Question/rant:
If 2 of your co-workers disappeared for 4-5 hours EVERY DAY, leaving you to take care of their work, would you have a problem with it?
Here’s my situation…
I work in a downtown area where the buildings are linked by a skyway system with many places to wander off to during the day. There are 4 IT support staff members (including myself) and 4 people filling various management roles. Everyone in the department knows that these two gals are sub-par (to say the least) workers who continually get away with coming and going as they please. Management has addressed the issue with the IT director–who has no spine and will not do anything to address the issue. The IT director even admitted that he “busted” these two gals shopping at 10am, or well before the lunch hour. He did nothing about it. Numerous complaints have been filed by people in the company about the attitudes of these two girls, and lack of support they provide, but nothing has been done about it. They continue to abuse authority, show up hours late, leave hours early, disappear to go shopping, go home and sleep in the middle of the day–basically they have been pushing the limit as to how much shit they can get away with–and it gets worse every week since they get away with it all.
The actions of these two co-workers has caused dissension within the department. During the last round of lay-offs, everyone was shocked to see one of the most competent and hardest workers let go instead of one or both of these gals. The reason given by the IT director was that the person let go was often misunderstood because of their inability to speak English clearly. We were all shocked by this explanation, but it was obvious the director was steering away from confronting the 2 other employees–who happen to be best friends–and he couldn’t deal with firing one of them and having the other one cause problems.
Anyway, what do you think? Should I just go about my business and ignore the fact that 2 people are ruining the image of the entire department by their poor work ethic and blatant insubordination? Everyone in the department want to see them fired, but the one person who has the power to take care of the problem refuses to.
How would you feel if you had computer problems while at work and called for tech support, but the support staff person answered their cell phone and gave some half-ass answer just go blow you off for an hour or two as they finish shopping? Feel free to hijack this rant/thread with your own co-worker stories–I need something to compare these goldbrickers to.