For background, I’m the marketing manager for a small technology company. I’m pretty sure most of us have college degrees. I know everyone here has at least some college.
The average age is in the upper 30s and about half the staff are software engineers.
How is it that in a company filled with educated adults, I am the only one who can seem to:
Make coffee
Change paper towels in either the break room or the bathroom
Change the water dispenser bottle
Change a toilet paper roll
Clean crumbs and food droppings off the counter
Push chairs back into the breakroom table
Refill soap dispensers or
Take sponges out of the sink?
I work in a department of three people that really should have a staff of five or six. The, “I was too busy,” argument doesn’t fly, since I’m at least as busy as anyone else here.
Am I the only asshole in this place who understands the fundamentals of basic courtesy and consideration? I’ve been here almost five years, and everyone seems to be pretty nice, but apparently dickishness is intrinsic to the human condition or something when it comes to picking up after yourself or replacing things when you’ve used the last of them.
I’ve tried to just leave things and let someone else do it, but, just to name one example, for more than a week a roll of paper towels sat on the counter directly under the dispenser roll and no one bothered to mount them. Instead they’d grab a paper towel with wet hands, hold the roll in place and roll off a towel. Every. Single. Time.
Seriously, people, two seconds of effort wouldn’t fucking kill you.
Last time I posted a thread like this, someone on this board decided to tell me that I was obviously the stupid one, doing all the work; and that my lazy incompetent co-workers were the smart ones, because they had figured out how to get away without doing their jobs.
He’ll be the first one up against the wall when the revolution comes.
The lazy co-workers will just get shipped off in the B-Ark.
Yeah, why should your co-workers do these tasks when the company has already hired a maid to take care of it (you)? In all seriousness, I feel your pain, being an engineer at a company of engineers who are mostly pigs, but you bitching about the role you have taken on is kind of a pet peeve of mine. One of my co-workers bitches like this constantly, usually in emails to all. Serious martyr complex. I hate the mess too, but instead of cleaning up after everyone, I avoid it with a coffee maker in my office and my own little refrigerator. The bathroom still sucks, but avoiding it by pissing in the potted plants only worked for a week or so…
You miss kind of a subtle point. I don’t mind doing the work when I’m the one that made it. I just wonder why the fuck others are too lazy, incompetent or stupid to exercise the same courtesy.
I’ve been tempted to post, “Your mother doesn’t work here,” type emails, but I find they engender more, “What an ass. Seriously, is this the biggest thing you’ve to to bitch about,” types of responses from coworkers than anything else. I’ve never sent one, but we had a mother type at a previous job who would send one any time she found something amiss.
She delighted in the martyr role and the left handed appreciation she got as a result. “Gee, Edna, thanks for doing all this when it’s not your job,” kind of thing. I don’t want any passive aggressive back pats, I want motherfuckers to clean up after themselves.
Do I prefer to do it myself rather than let it go undone? Sure, as noted above. Do I understand how anyone can’t be arsed to change the toilet paper roll? No.
Some of it is that the others may literally not care. We don’t own a paper towel dispenser at my house, and my toliet paper has never been on the dispenser in the last 10 years. We just don’t care. I’d never put the paper towels in the dispenser because I would never see it as having to be done. The same thing goes with chairs and such: I really try to be good about that when I am out, but at home our cabinets are open more often than not and chairs stay “out” from the table. It just doesn’t bother us, so we don’t see it. And if the sink is clean and the sponge is wrung out, I’m as likely to drop it in the sink as on the counter.
Not wiping up the counter is nasty. I am sure they just don’t notice. They may even think that the custodians (assuming you have them) take care of that sort of thing, and not realize you do it.
I understand your irritation, but I think that for many of these things it’s a legitimate difference of perception. I don’t know what the solution is.
I feel the same way at times. Why am I the only one that changes the paper towel roll and tp if it runs out between cleaning people visits? Worse, a piece of trash will sit on the floor all day with people walking right over it and no one would think of picking it up.
Recently someone came to me with a soap refill in hand and asked…
“Who has the job to replace the soap when it runs out?”
Regarding the break room issues, I do recommend putting a sign up with break room duty assignments on alternate days. That seems to work in our office and people are aware that it is part of their job to make sure the break room is clean and any garbage with food is emptied in the trash bin outside before they leave. This came to be after I warned everyone that any dishes that are left in the sink will be thrown out. And I did it for about a week. People were pissed about their coffee cups but they were warned and I was serious.
Oh, I din’t miss the point, I got it entirely and I don’t have an answer for you… I, like you, hate that people are too lazy to clean up after themselves. Shit, my own extended family is horrible about this. When members of my family (father, mother, sister, aunts, uncles, etc…) stay with us, whether for an evening or an extended stay, they assume that my wife and I are going to clean up after them (which we do :mad:). They will actually make a mess and when we start to clean it, they will go somewhere else in our house and read while we do it. Fucking inconsiderate lazy assholes! Yeah, after working 10 hours, commuting, making dinner for you, taking care of my kids, doing the dishes, my wife and I nothing more than to clean up the mess you made! When we go to their houses, we (used to) clean up after ourselves. When my wife’s family stays with us they actually fight each other and us (“no, sit down Eyer8, let me get that for you”) to help us out…
Anyway, I digress, just don’t clean it up; let the pigs wallow in their own sties and you won’t feel the need to rant.
Every office seems to have a “mother hen” type who has taken it upon herself to decide exactly what the office should look like as far as neatness. She then does all the nitpicky cleaning shit, then gets all huffy and superior about it.
Next she starts haranging everyone else with snide comments, naggy little memos and sticky-notes on the coffee machine. :rolleyes: Often she suceeds in getting upper management to take her side and send us all a memo that “get tough on the issue”, then does a rah-rah for “teamwork”. Mother Hen then struts triumphantly around for a few days, feeling vindicated…until she realizes that nothing has changed and we still ain’t doing it.
For some reason, it’s usually the middleaged angry fat women with the drawerful of Little Debbies that does this…
Preach it. In my last office, it was two or three people who were pigs, and after all the pissing and moaning from Mother Hen about it, the rest of us just avoided the kitchen completely for anything other than grabbing a soda out of the fridge. Of course, that didn’t save us from getting twice-weekly lectures about cleaning up after ourselves.
But not for making coffee. There are no magical coffee elves. Anyone who takes the last cup of coffee before noon should start brewing some more. Someone coming into the break room should see either see coffee ready or coffee brewing.
I left a note on the paper towel roll: “Replacing the paper towels is not beneath you.” Someone who was less than competent in reading comprehension (our CFO) thought it meant the towels were not under the sink, in the cupboard. :smack:
I love sticky notes, etc. They’re a subtle form of office warfare. Someone put this label on the paper towel dispenser in the men’s room: “Do not overfill.” Who the fuck overfills? That’s like saying, “Put in the appropriate place.” Of course someone will put it in the “appropriate” place. Anyway, I responded with my own label: “OK”. Oh! And we actually had a red button on the wall that had been disconnected from whatever doomsday device it was once attached to. I put a sticky on it, “Never, ever press this button. MGT”. Someone didn’t get the joke and wrote my name next to the “MGT”.
Ah, stickies, how I love thee.
Making coffee is a subject of an amazing amount of bitching, but this one is just weird. I know who drinks coffee in the office, and my subtle observations tell me that people actually make coffee in very close proportion to how much they drink coffee. I’ve since quit bitching about making coffee. But others still keep it up.
A coworker and I threw out some coffee cups. I throw out food when it starts to smell. If not having rotting food in my fridge makes me a “mother hen,” tough.
In my business, there is a parallel phenomenon amongst my carwash customers that seem to fail to realize that the shiny, stainless-steel trash canisters located adjacent to their cars are far too troublesome to be bothered actually putting refuse into as they vacuum out their filthy cars.
It is extremely irritating how blase some people are about littering, especially when there’s a receptacle RIGHT NEXT TO YOU!
Ah, but throw it on the ground anyway, after all, it someone else’s job to clean it up, right?
Not lazy or inconsiderate, but clueless: I pit my coworker who called me at home yesterday to ask why I took the pager home. Yes, I’m on call this week. We have a three-person rotation…how hard can that be to figure out? :smack:
I gotta say that this sort of thing is one of the things I hate the worst about Corporate America.
If I’m not guilty of the behavior, don’t fucking waste MY time lecturing me about how I need to clean up after myself. Collective Punishment is bullshit. Sort out who the culprits are and deal with them singly, directly, and privately.
I hate HATE HATE when some hothead management prick yells at a room full of people or sends out an angry memo to a large group of people because one or a few individuals are causing a problem.
Don’t give me any bullshit about how you can’t single out one person. It’s your fucking job to single out that one person and deal with their mess. Yelling at 20 uninvolved people only makes you look like an ineffectual cowardly jackass; and none of the rest of us has the power to make that one person change their behavior. Besides, if we actually tried to do it, the next thing you know you’d be yelling and swearing at the whole 20 of us again because there is a bunch of squabbling going on in the staff room and you don’t want to hear it!
About 10 years ago I had a guy IN MY HOUSE pulling this crap. I hosted a D&D game run by someone else. This punk 17 year old piece of shit sat on my futon with muddy shoes underneath him, drank an entire 12 pack of Mountain Dew, and ate Sunflower seeds. I had the garbage can sitting 5 feet from him. Several times I walked by and pointed it out to him, at least twice I straight out told him to put his shit in the garbage.
When he left, there was this circle of mud on my futon where he’d been sitting. Surrounded by a halo of sunflower seed shells. With 12 not-quite-empty pop cans on the table. I swear, each one had at least 1/2 ounce of more left in it.
I permanently disinvited him from my house and the GM disbanded the group because of this guy and two others he didn’t like.
IN MY MOTHERFUCKING HOUSE!!! What kind of shitbag does this in someone elses house???
Shitbag nerds that play D&D.
Seriously, any gathering I’ve ever had in my place most people I invite are helpful and respectful as much as drunken revelry allows for…I just don’t get completely sober people that simply make an unconscious decision to throw a bunch of their trash on the ground next to a trashcan.
I will never understand that mentality, and I hate and have to say it, but it’s mostly my African American customers. I just don’t understand this “littered urban environment” mentality. It is so prevalent I could scream.
I’ve had some almost altercations with some of these people when I see them throwing random shit on the lot (I have personally disposed of more nasty old car seats than I can mention) and I walk up and suggest that they please use the garbage can.
They generally give me the stink-eye and act like I’m trying to inconvenience them in some way. It’s literally unbelievable.
You could potentially waste a pot of coffee per day that way, though. If you want to drink coffee, you should be prepared to brew it without bitching.
I always gripe about the per-cup coffee brewing machine that we have in our office. It tastes a tad dilute and you can’t control the strength, but we never have any bitch fights over who ought to make the coffee.
Oh! And we actually had a red button on the wall that had been disconnected from whatever doomsday device it was once attached to. I put a sticky on it, “Never, ever press this button. MGT”. Someone didn’t get the joke and wrote my name next to the “MGT”.