, we'd just "make it work"

it's like, idk, going from freeform jazz to wagner. our salesreps are so used to doing whatever it took to please the customer for 10, 15, 20 years & now they have to tell those same customers that they just can't do any of that anymore. it's

i see benefits in both approaches...and honestly, their buttoned-up approach explains a lot of how they kept making money & we lost money.

good will come out of this, i think. but it's going to be hard fought.

it's rough seeing our perennially chipper upper management team with bleary, sleepless stares, everyone is just str8 exhausted

Just started a new job this month. Man, is it ever nice to have a) an office to myself (nb this is probably the lowest-paying job around where you get your own office) b) a boss who isn't high all the time and doesn't forget who she's calling after dialing the number, and c) co-workers who are just basically pleasant and helpful, and don't hold grudges for eternity, or want to ask me about my favorite subreddits, or insist on putting on "I Got These Beats Inside My Head" at 8:30 in the morning.

I work in an office w/ six people in, sometimes there are 7 and the 7th goes in the desk behind me and tbh I hate it because I have some weird psychological block that I just get distracted and anxious all the time when someone is sitting a foot behind me, well a-boo hoo get over yrself etc etc

the boss of the dept happened to mention all casual like "oh yeah, we're going to merge you with the other half of the department, knocking down walls and cramming 4x as many people into the newly enlarged 1.5x-as-big space" and I am really not looking forward to that

then again, I realise I was lucky to be in an actual office in the first place and basically no other job still exists which lets anyone who isn't a manager not be elbow-to-elbow and back-to-back with other people

I need some advice from my ilx peeps. Well, a reaction check really.

I was recently reprimanded in a meeting with my manager and the head of HR for an incident of tardiness that occurred about 4 weeks ago. There were mitigating factors. There is a twice weekly half hour conference call for managers with a development company we work with who is based in India. My manager told me that she would like me to be on these calls. I am not a manager but she decided to make me the QA lead of the project that the conference call is the subject of (no official title or pay raise though. shocker!). I said I would and she said that since the conference call is scheduled to start half an hour before my start time, I could join the call from home and then drive in after the call finished which would get me in half an hour later than my normal start time.

I did this the first time I joined the meeting but when I arrived at work my manager was incredibly upset because I was 'late'. I reminded her that she had said I could take the call at home and drive in after it but she ignored that and was still pretty livid. After that I started either getting in before the call or taking the call in my car as I drove in to work to be sure I would be there before or at my start time. Like I said, this was about 4 weeks ago and nothing had been said about it since.

Last Friday I was called in to the head of HR's office. My manager was there and she informed me that she had told her boss I had been late on that day and that she had then told the head of HR the same thing. For half an hour I was berated by these two then given a written disciplinary warning to sign and told that I am now on a 30 day probation period. This bugs me but I know this woman is vindictive and kind of a whack job so I wasn't really too upset about it.

What I was upset about was that she had made me look bad in front of two people who I truly like and respect - her boss and and the head of HR. I mean I liked this man (HR guy) so much that the one time PP visited me at work I made a point to stop by his office and introduce them, later explaining to PP that 'He is my favorite person in the whole company'. In the almost 3 years I have worked here, and before this meeting last Friday, I would visit with him often just to chat and talk about life in general. We originally bonded over being the only non-southerners (he is from Philly) in a very southern, republican, gun-toting, animal murdering; immigrant, black people and Yankee hating company (Not the owners or non-managerial employees but definitely a lot of middle management loudly and proudly voice these views).

Anyway, back to the meeting on Friday. When they were finished with me I asked the HR guy if I could speak to him alone for a moment to which he agreed. I intended to explain what my manager had originally agreed to but I realized at that point it would just sound like a lame excuse/sour grapes so I instead asked him what the 30 probation actually meant. If my manager had another problem with me would I be fired etc. He was so cold and dismissive to me I felt like a piece of crap. But you know, fine. I'll get over it and I assumed he would too. I thanked him for clarifying the terms for me. As I stood up to leave, out of the blue, he said to me, quite loudly and in an unmistakably condescending tone, 'Do you have some kind of emotional problem?'. I was completely stunned. All I could do was stammer 'Uh, No' and make a fast exit.

My question for you guys is does this strike you as overtly sexist? Not only did it seem to come out of nowhere and obviously had nothing to do any tardiness on my part but I can't imagine a male being asked the same question for any reason. I'm so angry he would say something like that. I don't LOVE my job but I'm very good at it and I like working at this company mostly because the people on my team are awesome and the family that own the business are really good people. But now all I can think about is quitting. Am I overreacting?

this sounds fucking awful, and seriously fucked up. is is possible your manager said some nasty things about you behind your back to the HR guy that he now believes?

that all sounds very very attackable imo ss

what the heck? that's awful

given a written disciplinary warning to sign

was there no process of appeal against this? sounds so wrong to have to sign something that you wholeheartedly disagree with

she bad mouths her superiors and my co-workers to me constantly so yeah I think its a very safe bet she had dissed me to a lot of people.

had you no warning, no option to bring in a witness, to prepare against the complaint?

a month after it occurred and with a case to state you'd be informed of other arrangements?

get it down in writing and in to the head of HR's boss pronto imo

The HR's boss is the CEO. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to do that. Ugh so freaking lame.

the only path you've left imo but if not then def to the HR head, despite their dickishness (and unprofessionalism) here