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

LOL speaking of bitching about customers in group chats, I wrote "ugh i am going to kill harry" (a customer) in what I thought was our direct team-only chat but it was the somewhat wider our team + all the devs and managers craaaap

Thankfully someone just joked "make sure you Jira that" lol. I deleted it p fast.

I did that once years ago where our most toxic member of our team had just loudly boasted "I WORK TWICE AS HARD AS EVERYONE ELSE ON THIS TEAM". I wrote "K@thleen just said she works 'twice as hard as everyone else on the team'", and then accidentally sent it TO HER. I tried to backpedal and say "and I agree with you", only I realized by looking at her desk that she hadn't read it yet, and then a manager pulled her into a meeting and she didn't lock her desk like she was supposed to.

I got up and closed the window. this was Sametime 15 years ago so it didn't save Conversation History and it wasn't setup to send email transcripts to her email, so she didn't see it.

Now if I'm trash talking, I double check!

i wrote a css overlay for slack to make 'safe' chats have a different background colour to shared chats, just as a reminder.

anyway, i'm off for a week so i wrote instructions on how to make a time sensitive change to the worst config file in history and on the jira ticket noted that there was a known problem which is unimportant and pre-existing and to be careful because the config is fragile.

change was applied as requested, and then the team-lead noticed the non-problem and 'fixed' that too, breaking the config and causing other jobs not to process.

Going by my past experiences, your coworkers will then subtly infer that this would not have happened had you not taken time off.

we're redesigning our training and one of the SMEs disagreed with feedback that my colleagues and I had left. She posted her concerns directly below our feedback, which was sure to confuse the developer with conflicting instructions, so I took the discussion offline. We discussed and the head of our dept decided to go with our approach rather than the SMEs.

In retaliation, the SME is now making passive aggressive comments ("you'll need to ask Neanderthal/etc, I disagreed, but they decided not to go with my suggestion, and then she deleted all of her feedback, including feedback not related at all to the content in dispute. so now the developer is asking where that feedback went as they need it for today's deadline.

like, are you 12 years old? jfc.

My immediate team is 4 staff. With the way our work's structured, we've basically divided the work into 4 parts, each about as busy as the other but all diff skillsets. Me and the other gal in the team we can, and do, manage all 4 tasks when we have to ie when someone's away we'll do their bit.

Whenever I or her are away, the other 2 useless men in the team stick to their own part and whinge theyre busy.

2 ppl were away the last 2 days leaving me and Useless Guy to divide the work up. 50 50 right? Makes sense?

So I say "I am doing my usual task A and T*ryns task B, You can do your usual, and Task D". He has the gall to say "I'll see what I can do to help out."

...help out? How are you HEPLING me by NOT DOING YOUR SHARE.

He kept making it sound like he was doing me a favour doing his extra quarter of the work, whinged he was busy, and inevitagbly I had to do the bulk of it because it couldnt just not get done.

So I did 3/4 of the work last 2 days and I am PISS MAD.

there seems to be one of those at every business and yet if you ever call them out for not being productive, they have every excuse in the book, none of which has anything to do with why they couldn't do the work to help.

is there another assignment you can have someone drop into his lap by proxy?

i'm tired of idiot team managers being allowed to add their stupid fucking representatives to training roster up until the Friday afternoon before it begins. rather than instituting a firm cutoff date, which should optimally be a week before.

We base the number of trainers on the size of the class a week before, which proves faulty because between during the Monday - Friday of the week before, the requests that come in Thursday/Friday wind up increasing the roster 150 - 200%. More than half the time, that means we have too few trainers (as the ratio is supposed to be 12:1) and have to go scrambling to find someone last minute, or leave the class short handed. (and in virtual training it's important to have a good ratio due to the increase in the number of tech issues, where there's often multiple that need to be addressed simultaneously).

then a quarter of the time, they wind up msging us the Monday or Tuesday to disenroll these same people, saying "nevermind, they have a conflict this week that I didn't know about". real easy to keep together who's in the class when the 'official roster' is out of date by the time it gets to us (and the dude responsible for keeping it fucks it up half the time).

verbatim exchange I just had. including timestamps, which were visible to the other person while making these statements:

[12:26 PM] GOOBER
how much time do we have I want to take it over but if not enough time to start it I will do it again later.

​[12:26 PM] NEANDERTHAL
about 9 minutes

​[12:27 PM] GOOBER
Ok, I reviewed, I know my mistakes but want to make sure I have time to redo so I will later even if it doesn't count for you guys, for myself.

​[12:36 PM] GOOBER
that was the longest 9 min I could've retested by now.

entire GUI system down in our test environment for over 24 hours. nothing like this has ever happened before.

the lead IT guy's response is to merely say over and over again "this shouldn't be happening".

so basically all of my trainees can't properly utilize the environment they're supposed to use and aren't getting practice.

fun!

fuck ... I want to post in this thread, but it's on ILE and not 77 ... honestly, I should keep it to myself. Stupid, annoying ... but understandable

I told my boss once back in 2019 that he could message me on WhatsApp since I was in the Philippines.

He apparently took that one time permission to mean "message me here always instead of texting" and unbeknownst to me, has been sending me messages there for weeks. Usually for emergencies. Like today, he wanted me to come in early to help fill in for a training, so he WhatsApped me yesterday. I didn't see it as I don't even have it installed anymore, he didn't text me, so I was late.

WhatsApp is like FB Messenger, it shows you if the messages have been read. can't...he see...that I am not reading them?

Not to mention the years of nonresponse!?

yeah for real. i haven't replied to a single message since 2019. lol

told him this morning to just text me from now on.

well now at least he knows what's up

one of our trainees in one of our classes has a smoke alarm with a low battery that has been chirping for two weeks, and constantly forgets to put herself on mute. eventually one of the other classmates said DOES SOMEONE NEED TO CHANGE THEIR SMOKE ALARM BATTERY

observing a trainer who is literally making the training all about him and his emotional outbursts. he made a mistake yesterday and then said loudly "put a bullet in my head!"

oh yikes. Is this training about dealing with stupid, annoying coworkers?

unintentionally, it has become exactly that

i uh hope that fellow gets the help he needs

He did in that I told him he was done for the day and took over

in more stupid trainer chronicles...

"Hi Rob - here's the status report for the week. Sorry, I couldn't take roll yesterday as I was presenting."

"I....what? You literally have a partner who wasn't presenting who could have taken roll. For fuck's sake, MS Teams shows you the people who were invited that aren't present in the session, it takes all of 30 seconds to confirm at the beginning of the day."

it's a level of dumb that I have no antibody for

much like public schools and standardized tests, our dumb leaders think that the stupid post-module 'assessments' are these great predictors of individual performance (editor's note: they're not). We have *14 of them* in the Pension course I teach, and they're open-note so they're not hard to pass, and usually only illuminate the poorer performances (or those with test anxiety).

If you cut them for time - you get an interrogation, even though not cutting them means if you run over time in a lesson, you have to cut tiem in another lesson, and then you're rushing and nobody learns anything.

coworkers who cc themselves on their own emails are 9 times out of 10 completely disorganized and have an inbox that is an actual nightmare

My father died suddenly of a heart attack while I was on vacation and I emailed my manager so that he’d tell my coworkers.. he offered to do so.. then “missed” my reply. So when I got back I had to answer a bunch of chipper “how was your vacation?”s in back to back calls which was absolutely brutal. The first one, I didn’t know they didn’t know, so it felt completely heartless that this usually thoughtful person would ask. I want to burn it all down. So instead I booked my second shot for that night so that I’d get sick (and I did) and miss the next day. Fuck you shitty “oh we are all such good friends” fake ass manager. Having a pension is the only thing that’s stopped me from rage-applying to other jobs. This is after six months of my father going through significant mental health problems during a time of great project stress at work, all of which the manager was very aware of and was praising me for withstanding.

jesus christ, i'm so sorry to hear about your father, but also the insensitive way that it was handled by your manager at work.

thank you. It is nice at least to feel anger occasionally rather than sad. But the first hour when I sat online prior to our calls and none of my decent work friends reached out was so alienating and depressing. I could tell my coworkers were so shocked and sad to see me have to say it too. He fucked that up so bad.

❤️

Wow, yeah he did. So sorry, FFM, what a horrible time <3

ugh what a careless jerk

Thank you ❤️ needed to rant somewhere that won’t get me fired! Please no one snitch. xoxo

Not a specific coworker, but so tired of having some variation of the same exact conversation with our IT department eight or nine times a year when reviewing the design for a new classroom layout with AV needs:

“So based on the size of the room and throw distances, here’s the projector we recommend. The one we used last time was discontinued, but this is the equivalent model.”

Nope, don’t like that one.

“Okay, no problem, which model would you prefer?”

Not that one.

“Sure, no big deal. But can you let us know what you do like, since you guys will be maintaining it?”

That’s up to the designer and their recommendation.

“Okay, but you didn’t like what they just recommended. How about this other model?”

Oh, no way, we had a bad experience with those.

“Alright, fair, so any recommendations at all for brands or types you prefer?”

Well, we’d prefer you stick to our standards.

“Of course, can you share your standards with us?”

Well, we don’t really have written standards…

ahh yes, the UH method of procedural documentation

all standards are stored "up here"

*points at head*

i got yr standards right here

one of the benefits of being burnt out to where I'm phoning it in at work is that I no longer feel compelled to bail out someone who keeps goofing up/failing to do things. like scheduling a meeting for a manager checkpoint with your learners and NEVER INVITING THE MANAGERS TO IT.

when we were spinning off from our parent company in 2017, we temporarily called ourselves NewCo until we settled upon our new name. so our intranet site temporarily contained "NewCo" in the URL.

it is four years later, NewCo is still in the URL, and they haven't bought a new URL with our company's name in it and just moved the intranet there. just looks so tacky.

Bigwigs: "we've got to stop this crazy attrition, we blame you as trainers for people leaving!!!!"

Me: "Hi, uh, today is day one of class, 20% of all of the classes were no-shows, 5 of them were given the wrong equipment by IT, and despite having a whole day to get everything setup on Friday with their IT, another 25% of the classes can't get into their systems, and they all sound frustrated."

Bigwigs: "Dude, whatever, these things happen."

Me: "But this is why they keep le-"

Bigwigs: "I said DUDE, WHATEVER"

classic incident last week

co-worker in email to client: So for some strange reason the inspector contacted me about your request to reschedule the inspection and it is now a week from now

me: the reason the inspector called you was because I sent the email requesting the inspection be rescheduled and gave both yours and my phone numbers in the email. I cc-ed you on the email I sent. I tried calling you to give you the heads up that the inspector might call you.

(privately)
me: I also was surprised that you rescheduled it for so soon because (client) has a lot of preparation to do and I worry they won't be able to do it in time. I had suggested to (client) that we push it back for a month

co-worker: it should be fine

(two days before the rescheduled inspection)
co-worker visits client site and realizes how much preparation work they have to do for the inspection

co-worker in email to client: I have rescheduled the inspection for a month from now.

totally missing from any communication -- "sarahell" was correct in her original assessment that the inspection should have been pushed back a month

ugh! this is my entire working life, swear to christ

.

xp - ugh!!!

idk if I'm just getting used to this guy, but he is less stupid and annoying than he used to be?

though i swear, we have this charlie brown / lucy pulling away the football thing with his "i will call you in 10 minutes" promises that never happen

i have a coworker who will chat something like “ok sending now” which i take with a grain of salt because i know i wont see it until like 12 hours later

for urgent stuff i have had to bug her repeatedly & i hate it so much but she literally says she’s sending the thing & she ~never~ does it

the worst

i don't understand how people like that rationalize the constant dishonesty

totally

do not just tell me what i want to hear & blow me off. stop acting like a teenage gamer! i’m not your fucking mom ffs

omg

it's also like this immediate gratification thing without considering the consequences ... why yes, you pacified me momentarily, but when you don't actually do what you say (and this is an absurd pattern), I get more angry and annoyed than before?

and if you're telling me what I want to hear because your instinct is to not have someone mad at you and avoid conflict ... you are just self-sabotaging tbh

And after a point (which she seems to have already reached) you're not even pacified momentarily, your anger spikes because you know she's bullshitting.