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

i have totally forgotten what it is like to have a boss/manager overseeing my work and that of my co-workers. In many ways it's cool not really having to answer to anyone. In other ways, the levels of absurdity and lack of accountability (for everyone, me included tbh, though obviously, mostly for them lol) starts to make me feel like I'm living in some insane alternate universe.

i must be one of these stupid, annoying co-workers. I got passed up for a promotion/raise by someone who was hired later and has a much lighter workload/fewer responsibilities. and neither of our work loads or scopes are changing after this! wtf. it’s like my boss changed from dusty baker to bob gehren overnight

I shouldn’t post about my personal life here :-(

Maybe you’ve made yourself too valuable and irreplaceable in your current role by taking on more responsibilities etc. and your ability to function at a high level in this role is being taken advantage of

a manager from one of our third-party partner hire classes reached out to one of my colleagues who is supervising those classes today. she asked if the colleague could send the training invite to one of the trainee's personal email address, because they were waiting for the equipment that our company sent to arrive.

This third-party company is a Bring Your Own Device client that requires their hires to supply their own equipment. There is no equipment coming. How the hell did one of their managers not even know this?

(not a comment on the ethics of 'bring your own device', which I feel like is really cheap and stupid of companies, but this third-party partner hire is a pretty shitty company and I've told friends not to work there before if possible)

totally an uptick in abusive, toxic seasonal hires this year. we've had to be careful about modifying MS Teams settings to require admitting everybody in from the lobby because when they are eventually let go for their multiple conduct abuses, they like to try and rejoin the meeting and sabotage it by saying whatever toxic, horrible bullshit they can before they're kicked out.

Here's a example of something that is GOOD right now that illustrates how STUPID some of our leaders are in their decision-making.

So right now, we are in the midst of our busiest time of year (Open Enrollment). Most years, I dread it - it's usually a three month period of exponentially-growing frustration. Instead, it's been the smoothest Open Enrollment system basically ever for me.

The only reason: I'm aligned to our newest partner organization (joined last year). In terms of competence, they're world-class - they are very organized, consistent, and easy to work with. As a result, they are the lead partner organization, and handle most of our third-party hires, despite having barely been working with us for a year.

They took the mantle over from our previous lead partner organization, who was dismissed for cause last year. They were with us for 6 years, and they were always terrible at everything. Their servers could not handle our systems, got frequently overloaded, and caused agent desktops to crash multiple times per day. They also lied about their server's capabilities over and over again.

They hired managers who were often underqualified and gave them terrible training, to the point where many of them expressed confusion their first week as to whether they worked for us or the partner organization, or what they were even supposed to do. They had telephony technology (pre-pandemic) that routinely froze up and had hundreds of calls pool and get routed nowhere MULTIPLE DAYS of the year, every year.

But nevermind this partnership costing us a ton of money and reputational hits over these six years, they only (finally) got fired because they jeopardized a one-million dollar contract with one of our most important clients. It took them screwing up the processing of system credentials for 200+ people, delaying training by almost a week and pissing said client off, for one of our Execs to fly over there and tell them YOU'RE DONE - FINISH OUT THIS YEAR, AND WE DON'T KNOW YOU ANYMORE.

shoulda happened five years ago!

for fuck’s sake, search outlook before you throw me under a bus you piece of shit

SAME DUDE AS ABOVE FWIW

ugh, sorry brimstead but in my sad experience

for fuck’s sake, search outlook before you throw me under a bus you piece of shit

is an evergreen post

co-worker emails yesterday afternoon: Can you deal with this group coming in on Sunday, I'm sick and don't have the capacity to handle it

a few hours later on said co-worker's social media: pictures of very tasty looking margaritas with a friend

... I'm only mildly annoyed because I am fine with covering for this person as they have been getting a lot of criticism from other people at work, but ... don't say you're sick if it's really just "I need a motherfucking break from this bullshit." ... which I totally respect

because it is likely that one of the people criticizing this co-worker will use that discrepancy to further criticize this person.

my co-workers and managers were incredibly supportive during my bereavement time, and it was my boss who encouraged me to take two weeks.

I get back today, to find out they aligned me to co-facilitate a class that started last Friday - I don't actually begin teaching until Friday, but now that means I get zero time to actually meet my co-instructor and talk about how we're going to divide things up, and have to jump into the class to help despite having 500+ emails to read and trying to re-acclimate to everything. and I'm on PTO two days next week.

what the fuck....thanks for giving me no time to get re-acclimated, guys. they're like "we thought this might be a good experience for you", i'm like...maybe ask me first? idk. I haven't taught in months and now I'm forced to hit the ground running before I can take a breath.

and like I don't 'teach' until Friday, but I'm expected to be in the class and helping do administrative tasks. which I didn't get a chance to communicate with my co-instructor.

on top of this mom is going out of state on vacation and her car has a potential starter issue that wasn't caught until today, so I have to take it in for her during work one day this week, while she's gone. happy goddamn Monday.

One of my workplaces was called out by Stalinists as racist and Zionist… they had just hired a contract marketing and outreach person but had not mentioned anything during the interview process about conflicts with aforementioned Stalinists. New hire sees call out post and quits before onboarding

that sounds awful

Jesus!

It has been stressful to say the least… I am co-producing an event there this weekend and was fortunate to only have 2 bands cancel and get one Stalinist troll comment on Instagram… I work for an org that has space in the building owned/operated by the org in question. The Stalinists had been a member of the org but recently got expelled for … various things that are apparently ok in service of the revolution??

Oh and the margarita co-worker upthread got seriously dragged by the Stalinists…

damn, california stalinists

so like what is involved in being a stalinist in the usa in 2023?

these are the notes tankies of twitter people right

oops, noted

California Stalin
on such a winter's день

yes, these are tankies, who when they were questioned about being tankies when they originally wanted to join/move in a year and a half ago, denied being tankies and called the people who questioned this "racist" and demanded public apologies from them. I was one of those forced to apologize.

meanwhile, their Instagram wishes a happy birthday to Stalin and the leader of their group posts on twitter about Stalin being a great man and how the left should really model their tactics after Stalin more.

gross

xp CAD:
https://medium.com/@communityliberationprograms/no-quarter-for-imperialism-dc238499c3a

lol @ Comrade

Joining with the imperialists to critique their enemies means switching sides in the global class war. It is nothing short of treachery, and the practical implications are no less dire.

lots of "the enemy of my enemy" logic
as well as classic "you're either with us or against us" logic which was the basis of my comment comparing them to Republican members of my extended family

though earlier today I was reading posts on a non-profit workers FB group, and damn ... I am just really glad I don't work anywhere that has to directly issue statements / messaging around Israel/Palestine rn ...

I know it was a transition for me going from a private company to working in a higher education setting, things definitely work at their own pace as questions/requests work their way through administration and different levels. It can definitely seem slow to someone unused to dealing with it, I totally get it! But now I have a manager who is brand new to higher ed as well and he keeps getting aggravated with our team for not getting answers quickly enough for his tastes. He's very much a "I want an answer immediately" type and, well, that's great, but we can't control how long it takes other departments to respond to our inquiries. I know he'll eventually get it, but it's annoying to continually get comments insinuating that I'm not doing my job correctly because I can't force other people to get him info as rapidly as he'd like.

you should collaborate with a teammate that's good at make-up effects and give them faux-bruises and fake blood/injuries and then one day knock on manager's door, holding the colleague by the scruff of the neck, and say "he wouldn't give me the info I needed so I roughed him up good for ya, boss! we won't be waiting for data any longer!"

lol I like that plan!

another option is to rotely respond with the sports slogan associated with the University's main athletic program ... like where I live it's "Go Bears!"

for example:
Corporate style boss: Jon, I need those specs by 5!
Jon: Go Bears!

Roll Tide

v good!

I am not so upset at this person right now, they totally have my back. I have theirs. This has been a good opportunity to self-examine

Just found out my boss thinks that earthquake insurance doesn’t exist in California (it was … banned?…18mo ago according to her) and it’s because the insurance companies know that the govt is going to cause a man made earthquake soon.

Just texted her a govt link proving that you can indeed still get earthquake insurance.

There was a violent incident at my work last week - an attempted carjacking that wasn't recognized as such and the person ended up inside our building with my coworkers trying to help them. The person punched,knocked down, dragged, verbally abused 3 of my coworkers. 1 of the 3 managed to push the person out of the building. Truly awful. I found out yesterday that another coworker, who was not onsite during any of this, told the coworker who managed to get the person out of the building that they should have done more to subdue and detain the person. I am livid. My coworker didn't identify the person who said this to them but I have a strong suspicion (based on past behavior) that it is one of my team.

jesssssssssssssssssssus fuck. nobody takes a job thinking they're going to have to physically restrain a violent stranger (well unless their job is related to that), judging someone who had to do that while not even being there, what the actual fuck.

xxp It hasn't been banned, but many/most insurance companies are looking for ways to get out of California. Florida, too. I don't think it has anything to do with a government plot to cause an earthquake, though.

In Cali it’s about fire

Yes, I mean, earthquakes are not new and have been baked into the pricing for a long time, but the vastly increased fire risk has made the market nearly impossible.

The CA earthquake insurance thing was a thing … over a decade ago …

there is this one department who literally can't avoid providing contradictory deadlines, likely because they c&p things incorrectly.

I get a semi-annoyed message today on one ticket, harassing me for an update "cos it's due today". the body of the ticket with the instructions addresses me by name and says "Please review by 11/7", and this is what I saw and registered first. but the ticket due date was set to 11/2, which I didn't initially notice because I'd already read the body. and apparently *that* was the right one.

same department sends me another ticket, which says in the instructions that I have until 11/14 to complete the attached questionnaire and send it back. they send me an email as well with instructions for this ticket, which says I have until 11/7.

really gives me a lot of faith

so on the ticket that I was told was due today instead of 11/7, the instructions said they'd authored the pages, and that I just needed to review for accuracy and give any feedback if anything was wrong.

After going in and reviewing, they weren't even finished, like all of the pages were full of untailored content. so I reached out and asked about it and they acted dumbfounded as to why I was confused and after a conversation that made me feel like I was taking crazy pills, I finally sussed out that they meant they authored everything they were able to and didn't have enough information to finish the rest, so they were leaving that for me to do. which is very different from "hey this is done, please review it and leave feedback".

so I politely said I'm not finishing this today and they can have it 11/7

Given that I've been working since I was 14 years old, I've developed what I consider a pretty strong work ethic and willingness to do certain tasks that might not be my favorite. Couple that with having spent almost all of my professional career working in small companies/firms/teams, I've never really considered myself as being the type to consider themselves "above" certain types of work. Like, sure I'll take notes if needed, or schedule meetings, no problem.

That said, I'm feeling really taken advantage of right now and I'm really struggling to not blow up at my new manager. For the past three weeks he's decided that, for whatever inscrutable reason, he doesn't want his actual administrative assistant to schedule meetings, he wants me to set them up. At first it was just one meeting, then two, nothing big. Just casual, "hey, will you send out an invite for this meeting to the team". Since I'm attending 'em, it made some level of sense. Well. Now this has blossomed into me being responsible for scheduling vast series of meetings and workshops with multiple departments, outside consultants and various researchers. Week-long conferences that break down into individual one-hour sessions with different invite lists at each. I'm spending 5-6 hours a day coordinating calendars, emailing assistants, rescheduling meetings and cross-indexing calendar openings. It's insane. And driving me batshit. Not only is this an absolutely enormous headache, but it's meaning I have to wait until after hours most days to perform my actual job and duties.

Like, I don't want to be the "why the fuck am I doing this" type, but also, the longer this goes on and the more complex this gets, I want to be like, "dude, I didn't get a master's degree, a professional license and gain 23 years of experience to be your admin assistant, when you already have one".

(And in case it's not clear, no disrespect to administrative assistants, it's a hard job and I have mad respect for them, which this whole experience has only strengthened. It's just... that's not the job I was hired to do!)

You need to talk to the manager, jvc! It’s either that or go Bartleby with the repetition of the phrase “That’s beyond the scope of my role here.”