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

I'm having a really hard time with my new(ish) boss. He's a highly competitive dude with a huge ego, which, whatever, I've dealt with that combo in managers before and while it isn't fun, it happens.

Problem is he also just loves mind games and divisiveness. One of his favorite moves is to make vague references to "winning" the "game" at work. Whenever one of us calls him on that bullshit and straight up asks what "game" he's talking about, he says things like, "well, if you don't even know what game you are playing, I can tell you right now you won't win". But even more common is telling each of us wildly different things in our individual one on one status meetings. Like two of us will have back-to-back meetings with him and he'll tell us both exact opposite facts/updates. I know he's not stupid enough to think we don't talk amongst each other and check in, so I can only assume it's some mind game he's got going on. He also turns everyfuckingthing negative, even undeniable good news he will shit on. Like just last week I had this exchange:

me: "Yeah, good news on that one, we actually wrapped it up three weeks ahead of schedule."

him: "That's disappointing, why wasn't it done four weeks early?"

me: laughing, thinking this is a joke, "well, I thought three weeks was pretty good, I'm happy with it"

him: "Don't be. I'm serious, work on that."

And I know he's done similar to all of his other staff. It's just so annoying and maddening. Like, what's the end game? Keeping us all unsettled and nervous? I guess mission accomplished, but jesus christ I do not have the time nor energy to figure out these games. I just want to do my job and go home at the end of the day.

I'd just be like, "I guess there's no incentive to finish things ahead of schedule!"

Or alternatively, just add at least one week to every timeline and you got your four weeks, buddy

I mean this is totally the "flair" discussion from Office Space, only I guess he saw that movie and sided with the Mike Judge boss character instead of realizing he was the butt of the joke and not Aniston.

I quit my job :)

She was not happy that I gave no notice - she thought I’d give them more time for a handover - and I just replied “well you’ve been cutting my hours for awhile now so I don’t think there’s much left to handover”. Her response was that the hour cutting was temporary because business was slow and that she wished I’d told her I needed more hours. Like, what? I’m not gonna be at the mercy of how badly you’re running the business at any given time.

Jon, your manager absolutely sucks. What a piece of shit.

fuck yeah just1n3! congrats - it's funny how much they shrivel up when they realize they no longer have any power over you.

Thanks! I’m on vacation in Finland right now and this is the first time in yeeeears I haven’t had to check in on customer emails, answer staff texts, talk my boss through something, and have just been free. Except I’ve spent 90% of my time here sick 🫠

That last bit is rough. Was in Germany a few months ago and was sick the entire time.

Yes way to go justin3!!

just1n3 even!! xo

worse than scheduling a meeting for 8:30 am, requiring me to log in earlier than usual - rescheduling it one minute before it was supposed to start.

with one of my bosses, "can you do a quick peer review" means "can you write the entire last portion of this document for me, I did the rest but I got tired and didn't want to finish"

boss has assigned me a new class to supervise and he keeps repeatedly communicating the wrong dates to our partners. which if not caught soon enough would lead other people to plan around these wrong dates.

yesterday he sends the group that is supplying the trainers the wrong dates and I questioned them because they didn't match our tracking spreadsheet and he initially doubles down, then says "oh shit wait you're right sorry" and corrects it.

today he creates the ticket to coordinate class operations and writes down a second incorrect set of dates. his excuse is always 'i'm doing too many things' but idk maybe focus on one thing at a time so people don't have to keep cleaning up yr mess. lol

same boss tells us this morning "hey we updated this curriculum, if you're prepping instructors to teach this, please highlight the changes for your instructors", without indicating in Version Control what changes were made, or even sending us a summary of what was changed.

I haven't supervised a class since January and even then didn't have the courses memorized - the fuck am I supposed to know what changed? also, there was a pretty major deletion of a course that I had to figure out by process of elimination. so I called him out on it in front of the team lol....

Well, I think today I was given the brightest, most glaring sign that I need to GTFO of my current work situation as fast as humanly possible.

(tl;dr background - our manager says we have a shortage of offices and workstations, but we don't. We have plenty of open spaces, but it would require those in management to do their jobs and enforce remote policies and have hard conversations with recalcitrant employees who should be moved to other floors and buildings but don't want to go.)

Anyway, we had two new interns start in our department today. We've known that we were coming and came up with 3 different solutions as to where they could sit, all were rejected by our manager. So we ended up being told to cram them in with two of us in our existing workstations. Since mine is one of those that are marginally larger than others, I was directed to have one of them move into my cubicle. Fine, annoying, but whatever. Now today I learn that it's "important" that the two interns sit next to each other so they can "collaborate better". Which... isn't wrong. And is in fact why we suggested some of our other seating options. Anyway, now it turns out that BOTH of them are squeezed into my work station.

Apparently the easiest solution for my manager is to triple people up with me rather than, y'know, be a manager and make the hard decisions.