I don’t want to Pit them, because they’re nice people and I really can’t get up the ire, but it annoys me. I actually come to work to work, you know? I mean, I chat, but here is what they have done today:
Everyone came in at 8:30 or so. They chatted until 9.
Until around 11, people stayed in their offices but at least one person (a different person each time) would be visiting someone else in their office and talking loudly. All of them alternated.
At 11 for some reason they all ended up in one office and chatted for the next hour, not doing any work, talking and laughing really LOUDLY.
At 12, I heated up my lunch. Five minutes later they all broke for lunch. Now they are all in their offices, eating lunch. Not chatting but not working either.
And this is how it is every single day. WTF?! I just want some peace and quiet. I don’t have an office so I can’t shut my door. I talk too, but for 10-15 minutes and then I go back to work.
My place just hired 3 new lawyers and assigned them offices right next to and across from each other, right across from mine. These fuckers yack away at each other all day, just sitting at their desks and talking out their open doors. Especially ths one asshole who pontificates in this incredibly annoying voice. I really want to offer them a nice tall glas of SHUT THE FUCK UP!, but instead I just close my door . . .
My co-“worker”, among a myriad of annoying things she does all day, talks to her apparently equally borderline retarded husband at least ten times a day. If she’s on her desk phone with someone within the company she’ll put them on hold and pick up his call on her cell phone. When she’s not talking to him she’s talking to one of her dysfunctional neighbors (she and her husband are heads of their neighborhood association) which makes me wonder how collectively stupid their entire neighborhood must be. Oh, and she has the most grating accent I have ever heard.
This is one of the primary reasons why I simply hate working in an office.
I worked in offices for many, many years. I used to think I hated my work, until I started working at home and realized that I’m OK with the work itself - sometimes I even like working, if you can imagine that - but the politics, hassles, and just general yakkiness of an office drive me NUTS.
If I’m at work, I want to be working. I don’t want to be hearing about your weekend plans, or that wedding you went to, or the new car you’re buying. I don’t want to be accosted every time I walk past the break room. I want everyone to STFU and let me work.
This, apparently, is a feeling that has no place in the modern office. I got accused of being stand-offish and unfriendly just because I wanted to do some fookin’ work while I was at work.
I get implications that I am stand-off and unfriendly, too. Sure I post on the Dope, and read the Internet - but I get all my work done, too. And I bother no one. Chatting loudly doesn’t just waste time but disrupts the other people in the office.
Yes, the summer is our slow time, granted. But they continued talking until 1:30, when I left for my lunch hour. And now that I am back they are quiet for now. We’ll see how long that lasts!
And I still wouldn’t complain that much if all of this talking didn’t hold me up. Sometimes I can’t do a project until I can get a word in edgewise to ask a question. They leave everything for the absolute last minute, and then freak. And they are willing to work late. I don’t object to working late but if I finish all of my work in my alloted time I shouldn’t ever have to because someone else chronically didn’t finish theirs.
And I don’t mind the brief updates. I don’t want to trash-talk men, though, or talk about weight (but not do anything about it ever) and I really don’t want to hear a forty-five minute talk on your kid’s birthday party!
Oh, and “the management” also chats. Usually they meet in her office. :rolleyes: I got no recourse, being the quiet one.
Have you tried pursing your lips and looking at them disapprovingly through your lorgnette?
Just kidding- I know how you feel, as I am also always the quiet one. No, I’m not stuck-up. No, I don’t think I’m better than you. No, I am not a bitch. Well, okay, maybe I am. But I’m quiet just because I’m a quiet person!
I work in a call center, and work beside a gossip in a main arterial corridor. At least a dozen people a day to stop to talk to her, and often crowd me while doing it. Another woman on the other side of her gets a lot of visitors, too, and when they’re not talking to their work-friends, they’re talking to each other. Right now, they’re talking about food. The gossip just said “a potato, when baked, is considered a vegetable”.
On top of that, just as many people will stop to chat in the hall behind me, completely distracting me from my work. I really want a different desk.
I totally forgot to mention how one of them got in a fight with her husband the other day, on the cellphone, shouting loudly at him. Awkward.
I think I will start tracking how much they talk.
Yesterday two people were standing right outside my door talking. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t have heard what they were saying. But I could hear every word Boxcar Willie (his name has “box” in it) was blatting on about.
I once really pissed my manager off when he decided, a week after Christmas, that we were all going to work 12 hour days to get the project back on track.
During the days around Christmas, my co-workers sat and yammered about Christmas, took looooong lunches and left early (since it was a holiday! Who needs to be in the office!), and took lots of vacation days.
I worked 8 hour days, didn’t yammer, and only took the 2 days off at Christmas that our office closed.
When I protested that I didn’t want to work all that over time because I was right on track, not behind at all, I got branded as “not being a team player.”
One of my other threads addresses tangentially having to go to someone’s house as a “team-building exercise”. I hate being forced to go to anyone’s house.
In addition to having to work late due to massive slackage, do they also complain about not being able to get their work done? People who do this make me stabby.