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

idk that they're stupid, pretty clever move, but how nobody noticed for weeks is beyond me

if his input mattered that little then more power to him for tricking the company like he's Keanu Reeves in Speed.

he was supposed to be in training, like actually participating. it was discovered because he would get called on, and there'd be a pause, and someone would hear him talking but his mouth wouldn't be moving (as he was calling in on a phone from a remote location or something).

I made the Speed joke earlier lol

they showed me the pic. it looked like when you take a video of a tv screen on your phone, and it wasn't even centered, the border was crooked. they also looked in his record and he hadn't completed any assignments or gone into the modules.

and when he got a verbal warning, he apparently (this time live on camera for real) started yelling, screaming, and throwing things around his house.

this has been quite a weird day at work!

Haha
He sounds like an amateur tbh
When my kid was doing homeschooling in lockdown he got me to take a photo of him sitting smiling which he then used as a background and waited off-screen only to appear as his own double on the other side of the screen at an opportune moment.

lol genius!

the name-dropping co-worker again:

we were discussing the problems of curating a space by committee and I brought up an electronic music festival I was an organizing committee member of for a couple years and how a lot of the artists/aesthetic was based on historical experimental electronic music like Pierre Henry and musique concrete

co-worker: actually, I attended a concert at Pierre Henry's house in Paris

me: of course you did.

for context: we are essentially non-profit real estate and construction consultants.

and when he got a verbal warning, he apparently (this time live on camera for real) started yelling, screaming, and throwing things around his house.

who in the fuck does this?!

Was he from Citrus County or Marion?

this is an adult, right? Not a 4 year old child?

presumably.

so we have this IT chat where if Reps in training have major technical issues (i.e. can't sign into applications, locked out of system), we can 'escalate' their ticket for them. all we're supposed to do is dump the ticket # and the name of the person who called it in in the chat. I usually try to probe and find out what the issue is so I can add a description, but this is really just a courtesy, as this information should all be in the ticket.

normally all they do is reply to say "ticket closed/resolved" or "escalated to next party" or "left voicemail for the rep" - or telling us if the ticket shouldn't have been started. it's been smooth for the most part.

then this one rogue IT person today starts grilling me about four of the tickets I escalated, asking me detailed questions on what each learner tried, can I have them try this, that, etc. I'm supervising/teaching classes, am just a middleman, and I had to pointedly ask "can't someone just contact these four people - they're on MS Teams and can be called, that might be easier than me playing telephone with you". Common sense, right?

then after all of this, turns out three of the four tickets are actually ALREADY RESOLVED and IT just hadn't gotten around to telling us yet (that's fine - they're very busy). Instead of doing what a normal person would do and replying to my status update request with "three of these tickets are resolved" and giving me an update on the one that was still open, I get grilled about all four tickets as if all four are still open.

nice waste of time on an already busy day/week.

oh and it turns out all of the questions they asked me were literally documented in the IT ticket by the person who took the call.

Have you started looking for work elsewhere? It seems like this workplace really sucks for u.

I tried once half-heartedly three or four years ago and got very little hits other than a competitor offering me 33% of my current salary to do the same job. I guess seniority has more perks than I realized. but admittedly I didn't try as hard as I could have.

at this point I'm trusting the devil I know, but assuming this caregiving arrangement eventually alleviates, I'll be ready to spread my wings.

i know a little bit about what you do and given the current labor market it might be worth taking a casual look around

yeah I gotta rewrite my resume but I think it's about that time.

very least maybe I can get a retention bonus

Sounds like you’re in learning & development, maybe some roles would open up with a dumb certification to get past the resume filter?

correct and hmm that isn't a bad idea actually!

Going by what I’ve learned about your coworkers here, you could definitely use dumb certification.

lol

solid lol

"What is the I Award You No Points cert?"

there's this occasional rep we use as a trainer now and then when we don't have better options available. he has a temper and usually tends to give up at teh first sign of trouble. he also makes it impossible to connect with him during his class.

most facilitators know to occasionally check their MS Teams PMs during stopping points, but not him, he ignores them for 8 hours. he also ignores messages that you send him *in the training chat itself*, (even if you tag him so that it pings). so the only way to get him a message is to interrupt him in the middle of his training, which he then gets annoyed about.

he also spends half the training talking about himself and the amazing things he does.

Multiple-monitor and single-monitor people differ in their level of responsiveness to chat during Teams meetings, I have found. Something to do with monitors but I'm not sure in which direction.

(which is not to excuse someone being stupid and annoying and narcissistic, of course)

Not sure how many he has. Most of our employees have two, but not all (including me - I'm rocking just one)

This could have been posted in a few threads, but I'm just sitting here baffled by some of the choices being made. During a significant spike in cases, fresh off the news and still unsettled science about Omicron, we are being told that we are having a holiday luncheon for our group. Next week. For 90 people. Buffet style. Indoors, in one single room. Testing prior "encouraged", but not required. Less than 2 weeks out from Thanksgiving.

I'm not going to attend. Even so I'm baffled that anyone thought this was a good idea and was encouraging of it.

wtffffffff

that is cray cray

There are approx 1/4 of the kids in my child's school year off with covid or suspected (waiting for pcr results) and about 40 of the parents are apparently going for a meal tonight. Tbf some of them have already had covid, but this is gonna be a superspreader event - just in time for a lovely covidy run up to Christmas.

There are just some people who want to rush blindingly forward back into "normal" so badly that they lose common sense.

they lose common sense

'common sense' usually amounts to whatever wins the contest between 'I desire this' and 'I fear this'. You've just incorporated what you know about covid into the 'I fear this' side of the equation. Me, too.

just need a little whine.

i took today off because i just needed a break. i've been at this job 1.5 years and my manager has shown herself to be .. terrible. she offers no coherent vision for the complicated responsibilities that i'm tasked with, and when i try to offer something, because frankly i need it to function, she obstructs me. i'm starting to lose my patience with it in meetings. i've gotten irate with her in group meetings twice now. everyone else i work with feels similarly as me, and i'm not even the person who has been most snarky to her, but still, i'm troubled about it. she does not have the balls to try and get me fired, i don't think. i don't have the heart to do battle with these kinds of people either. but i'm too old for this shit, and my patience has grown shorter! i sort of want to play the ice-cold long game and make her suffer, because frankly i'm smarter and better than she is. but i'm struggling with burnout and tbh my heart is bigger than my desire for revenge. i have also tried the "detach and check-out more, pretend to pay attention to whatever random in-the-moment thing she asks you to do for no good reason, and then don't do it" route - which DOES work pretty well with her, frnakly - but which turns work into an existential crisis every day. i have been in the workforce for 10 years after getting my graduate degree and i keep getting handed these childish, god-awful managers who want to have their egos stroked, hands held, feelings coddled, and then to be able to treat everyone who works for them like subjects in some kind of fucked up royal court. fuck all of them!

my unscientific guess is that 75% of people who are managers hate being managers and resent the fact that they're accountable not just for themselves, but other people. whether it's resentment that their employees are actually asking them to help, resenting the fact that they're upset about something, or oblivious to the fact that even if they aren't abusive, nasty bosses, their erratic inconsistency drives their employees almost just as insane as if they were....it's a type.

sounds like your boss. honestly I've felt the same way, some people used to ask me why I got so frustrated, "you're making a good salary, you're well respected, you get good reviews, and sure, shit is going sideways, but nobody blames YOU for it", they wouldn't get that I actually tie my own feelings of self-worth into my performance and want to be proud of what I do and get frustrated when I can't.

is this boss mostly ineffective or do you think she is threatened by you being smarter and more accomplished than her, like she's afraid you'll be in her spot years later?

honestly i don't know. i do think that she feels pretty insecure. i don't think she feels threatened by me specifically. this doesn't seem like the kind of place where someone gets demoted, it seems like the kind of place where people either slowly move upward of people like them, or just stay in their place forever if everyone feels like they have to put up with them. but i have heard a story that a demotion happened in the last ten years (under a different director). she no longer has the majority of people under her on her side, i think that's part of it. she also seems to be trying the patience of other people who are at her level or higher, but i have very little visibility into that.

thanks for your perspective. i think the best way forward tbh is to expect her to be this way and to engage in my job a little bit as i can anyway, just enough where i am "doing something" but not enough where i "care about the outcome." i felt like i had that a little bit earlier in the year, but it's very tenuous and trying.

On the topic of empathizing with your SACs (Stupid Annoying Coworkers) -- my current, more generous (?) theory about my namedroppy coworker, is that he feels personally inadequate and unaccomplished compared to the people he namedrops (including family members, which are likely the source of the feelings of inadequacy) and thus he relies on the relationship to make him feel less shit.

* relationship between him and the impressive person he brings up as knowing / having worked with, etc.

finding grace for the annoying habits of coworkers is harder than actually working at work

truth bomb

there is literally nothing "important" or "urgent" or even "complicated" about my job, the job itself is barely there. maybe that is one of the reasons why my manager is so bad - they are in denial about this, so everything they come up with to do is just a reflection of whatever insecurity happens to be nagging them in the moment. the hardest part of my job by far is not getting dragged into the hell that everyone else seems to be trapped in. in that sense, doing other things at work - like reading, or anything to take my mind away from the fact that i'm at work - is actually very crucial to the job itself.

My reaction to the truth of this statement:

there is literally nothing "important" or "urgent" or even "complicated" about my job

is to simply remind myself at the beginning of every workday that there is nothing important about the job, and that I am only selling my labor and intelligence because we live in a rotten society. it doesn't make me feel better, but it has freed me from feeling like a single ounce of my self-worth is tied to my day job.

like "you missed a typo when editing the 9000th iteration of this obscure drug's objection handler"

i do not give a fuck, my supervisor.

i have been in the workforce for 10 years after getting my graduate degree and i keep getting handed these childish, god-awful managers who want to have their egos stroked, hands held, feelings coddled, and then to be able to treat everyone who works for them like subjects in some kind of fucked up royal court. fuck all of them!

This part of map's post hits extremely hard.

people who a) chime in late to a teams chat thread and b) respond to the last thing said without getting further context and just sound like wackos. truly the doddering aunts/uncles of the office

My reaction to the truth of this statement:

there is literally nothing "important" or "urgent" or even "complicated" about my job

is to simply remind myself at the beginning of every workday that there is nothing important about the job, and that I am only selling my labor and intelligence because we live in a rotten society. it doesn't make me feel better, but it has freed me from feeling like a single ounce of my self-worth is tied to my day job.

Have just gotten hired for a part-time gig that is gonna manifest in exactly this way, I just know it. I'm gonna literally be one link in a chain of people who have to approve marketing copy; I won't even have to make the changes myself, just...suggest them to the creative team (and cc my boss, presumably). It is a pure money gig. I'm already imagining what I'm gonna spend the money on (putting out records).

It's kind of liberating— it's the other work I do (running writing workshops, teaching kids about poetry, editing manuscripts, writing for magazines etc) that I actually care about and agonize over. I just decided a few years ago that I'm not going to agonize over something that gives me no pleasure anyway— if the checks are being cut for the work I'm doing, then that's all that matters.

there is literally nothing "important" or "urgent" or even "complicated" about my job

on a deep level this is true about my work as well, but this rotten society has made certain things complicated, urgent, and important, and I have chosen to help people navigate these things or do these things for people, even though it mostly boils down to checking the right boxes and filling out forms in ways that will keep them out of trouble as well as saving them money they don't have.

true of most work,

but inside the context of the current world economy some things become significant because of how they operate within said economy.

In my profession, I sometimes make jobs for people. (As in, like, they previously didn't have one and now they do. Or they had a job and now they might have a slightly better one? I dunno.)

Of course I would rather they did not have to have jobs, of course. And I would rather those jobs not be soul-sucking clusterfuck meaningless office jobs.

But, until utopian fully automated space communism exists, people mostly have to have jobs, to like, live in buildings and eat food and wear clothing. Hence, what I do feels... at least a little bit helpful? Maybe?

Or maybe I'm just moving people from one terrible choice to a slightly less terrible choice. I don't know. But I don't think my purpose is to burn the system down, merely to function compassionately and thoughtfully within it. Because I also need to live, eat, feed my family. Which likes to eat food and wear clothing and live in a building.

Or maybe I'm just moving people from one terrible choice to a slightly less terrible choice. I don't know. But I don't think my purpose is to burn the system down, merely to function compassionately and thoughtfully within it. Because I also need to live, eat, feed my family. Which likes to eat food and wear clothing and live in a building.

true, some of my work involves improving the conditions of buildings where people live, or making it so people can live in buildings they can afford, so they can both live in a building and eat food ... or something like that.