I’d like to hear people’s experiences with annoying co-workers. The target of my personal venom is a young man I’ll call “Jimmy” to protect his identity.
I’m a part-time supervisor at a university library. Jimmy is another employee, below me on the ladder. He’s weird in a lot of ways–no sense of humor, no grasp of sarcasm, speaks in monotone, hikes his pants up to his armpits–but there was a particular incident that took the cake. One weekend, he was telling me that he was pretty sure he could be an assassin because he owns a sword. I told him that while I can appreciate a sword aesthetically, there are more appropriate tools for today’s modern assassin. We argued for a while, and I thought it was over with, until the following Sunday morning, when he walked in with a katana strapped to his back!
“Jimmy,” I said, “Uhm…we’re gonna have to ask you to take the sword home.”
“I’ll take it home later,” he says.
“I think you should take it home now.”
“I told you I was going to bring it in.”
Now, I’m a pretty mellow guy. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable–I’m not trying to have him fired or arrested; in fact, I’m not even asking him to clock out while he runs home and back. But I start to get angry. “I know that, Jimmy, but I thought you were joking, because we live in a civilization, and in a civilization, you don’t bring weapons to your office! Take it home!”
“I’ll take it home this afternoon.”
“No. Now.”
“On my lunch break.”
“Look, Jimmy, I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but you’ve brought an implement of destruction to our place of employment. I know it’s raining and I don’t want to make you go right back out, so leave the sword with me, go gather the loose books on the second floor, and when you’re done, take it home. If you say one more thing about it, I’ll have to call security which I don’t want to do.”
So he leaves it with me, does his thing, and comes back. I tell him to take it home, and he starts grumbling.
“Jimmy, I’m not the bad guy here. I told the evening supervisors last week that you were joking about this; they said they’d immediately call the cops. You want that?”
“Prudes,” he says, in a very contemptuous manner.
“They’re not prudes, they’re concerned for their safety! You can’t bring tools of death to the office.”
“Well, I wrapped it up.” He had it wrapped in a towel.
“I don’t care what you wrapped it in, it’s a sword, it’s to kill people! Get it out of here!”
“If it was dangerous, they wouldn’t have sold it to me.”
“That’s the dumbest logic I’ve ever heard. Take it home.”
“Well, I believe it’s an individual responsi…”
“GET IT THE $%*? OUT OF HERE!”
He finally left. Became the basis for much workplace gossip thereafter.
I would keep a close eye on that boy if I was you.
My annoying co-worker is ‘Dan’. He’s a contract worker, but gets a full $10.00 an hour more than I do. He’s late. Every day. Every single day. Every single, cotton-picking day. Always at least 20 minutes, often more than an hour, sometimes as much as 4 hours. Then he goes to sleep.
That’s right, he goes to sleep. He makes 26 bucks an hour to sleep. He sleeps more at work than I do at home. We work graveyard. The managers don’t come in till 7 AM. He generally sleeps till 6. Our manager knows this. Has been told of this on more than one occasion by more than 1 other person. And our manager loves ‘Dan’. Has actually said, in the presence of others, ‘Thank God we have ‘Dan’’.
It has caused my blood pressure to reach dangerous levels.
Are these people for real? Seriously, are they for real? I cannot believe such people exist… well, actually I can slightly believe it. I had a co-worker who, although didn’t carry their favorite claymore sword to work, was a bit on the spoiled-brat-who-got-a-job-through-his-aunt-who-is-a-board-member side.
Around Autumn of 1999, a lot of new people were being hired to work the new facilities here in the library. Amongst those people was this 21-year-old returning student who had this habit of not really working. He would come in 15 minutes late, take an hour lunch break and leave 15 minutes early ON A 4-HOUR SHIFT. During work, he would sit with some of the more attractive patrons for 2 HOURS. I mean like after answering their questions and what-have-you, he would just sit next to them. Eventually it got worse as he began having slightly large and disturbing verbal arguments with some of the older male patrons. After a couple times of his “disagreements” with people, he was quietly let go by the Dean of the department, who so happened to be friends with his aunt.
Oddly enough, every once in a while he drops by and occupies a staff work station as if he still works here…
I work with the biggest freaking slimeball twit ever. I could go on an on about her with daily bitchy, annoying things she does, but I won’t give you the blow-by-blow. I’ll just relate what happened this morning:
Annoying Twit: The breakroom’s a mess.
Me: Why, what happened?
AT: The coffee pot overflowed.
Me: Did you make the coffee?
AT: Yes, but it’s a new pot. [comment: it’s the same brand & size as all the other pots] It overflowed all over the floor and there are coffee grounds everywhere.
Me: Did you hit “brew” twice?
AT: No, I don’t know why it overflowed.
Me: Did you clean it up?
AT: No.
Me: Well, who do you think is going to clean the mess up?
AT: I guess Crystal [our receptionist] will.
Me: Don’t you think if you make such a huge mess, you should clean it up?
AT: Yeah, I guess, but it wasn’t my fault…grumble, grumble…fine, I’ll clean it up in a minute.
I went to do it myself, because I didn’t want Crystal to be faced with that as soon as she walked in. Unfortunately, she had already arrived and taken care of it. Poor woman. I’m going to bring her something good for lunch later.
Oh. My. God. I would have popped her, I swear. I wonder what the hell goes through the minds of people like that.
Where I work, we have an “administrative services team” that takes care of running dishwashers, stocking the fridge, and maintaining the conference rooms (along with general admin tasks). The person who took care of the majority of those duties recently left, and so I and another person have taken those over in the interim. Let me tell you, it is the most thankless task ever, and serves to do nothing but piss me off.
People leave conference rooms a mess. Half-full glasses, chairs strewn everywhere, half-eaten food, confidential client information written on dry erase boards with “do not erase” written on them…I could go on. Someone started coffee and didn’t place the pot correctly, so there was coffee all over the floor and the creator of this mess never returned to clean it up and never apologized. There’s a bitch session when one person’s favorite drink isn’t immediately replenished in the fridge, or if only lightly buttered popcorn is in stock, not butter lover’s. I just don’t understand why people feel entitled to have someone clean up after them at work. I swear, if I could just get my hands on these people…grrrrr…
This is SO cool! I may be able to use some of these in my act. I don’t do the nine-to-five scene anymore (I’m a stand-up comic), but the one that sticks out in my head was “Matthew.” I’ll illustrate:
(Sounds of rather loud swearing, and the sound of something being hit)
Me: Matthew…you okay, man?
Matthew: This gddamned computer! I fcking hate this motherf*cking thing!
Me: O…kay. What’s the problem with it?
Matthew: What’s the matter with it? What’s the matter? This fcking thing won’t save the changes to my gddamned report! That’s what’s the f*cking matter!
Me (summoning my courage to walk over to his desk): Okay, man. It’s alright, Matthew. We’ll get it. Stop punching the monitor. Did you have the report saved on disk?
Matthew: Yes, I had the gddamned thing on disk! And this fcking thing ruined it! This gddamned piece-of-fcking-sh*t computer!
Me (checking the disk drive): Well, let’s see what’s going on. (Pulling disk out) I think I see the problem, Matthew. See this (gesturing to the little tab that protects the disk from being erased)? This was set so that you couldn’t copy over your files.
Matthew: I bet I did that when I was playing with it yesterday when we were in that meeting. God, how boring was that?
And that’s a TRUE story. That boy was promoted to the quality department.
My most annoying cow-orker is our Novell administrator.
I work in a small division (200 people) of a larger company (4000 people), and we have only three full-time IT people. Two of them are old-time mainframe types, still around only because they work for the accounting directorate and have hardcoded their job security into the AS 400 that is used to manage the books.
The third, call him Dan, is an ex program manager that happened to royally fuck up his program around the same time our building installed a LAN with file and print servers (circa 1990). So instead of firing this incompetent prick, they transferred him to the (then-named) MIS department.
We’re an engineering firm. We need programs like MathCAD, IDL, LabView, etc. Dan refuses to make any attempt to support installations like that, refuses to learn how, and blocks any attempt by the users to do it themselves. The only support we get in this area is from a part-time student that the Controller hires every semester to help Dan.
If you need hardware or software support, and go seek his aid, Dan’s first question is “Why do you need that?” It doesn’t matter that it’s not his job to authorize or deny service - he can’t understand or evaluate our needs in the first place. But if you don’t play his game of “demonstrate why I should go out of my way to help you,” you don’t get squat.
He has a PhD in brown nose. The directors, senior managers, and Veeps all think he’s great. Any time they need their PC’s nose blown or ass wiped, he’s there. So when you get into a conflict with Dan, and it escalates to the attention of senior management, guess whose side they’re on?
If you’re an attractive female, and need some help on how to use Word or Excel or any other program for that matter, all you have to do is look confused for an instant, and Dan will be there, spending as many hours as necessary standing behind your shoulder, giving you “assistance,” and looking down your blouse.
Install any application on your computer yourself, and he’s in your face. Turn off filesharing on your volumes, and he sneaks in after hours and turns it back on. Install a game or a browser plugin like Flash, and you get accused of misuse of company resources. But browse the obscure corners of the fileserver volumes and you can find all kinds of porn images, MP3s, DIVX files, and cracked games - each one owned by “ADMINISTRATOR.”
Fortunately, our internet gateway machine is Unix, maintained by an outside contractor, and Dan has been unable (so far) to monitor our web browsing. I’m sure we’ll find out real quick when he learns how.
bughunter,
I used to work with a guy who was just like that. In fact, he was one of the main reason I left the company.
I feel for you, man.
Nothing is too small to be a problem and all problems are fodder for 20 Questions:
PAW: I don’t see why we have to do it like this.
Me: Do what? What’s the problem?
PAW: Oh, it’s nothing. (huge sigh; discontented look)
Me: Well it sounds like something. What’s wrong?
PAW: It doesn’t matter. It isn’t like talking about it would change anything.
Me: WHAT wouldn’t change? What are we talking about?
PAW: Now you’re getting mad. See, I told you it wouldn’t do any good to complain.
Me: ::gritting teeth:: It might if I knew what the problem is.
PAW: Well I just think it’s really, really stupid that we have to ask people for ID to get a card.
Me: We’re required to by state law, to prove whether people are within our taxing district.
PAW: It’s still stupid. I mean, people get mad.
Me: Yeah, they do but it helps if you explain WHY the law’s the way it is. No free lunch, fair’s fair, can’t give away services other people have to pay for…
PAW: That doesn’t help. I TELL them it’s stupid but, like, you make me do it. They still get mad.
Me: Maybe they’re mad because you’re telling them they’re right to be mad.
PAW: No, I’m not. I’m just telling them the TRUTH. It’s stupid and it isn’t my fault.
Me: ::breathing deeply:: It’s financial responsiblity and most people are reasonable enough to respect that if you tell them WHY.
PAW: Well, it’s stupid and I’m just being HONEST. I don’t like lying to people.
Me: Nobody’s asking you to lie! Just explain the policy and give them my card if they stay mad, okay?
PAW: It feels like lying. I thought we were SUPPOSED to make patrons happy but I guess not, huh?
Me: ::fraying out:: What about the honest taxpayers who PAY for this place? Have you asked THEM how “happy” they are to bankroll everybody and their dog?
PAW: Well, sheesh! I’m just being honest and trying to do my job. See, I TOLD you nothing would change. It never does.
Almost verbatim account, sadly enough. And the tactics apply to everything: 45 minute personal phone conversations, no funeral leave when the family hamster died, dirty dishes left in the staff room sink, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s an eclipse…
Wishing I were joking,
Veb