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

Yeah, but he was (or at least appeared to be) wide awake.

the aforementioned "face 2 face" day where we all go into the office for... reasons coincides tomorrow with the release of some software we've been working on for a while. and because it's potentially disruptive we've been given a change window of 7 to 9am.

tldr: i have to be in the office at 7 tomorrow morning.

Received a good reminder in recent weeks to never, ever question direction from middle managers, no matter how mildly, well reasoned and supported by data that gentle push back may be. It will NOT be received well and will backfire, almost always.

Before my new boss these tasks took up maybe 10% of my time. When my new boss entered the picture, it went up to probably 40% of my time, prompting my gentle questioning. Now it sits at about 65% of my time. Lesson learned, don't complain.

omg i've never actually needed to post in this thread until today

the ONLY words i can think of for this person are ANNOYING DUDE

i hate to just barge into a thread that i haven't followed and bark up a storm but i'm trying to put my finger on this guy

i'm going to have to think about it but i appreciate having a place for this lol <3

Not a specific co-worker, but a complaint about a specific type of co-worker that I like to call an escalator. You know, the ones that start with a very simple, easy to answer question that gently snowballs until they get to their real ask, which is a big time suck.

co-worker: "Hey can you send over the square footage of this project?"
me: "Sure, here you go."
co-worker: "Thanks, can you actually break that down by floor."
me: "Ok, here it is."
co-worker: "Great, do you happen to also have the costs for each floor?"
me: "Had to spend some time breaking down the overall costs, but here you go."
co-worker: "Oh, actually, all this information was for this 18-page form I've been asked to fill out. Can you just fill it all out for me? That's probably quicker."

i seem to be currently doing someone else's ticket for them using the medium of slack messages so i feel your pain.

jon stuff like that is why i've gotten to where i ghost people now. not saying you should or even know if you can, but there's definitely a personality type that does that and basically if I've done what was originally asked and they're trying to be sneaky, i just 'forget' to respond ever again.

Yesterday one of our idiot plans administrators nearly prevented a single mom from adding her newborn child to medical coverage because of a egregiously bad understanding of the plan's rules.

Most companies have rules preventing people from getting duplicate coverage as an employee and a dependent child of another employee (i.e. you can't have your own medical, and also be covered as a child on your parent's plan).

This person was covered under dependent life under their mother and tried to enroll in employee life, and so the system was invalidating the entire transaction where she tried to add the child. A ticket was started.

Instead of telling the agent to just remove the Employee Life, he incorrectly told them that she couldn't cover the child on medical at all because of the unrelated coverage she had under her mom

Scares me to think how many other catastrophic mistakes he's made

xp - this was actually my first interaction with this specific first person, but yeah, i'll definitely have my radar up next time they reach out for something.

the other archetype i hate are the 'intentional forgetters', people who know there is a defined process for doing things, but they circumvent the process and go right to you, and when you remind them of process say "oh I'm so dumb, I forgot about that, well can you just do it for me now and I'll remember next time"...and then next time, do the same thing.

we have a 'mega important meeting' scheduled today that we're told we can't miss under any circumstances, even if we're teaching a class. I had massive sleep disruption and drastically needed to take a half day, so I inform them I'll be joining at 1 so I can attend this meeting. I get to sleep (thankfully), log in to find out my boss has inexplicably moved the earth shattering meeting to 3/25...when I'm on PTO, and they know I'm on PTO, for my brother's wedding. and he's on PTO all next week so literally the only time we can all meet is today through Friday.

Hey, how about we actually have the meeting today and if there's something that's still in flux, you just fuckin tell us?

(I'm already anxious that it's something like 'layoffs are coming' or 'so and so won't be returning from LOA' or that our dept head is leaving, so I don't like waiting anyway)

and no, I will not call in on my PTO, esp since I Have no fuckin clue what i'll even be doing throughout the day

hi GUI programmer, I know you hate it when people report to you things don't work, but waiting three days to respond only to ask "oh hey is it still happening" and hope it went away on its own is not a solution. or simply not bothering to check the error logs to see what caused it and snidely responding "idk it works now, try again", as if the screen caps and error details I pasted were faked.

Currently sitting in a Teams training course where my supervisor wanted to make sure that we are actually watching the session. She got the admin assistant (who is on camera throughout) to hold up a sign at random intervals telling us to send her a private message. If we don't send the PM within 30 seconds of her holding up the sign, we don't get a certificate of attendance.

that's the worst thing I've ever heard

Yeah, that's astoundingly awful.

Fuck you if u gotta pee, sign might come!

I too enjoy when my employer treats me like a toddler.

that’s when i quit my job

nine times out of ten people aren't paying attention in meetings, it's because someone's sharing a poorly written, cluttered powerpoint and the presenter is taking 20 minutes per slide and it's something any idiot could have figured out via an email.

i used to have this monster of a director who any time an email thread had more than two responses, she'd immediately demand we created a meeting for it, so I'd be side-messaging people follow-ups to obscure this because then I'd have 8 hours of meetings a day

Still waiting on that follow up from Swen.

nine times out of ten people aren't paying attention in meetings, it's because someone's sharing a poorly written, cluttered powerpoint and the presenter is taking 20 minutes per slide and it's something any idiot could have figured out via an email.

Of course I also had a friend/colleague at work who knew I used to tune out and do other work in pointless meetings, she used to throw to me for a comment when she could see I was doing it, just for the joy of watching me try to tapdance around it!

i call bullshit on that, sorry

the lecturing comment, i mean

To simply blame the speaker is ignoring a huge number of variables, from whether the course is required to whether the student thought it would be a gut when it isn’t to the ability of contemporary technology to distract and consume our attention more than what is actually important and right in front of us. The speaker isn’t always at fault, and the listener or student isn’t always innocent. In a sense, your scenario places all of the onus for education on the educator, and frankly, that’s horseshit

I too enjoy when my employer treats me like a toddler.

Whole lotta low-paid working class jobs where that's the rule, not the exception.

It is on asserts own lecturing though, table. It is admittedly harsh on the speaker (I had a nobel lecturer who stupidly had his class scheduled to clash with Champions League games, though I would note he also didn't win his nobel for lecturing)

It is good for any lecturer to see that as a challenge to raise their game though. Focusing more on delivering your message well will be better for those who want to pay attention. Even if you don't win.

The general principle I operate on is that under no circumstance can I make everyone listen.

But...if I begin losing half of the class or more, including people who had previously been focused, then maybe I need to change gears.

Not even necessarily my fault that it happened, but my responsibility to try a new strategy.

Of course the big wild card are cliques or people who manage to distract other people. If you have one or two people repeatedly distract well-meaning students, or a group of friends who can't focus when they're around each other, them sometimes yr only option is to be the grade school teacher who separates the T-Birds

yeah table my view is more like Neando's there, I was exaggerating because I worked with people who would self-immolate by demanding people switch off their phones and pay attention. I was / am a very good lecturer (no point in false modesty, I've been told enough) and my view was that the material was interesting, I'm putting in the work, the students are paying and I'm getting paid, so attention is up to the listener and I'm not going to demand it. Not pitching it right in the lecture, that's totally on me, and I made a contract with students that they could just make a kind of "uhh" noise if something didn't make sense, and if I heard that I would go back and elaborate. Takes the heat off raising a hand to say "I don't get it". And of course that's useless now because it's all online with a sea of black rectangles containing student names.

working from home, in meetings where my camera is off, I sometimes close my eyes and lean back to better concentrate on individual speakers. just try doing that in any other context

is my 7th work anniversary tomorrow so i was going to post on the work message board along the lines of '7 years, eh? you get less for $crime'

looking up 7-year sentences here: https://www.thelawpages.com/court-cases/maximums.php and it gets really dark and nsfw really quickly

for this project at work, to identify candidates for pilot groups, teams have to answer a questionnaire so we can tell if they will fit into the pilot as well as knowing what things we should focus on in training. we discovered that three of the teams omitted a shit-ton of information, so I went back to them weeks ago and listed all of the things to focus on in training, including the things they'd left out, and asked them point blank - are we missing anything?

today, I discover they failed to tell us about this script that their agents need to read on a call that quite honestly should have disqualified them from being part of this pilot group. now we're having to figure out if we can make it work or not.

So there's been an ongoing issue at my office that is relatively minor and probably petty, but opinions are very sharply divided and I'm wondering where folks from the outside land.

Short version - we have several student workers that work with us over the summer and throughout the year. Our leadership is constantly doing nice things for the student workers. Which, on the face of it, is totally great and a nice thing to do! They throw a monthly pizza party just for the student workers. They take them out to a big lunch three times a year beyond those. They bring in donuts for the student workers twice a month. On their birthdays, they decorate the student workers desks with balloons and give them gift cards.

All nice and decent things to do, right?

Well, here's the catch. They don't do any of those things for full time employees, ever. We are specifically excluded from the pizza parties and the donuts. The total number of pizza parties they've thrown for all employees in the five years I've been here? One, when a coworker retired. The number of times they've brought in donuts for the general office in five years? Never. The number of times a full time employee's birthday has been even acknowledged, much less celebrated? None. The number of times we get gift cards? Zero.

Opinions are sharply divided here - some folks are extremely bitter and vocal about it ("oh, look at what they get NOW"), others don't think it's a big deal at all.

You can probably sense that I lean more towards the former than the latter. Don't get me wrong, I realize student workers are very likely underpaid and under appreciated, so I'm glad we do nice things for them. However, I also feel that unless you are going to make even token gestures of appreciation to all employees, maybe don't make a big public deal about it? Like it shows that leadership is entirely capable of employee appreciation, they just choose not to do it for everyone.

I guess my question is do they get paid, cos all those things sound like the stuff people who don’t get paid get.

xp Something is ringing a bell here--is this the same employer who is weird about holiday gifts?

gyac - oh yeah, that would have been good to include. they do get paid. in fact, since I just learned this yesterday, they get paid $1.50 above minimum wage. yeah, to be clear, if they weren't getting paid I would absolutely have no issue with any of that.

throw your own parties and don't invite the students or the people who organise their parties!

(our release manager was trying to get people interested in a curry in town one day next month. tumbleweeds... (same manager suggested we just divide the bill evenly the last time we were out when the juniors down my end of the table had specifically chosen the cheaper options))

Good point koogs, though we tried that twice last year and it fizzled out. We requested just enough funds to cover ordering pizza for our group and got denied both times. Problem is, morale is so shot to hell right now that no one was willing to chip in their own money to pay for it, so.... here we are.

funny thing to me is that pizza parties felt like a punishment, outside of the 'food' part. I hate mixers at work. sometimes I'd grab the food and go back to my desk and hide lol. everybody at my company was always boring and stodgy and I'd feel like if I revealed 15% of my actual self they'd be alarmed.

but that's not the point, obv, the point is it helps to have consistency and be recognized in similar fashion as others. so i getcha!

I spent 14 years bitching about the same boss and the last year bitching about the new owner who bought the business and Monday night, after my husb said “hey you hate this job why don’t you quit”, I finally quit. My hours were getting cut every few months and she is running the business into the ground (quite a feat, considering the old boss sucked and still managed - barely - to keep it going for 35+ years), struggling to make payroll (the numbers are the same as the last few years so I don’t know why), and honestly just gives off very shady vibes.

I feel like a weight is off my shoulders. Watching someone just fuck up the most basic things in running a business for 15yrs is exhausting. Offering workable and simple solutions and just being ignored, is exhausting.

Congrats! Youre gonna do great things!!

big congrats for pulling the trigger. never an easy decision to make but mental health is so important and also when you see troubling signs like that, always a good time to get out.

Congrats just1n3! No doubt you'll end up in a better situation and enjoy that weight off your shoulders!

congrats that sounded rough.

in a moment of boredom yesterday i googled a project i left a job over to see how they got on..... only so badly that some of the players had to testify in front of a tribunal in Washington DC (another country) so.... gonna say that call was for the best. Not that i really should have wondered.

lol always fun to look back to see the mess you escaped