Oh, slurping, jeez, thanks folks I’d forgotten about this guy til now. He had a large plastic bottle of water on his desk and must have emptied it 10 times a day - directly into his stomach. I mean you could hear him opening his throat and the water gurgling. gurgling. gurgling down down down and sloshing around - it drove me bloody insane! I actually think he knew it annoyed me and deliberately did it as loudly as possible. Thankfully he got fired.
We have a large sign over the kitchen sink saying “please put all dirty cultery and crockery in the dishwasher”, which is right below the sink. You guessed it, by 3pm the sink is a pile of dirty cups, plates, and teaspoons.
Everyone here has a mobile phone provided by the company, but no-one seems to know what the word “mobile” means. They leave it on their desks as they wander around which means several times a day there’s some godawful custom ringtone going off, and they all have it at absolute max volume. I’ve got to the stage where I leap up and stab my finger at the hangup button, I just can’t stand it any more.
I’d forgotten about the lovely assitant who only lasted two weeks. She claimed to have “Multi-environmental allergies.” The list of things that made her sick, dizzy, headachy, etc. was astonishing. She couldn’t print out anything from the computer because the ink made her sick. Any food in the immediate area made her so sick she would have to go outside. I once asked her to open a box of signs that just came in. “I can’t, the plastic is making me sick.” I pointed out they were METAL signs. “Oh, it must be the ink. I’m so dizzy. I have to lie down.” She couldn’t talk to customers because “the fragrance in perfume and shampoo makes me sick.”
She got fired when I found her printing out Internet porn. She claimed I ordered her to do it, a pathetic lie that nobody would believe about straight-laced me in 5,000 years.
Very minor indeed, but I have a couple:
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I hate people who feel like they have to tack a “how are you?” onto their greeting. They couldn’t care less how I really am! Sometimes I will answer with a “Fine, how’re you?” kind of strung together as one word, as it should be, but more often, I just reply with a hi or hello and move on. Ugh!
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The copy machine where I work is fairly sophisticated - it will actually, if given five seconds, be able to read the size of the original you have placed under the lid and choose the paper size for you. If you hit the start key before this takes place, the machine beeps (four obnoxious times in succession). I have a female coworker who absolutely refuses to let the machine do its work. Each and every time she uses the copier, she has to hit the start key so it will beep. I’ve tried to tell her and even asked nicely if she’d either wait a couple of seconds, but no… She’s the only one who consistently does this and yes, it drives me bonkers!
The Rambler - A wonderfully nice woman, but she can’t get to the point of her question, story, or observation. She enters the office to ask about taking an early lunch hour, and I have to endure a history of the sandwich, the fall of the Roman Empire, the mating habits of the echidna, and why her mother has bunions on her chin. A former boss went so far as to get an egg timer and set it to 1 minute every time The Rambler came into the office. At the end of the minute, the conversation came to a halt.
The Close Talker With Very Bad Breath - Again, a really nice guy; however, he is a close talker and feels like he has to be only microns away from you when he speaks. I always try to keep a desk between us. To add insult to that injury, he has English teeth (very crooked and slightly green) and some of the worst halitosis in the world. He smokes and drinks coffee all day, so the effluvia coming from his mouth is really offensive.
The Huh? Guy - I’m a pretty bright guy, and I’m very, very good at my job. I have experience, insights, management skills, and an excellent grasp of the issues involved in my profession. All that being said, there’s one guy in our office that I can never understand. It isn’t that he mumbles or has an accent - I just can’t follow him. He speaks in complete gibberish and a never ending stream of non-sequiturs.
Me: So, does anyone else have anything to add?
Brian: Blue volume Pepsi Grannie Maui Westin 1986 mortar wedding ring vomited Isaac Newton.
Complete dumbfounded stares all around.
Me: OK, then. Thanks for everyone’s input. Meeting adjourned.
plnnr, I have a Rambler, too. She’s a very lovely girl, but she talks incessantly, constantly asks for opinions, and then talks over whatever you’re saying. And she talks about the same thing over and over and over…
I spent 7 hours listening to her tell me about the fact that she had to move, and didn’t want to move out of the ‘cool’ area. It’s incredible- she’s the most oblivious and self-absorbed person I’ve ever met. You can walk away while she’s talking and she won’t notice. You can tell her something, and she’ll stare at you with an absorbed, listening expression, and then say, “Yeah, so I’m not sure if I should move in with Dena or with Ruth, y’know?”
Somehow, she’s still nice. And pretty bright. I don’t get it.
I once asked her, “Are you sure your name isn’t ‘Nash?’” but I dont’ think she heard me because she was off on a monologue about God only knows what.
Maybe that’s what I should start calling her.
It must be a law of nature. If you have someone in your office who has the compulsive whistling gene he’ll also be the one who cannot carry a tune in a sack. I have one sitting six feet from me, he will manage to sing a song getting the both the words and tune wrong, and to sing/whistle out of tune. He’s also the guy who thinks out loud that the mobile ringtone that plays the riff from Layla is playing Led Zeppelin. Why be compelled to say that out loud when you don’t know Zeppelin from the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra?
Whoever it is that puts plastic in the paper recycle bin.
The guy that books holidays, shops, reads the paper and banks online during work hours, then looks over my shoulder the second I go to cockeyed.com to see if Rob’s been up to anything new and says in a highly sarcastic-tone “I thought you didn’t approve of surfing during work?”
I get my own back for this last one now since posting here looks just like work 
CHANGE THE TOILET PAPER ROLL, DARN IT!!
Wow, that felt good. There is at least 1 woman around the office that can’t/won’t change the toilet paper roll when she finished off the current one. These are holders where you press the little button, move the arm aside, and insert the new roll. There are always 3+ rolls sitting on the back of the toilet, just waiting to be called into service. But at least once a week, I walk into a stall to find that someone used up the last of a roll, started a new one, and didn’t bother to actually put it in the holder. GAH.
I’ve been tempted to write up a “10 easy steps to toilet paper instillation” guild, and post it in all the stalls.
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When I am eating food, and you feel the urge to converse, this is fine. However, touching my food or the container it inhabits is probably a bad idea.
Picking up the container and reading the ingredients at me goes beyond that into “rude” territory.
Commenting on the amount of fat and other stuff in there goes beyond “rude” into “You Are An Asshole” territory, thank you.
Perhaps you are doing this simply because you care about my health? Why not simply say, “Jesus Christ, you’re friggin’ fat. It’s probably because you eat THIS shit.” Hell, why don’t you simply spit in my lunch? I mean, since you care about my health and all. -
When you see me bustling down the hall holding a stack of papers, it is probably a good assumption that I am on my way to, you know, actually do something job-related. This means that if you wish to intercept me and interrupt what I am doing, it should be in some way important. Stopping me because you wish to bitch at me about how much you hate your job not only keeps you from accomplishing your job, it wastes my time. Yes, I know your job sucks. And yapping at me about it while ON the job helps this how? Perhaps you would like to go out for a beer AFTER work, when I, you know, might actually have a minute to spend, listening to you gripe, instead of while ON the job, where I, you know, might actually want to GET SOME FRIGGIN’ WORK DONE SO I DON’T HAVE TO TAKE IT HOME WITH ME?
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My job is fairly specialized, and has a variety of procedures and paperwork they want done a certain way. This is fine; it’s hardly the first place I’ve worked that was like that.
However, if you want me to do things a certain way, some sort of, you know, training might be useful. Griping at me because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and you don’t have time to teach me doesn’t accomplish a whole lot. Oh, and if you want me to attend training sessions, it might be useful to tell me where and when the training sessions are happening, as opposed to bitching at me after the fact about the fact that I did not attend training sessions I didn’t know about.
Guess you didn’t have time to tell me about them, hm?
It used to annoy me when my coworkers would ask me what I had done over the weekend. Asking “how” the weekend went is OK. Asking what I did is nosy, IMHO, and it always made me uncomfortable (since I never “do” anything).
[rant mode = ON]
It sure seems to me that the reason all this bad behavior goes on is that nobody does anything in response. 90% of the decent folks suffer in silence while the selfish/stupid 10% take up 80% of the psychological/emotional “space”.
Abandoned ringing cellphones in other cubicles would be in the sink in a half-filled coffee cup right after the fat chick was told to get out of the way, and the yenta was told to shut up until she had engaged her brain.
These people are attacking you every day. What are you doing in response, except giving yourself an ulcer as you chew a hole in your lip?
[rant mode=OFF]
I do say something. My coworker is the one who puts non-working pens and broken staplers (and other broken stuff) back “where it belongs” rather then take ten steps and throw it away. It’s not really laziness, it’s just not thinking. I’ve asked her repeatedly not to, and she just blanks out and then says, “Oh, yeah, I guess I should throw it away.”
Another thing she does that irritates the shit out of me: I teach preschool, and we’re in the same class (we’re co-teachers for the group). She does the monthly newsletter, but has no basic computer skills at all. When she types it up, she uses the Courier font. I can’t stand that one, especially in this day and age when she could use something that looks better, even just something basic like Ariel or Times Roman. (Other teachers use nice headers and insert cute seasonal graphics into the letters, then copy them on the color copier)
Once I asked if she did it on the computer or on a typewriter, and when she said the computer, I had to break down and ask why she used Courier, and she said it’s “the only font comes up” and that she didn’t know how to change it.