Yes this is basically another thread to complain or make fun of people you use to know at work.
At any job you worked, did you either have a coworker or somebody who applied to your job that had a completely unreasonable idea of what happened at your job or had unreasonable expectations? Anything that a normal human being wouldn’t expect but they somehow did? Entitlement, Naivety, Foolishness, or straight up Idiocy.
One of my coworkers is a man in his late 20’s. One day he asked me if we were going to get Halloween as a paid day off. First of all, does ANY job recognize Halloween as a paid day off? Second, how did he go through life not knowing Halloween isn’t a federally recognized “day off” holiday?
We also had a person who was only employed at my job for a month, mainly because after a month of normal job hours (40 hours a week) and being an overall great employee they suddenly requested to only work 32 hours a week. Now she was a single mother so if they had requested it so they could care for their child that would have been accepted, however they simply stated they wanted to only work 32 hours a week “to force my ex to pay me more in child support”. After that was denied she quit the job presumably to find somebody to accommodate that request.
Where I work, a person can request a 32-hour work week for whatever reason (I don’t even think the reason has to be provided). So I don’t think she was wrong for making the request; she just was wrong for telling her employer TMI. In fact, I would be pissed if my employer granted this request only for childcare purposes. The only thing that should matter is whether or not the job duties can be properly fulfilled over 32 hours/week. If they can, then it shouldn’t matter if someone wants to spend the other 8 hours of the week literally wanking off.
One job I was at we used to rotate being on call for the client. Everybody took one week out of every seven to cover emergencies. One person, during her first on-call week, turned the on-call pager off because she was tired and needed a good night’s rest. Without telling anyone.
We found out anyway when the problem got escalated to the next person on the food chain.
I have a minion who started with us a year ago. She took on a job I used to do before I moved into management…at which point her post was still vacant. I was doing my job, her job and half of another person’s job due to staffing problems.
She was recruited, I trained her to do the job, I explained how it had busy points and very busy points, helped her out at the very busy points, got her oceans of support for the busiest times and generally did everything possible to help her.
She’s been off sick with work-related stress for 14 weeks now. Her occupational health report states that her solution to the problem is to reduce her workload and recruit more staff. le sigh
Not a job I had, but still: individual applied for a retail job in early November, informing the interviewer that he’d be out of town over Thanksgiving. Yeah, including Black Friday. No, he wasn’t hired.
A tourist attraction I worked in had a cafe manager who, after a while, refused to work weekends or most school holidays, because they were ‘too busy’ so she basically never worked with the staff she was supposedly managing- they were mostly really nice but clueless barely trained teenagers, so she was constantly bitching about them, while refusing to work with them or train them. Then she decided that the days she was working were ‘too quiet’ so hired her daughter to come in and keep her company when there were no customers.
In Spanish, someone who lives in a word of fluffy pink clouds where pee smells like good cologne is said to live en un guindo, in a cake-cherry tree. To suddenly discover that the floor is Down There is caerse del guindo, to fall off the cake-cherry tree. A former coworker of mine is known to many locals as la guinda because the lass had a whole cherry-tree plantation, multi-tiered cakes and all…
We were only one step above the lowest peones (actual job title) in the factory. Weekend shift. Both of us were given the same advice by a coworker who figured he didn’t want to work with anybody stupid enough to follow it: “limit yourself to the stuff in your job description, don’t ever go beyond when a boss orders you to do so, much less on your own.” I told him that didn’t seem like a good path to a promotion, as it didn’t show that my degree truly was good for more than decoration; she followed the advice but actually went beyond: not having truly bothered to read the job description, she would Just Not Do anything she didn’t think was part of it, including things that were.
She was wrapping up a Masters in ISO12K Implementation and somehow thought this would not only qualify her to lead our local Waterworks Authority but get them to hear of her fabulous achievement through the grapevine and come seek her out. In reality, the WA is part of either the Ministry of Public Works or the Ministry of the Environment (or whatever they’re called in each legislature); the manager of each WA area is a very-senior civil servant with more years of service under their belt than either of us had of life at that point, always an internal promotion; to eventually get there, you need to be willing to move wherever promotions open up. Many of those people have multiple degrees, doctorates aren’t required but also not terribly surprising.
When she did not get renewed and I did, she accused me of blowing our immediate manager. Her nine older siblings took the chance to grab her, drag her (literally from what I hear) into the cafeteria across from their parents’ home, take over the back room and spend several hours explaining all those parts of Sesame Street which apparently she’d missed, such as “people won’t come give you jobs only cos you happen to be the apple of Mom’s eyes” and “when you get a job you’re actually supposed to work at it”.
I understand the bump against the floor did a lot to improve her attitude.
I once had a colleague who thought it was perfectly fine to take international business trips without telling anyone in advance. One day he casually remarked to me that the next day he was travelling to a week-long educational seminar in another country. I asked him if he’d filed the requisite travel request with our boss, and he said he didn’t think it was necessary because he wasn’t asking for his expenses to be covered. Fine, I said, so you’ve at least filed a vacation request? Oh no, he said, it’s a business trip so it doesn’t count as a vacation.
I was nominally responsible for supervising this guy, so I had to report the matter to the boss. By the time the report got read, he had already left for the trip. In the end we deducted the days he was absent from his vacation days. He would have been fired too, except that his contract was coming up for renewal at the end of the month, so we took the easy way out and simply didn’t renew it. We made it well known to him, however, that we were not happy with his conduct and that this was why he was being let go.
He didn’t seem to have got the message, though. For months afterwards he continued to list us as a reference on his job applications. We had a lot of fun taking calls and e-mails from his prospective employers.
Not Halloween, but another “you gotta be kidding me” holiday, maybe St Patricks Day. Employee approached me complaining she wasn’t paid for the holiday. She said this when others were around, so she quickly became know as the not-real-bright one.
I also had an employee who complained to my manager whenever I (the owner) did not “follow the rules”. I eventually had to explain to her that I was the one who made the rules, and that I was hereby changing the rules to read, in every circumstance, “everyone (except kayaker) blah, blah, blah”.
My pain in the ass godson once got a job at some fast food restaurant. He managed not to get fired the first day, which was a miracle. He didn’t arbitrarily decide that some random coworker “disrespected” him and start acting like a psychopath. He didn’t tell his boss “You’re not the boss of me.” He didn’t overreact to minor corrections by accusing his managers and coworkers of egregious disrespect. He was big on demanding respect.
And at the end of the first week he was still employed, which was a record setting event. And he made it through week #2. Obviously, this started to lead to a lifestyle where he went to work everyday, did a job, got paid and went home. There was nothing disruptive at all which was a state of affairs tha could not be allowed to stand.
So he started bitching to his manager about how he was a vegan and didn’t think he should be required to handle meat. Or take orders for meat. Or hand people paper bags containing meat. And it was very very disrespectful of his employer to force him to work around all this meat. At a freaking burger joint.
I admit to being one of those “why isn’t it a holiday” people once. The job in question included 24x7 on call support work and mine once fell on Easter. I got paged out that day (actually, twice I think, it was common to get paged out 2 or 3 times a day in that job). Monday when I came to work I pinged the HR team as to whether I would get holiday pay for working on Easter. (I didn’t, only the standard weekend call-out pay.) Anyway…
The manager at my last job was a real mind-blower. I learned a lot of this directly from her, but I’ll keep the story short by just stating facts. She had zero management or team lead experience and was “promoted” to manager on her second day on the job, about a week before I was hired. (Her background was in software testing.) I was a business analyst, she was the manager of business analysts, and we were both client-facing. I quickly realized that she also had zero administrative skills. She struggled to use Outlook, Visio, Excel and our issue tracker. She would create testing tickets and assign them to me, or would create analysis tickets and assign them to a tester. She’d assign a ticket to me and notify my coworker to start work on it, or assign it to him and tell me to start work on it.
They were still building out the team, so she had to hire a few more analysts. She invited me and my coworker to interview candidates with her, which was nice. I noticed that when she described who we were and our contract that she seemed to be just parroting bare-bones descriptions that she’d been told. You ever see someone who seems to be parroting some technical info they don’t understand? It was like that, but about our company and contract. I thought it was odd but didn’t worry about it.
She also was visibly very uncomfortable with her newfound authority. Her boss interrupted a meeting we were having once to ask her to choose between two candidates they’d interviewed. She made faces at him and resisted, and actually told him that she didn’t feel comfortable making the decision of who to hire. After about 15 minutes of back and forth he managed to gently berate her into picking one.
Unfortunately they lost the contract and had to let the whole team go. The day after, she called me at home to touch bases. During the call she asked me if I knew what our contract was all about. She said she’d asked our client to send her a description that she could put on her resume. All that time (about 8 months) and she’d never understood what it was we were doing!
We are a magnet school, famous in a very limited sense. We have to screen pretty aggressively for applicants who think a job here means working “with good kids”. As in, I am tired of dealing with discipline problems, I want to work in a school where all the kids will do their homework, learn easily, and never act out. Kids are still kids. You still have to have to manage a classroom. They are still sometimes little jerks.
We had a young teacher who for several years kept lobbying, intensively, for more “leadership roles” and complaining that she didn’t have any opportunities for leadership. The first year she complained, we put her on the master schedule with a shared planning period with another teacher who needed help, and asked her to mentor. She literally cried about how impossible that would be and how she couldn’t work with the other teacher, because she is so “needy”. So we changed her schedule. We gave her a committee chair. The committee met two times. The second time, they dedicated themselves to trying to come up with a way to kick students out who were under-performing academically, which is something We Do Not Do, but apparently she thought we should. They never met again.
They next year, she started in again. I put together a list of projects that someone could take on, with a committee or alone: all sorts of things that we have needed someone to do for some time. She rejected them, saying she didn’t want “responsibilities”, she wanted “leadership”. She begrudgingly took on one project, formed a committee to tackle it, they never met. There were a couple other instances like that.
Next year, there was an opening for department chair. She aggressively pursued it. When she discovered that department chair involved duties outside your immediate department (supporting the school as a whole), she said she didn’t want to do that part, only the department part. We told her that was impossible. We suggested two people take the role, if it was too much. She said she wouldn’t do that because she was “childfree” and the other lady had kids and she was sure that meant that she would get “stuck” with all the work (other lady has NEVER failed to live up to a responsibility). She cherry-picked exactly what she wanted to do and presented that as a job description. We told her to stuff it. She finally quit in a huff. She was a good teacher, just totally unrealistic view of what it meant to be “in the room where it happens”.
I’m sure we’ve all had the co-worker who thinks that answering a text is more important than, you know, doing your job. One such idiot refused to open an other register when I told her to. Hey, I’m first register and when I say open another register, you do it. She got let go on the spot.
And one woman was working in the aisles because the register was slow. I called her to the register twice when things picked up, and told her to go back on the aisle when it showed down. The third time I called her, she walked our. Later her mother called and complained to the manager about my mistreatment of her daughter.
At one Computer Science (note) department I taught at there was a guy who complained about the time and effort we were putting into networking as much stuff as possible. This was 20+ years after ARPANet was invented and just as the Internet was becoming famous to the outside world.
He actually said we should get rid of all the network stuff. A Computer Science prof!
It turned out he just had no clue about that stuff. Nor a lot of other stuff. And had no idea how to learn about any of it.
E.g., he complained about how he got stuck with the Assembly Language class and needed more course materials and all that. Furthermore, he didn’t know the language used so how could he be expected to teach it?
I firmly pointed out that when I started there the machine they used to use to teach the course was shutting down. So I started from scratch. Decide what system to use, get a text, get the software, create assignments, tests, etc. And I taught myself all I needed to do this. (Something I did many, many times over the decades.)
Look, partner. See that “PhD” after your name? That means you should be qualified and then some to teach yourself a new programming language, a new topic, etc. in your field. And you should bleeping learn how great it is to have things networked.
I’m a Sun Java certified programmer (for some weird reason). They didn’t teach Java when I was in college because it didn’t exist. I picked up a book, sat down at a computer and learned it.
Doing this is a must for the field. He couldn’t do it so he didn’t last.
When I was a retail manager I was hiring my seasonal staff for a mall location. Basic minimum wage first job kind of stuff. A lot of teens.
I hired one gal I’ll never forget who was very nice and did the job just fine, however she had absolutely no concept of how a schedule/shifts/hours were supposed to work even after explaining it to her multiple times.
Apparently she thought once you landed a job somewhere you just show up to work any time you want to work and leave or don’t come in any time you don’t want to work.
After a week of calls from my assistant managers saying “she didn’t show up again” or “she’s here to work but she’s not on the schedule” I had to get rid of her.
She was still really confused about the whole situation.
When I train new cashiers at work, I always ask them “What are the three things you have to do to keep a job?” The answer is be on time, do the work, and get along with people. And more people are fired for violating the thid thing than the first two combined.
I was once showing a new, first day employee the upstairs of the store, and I asked her to go downstairs and get a shopping cart, and I’ll show her how to crush the empty boxes. She just went totally off on me, saying I didn’t have the right to tell her what to do and she wasn’t going to listen to me, etc. etc. Very loudly. Two of the male aisle workers came running, followed by the manager, who escorted her out.
Unforgetable night. I also had to deal with a customer who, after I rang up over $300 work of stuff, tried to take his cart out of the store without paying, and a guy who came to my register with a knife. “Where do I find these?” “Oh, let me look at that.” I grab the knife. “That’s kitchenware. Aisle 2.” When he came back with a package of knives, I told him that pulling a knife on a person who is standing in front of a register full of cash is not a good idea. He laughed and said “I never thought of that.” And one of the store owner’s daughters came in the store a couple of days later and, having seen the video said “What was with you and the guy with the knife?”
I remember another one. We had a Latin teacher who used to complain, endlessly, about how he had to “develop his curriculum” for AP. He seemed to sincerely believe that all the rest of us had a Big Book that we assigned chapters out of and the students just answered questions at the end. ALL of us design our curriculum. And I went looking, and found him a bunch of canned AP Latin curricula he could work from–AP Latin has a super-supportive community–and he rejected every one for various reasons. But he continued to hold that he, and only he, had the terrible burden of having to figure out how to teach these children.
Another story about somebody who had trouble with the subject of days off.
I worked in a prison. Anyone who gave a moment’s thought to it would figure out that a prison is a twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year business. There is never a time when we close.
But there was at least one guy who hadn’t really grasped this concept. He was genuinely surprised when he was making his Christmas plans and realized he was scheduled to work on Christmas Day. So he went to the sergeant and then to me to try to get this mistake fixed.
He explained to me that he didn’t want to work on Christmas. I explained to him that regardless of how he felt about it, he was going to work on Christmas. And he just couldn’t accept it - he acted as if there was a law saying that everybody who wanted Christmas off was entitled to it.
I explained to him that we shut down as much as possible and gave as many people as possible the day off. But there was an unavoidable minimum number of people who would have to work. And that as one of the least senior people in the prison, he was going to be one of those people working. And he kept saying “But I can’t work on Christmas.”
We had a guy in a similar position. First, he was out for months due to back pain (in essentially an office job with some light lifting) and then due to “tinnitus”, which conveniently isn’t something anyone can prove or disprove. This was a guy who was regularly going to rock concerts, even traveling cross-country for big concerts. Part of our annoyance was that we were told that as long as he was out on disability, we could not hire a replacement. So we were shorthanded for months.