Since she’s gotten back from her “break” the only thing she’s done is flip through magazines and show us ads she likes.
I’m just thankful that I’m not a dentist because I hate to work in an orifice…
Dum,dum,dum ,shish!
Because they probably do actually get their assigned work done. See here’s the deal. If you are one of these people bitching about how everyone in your office is all chatty and social when you just want to get your work done, the problem isn’t them. The problem is YOU. Most people don’t want to work in a sterile environment where no one interacts and they just sit at their desks mindlessly doing their work like a bunch of robots. People tend to want to build some sort of relationship and rapport with their coworkers. If you are the person who comes in, does your job and never speaks to anyone, you probably aren’t going to be very successful. People will think you are dependable, but they will also think you are standoffish or antisocial and you will never be anything more than someone they dump work on. No one will care about helping you to advance your career or move ahead in the company (assuming you even give a shit about that). And then you’ll be bitching about how “those idiots are now your boss or working on the best projects”.
Did you read Athena’s post? That surely sounds like a case where the assigned work DIDN’T get done, as they were all asked to work 12 hour days after Christmas to catch up. Except Athena didn’t have work to catch up on, as she wasn’t behind, since she hadn’t been slacking off.
Trust me, the one in my office doesn’t get a damned thing done.
I read it. But do we really know how much work other people were doing?
The question I always raise in these sorts of discussions is this. If you are really so much smarter and more productive than your coworkers (or cow-orkers as people cleverly like to say), why aren’t you head of the division by now? Or looking for a job where you will be more challenged?
In my case, the job where the boss who valued going out drinking with him more than he valued being efficient had come after a short dry spell due to people not believing my experience.
When people look at your resume and think you’ve made it up (because your experience is 3 years in a multinational project and all they’ve ever seen is local and 9-months-tops, or local and mismanagedly-long), it’s kind’a hard to get hired. The Spanish job market doesn’t use references, I sure wish it did. But then again, the same people who didn’t believe my resume wouldn’t have believed the references.
As for head of the division, I’m open to management positions but not particularly eager about them. Specially given that in my sector (consulting), “head of the division” actually means “salesman.” Project manager, I’ll take. Sales, no.
I’m a librarian, my shrieker is a part time library assistant and shelver. I know she doesn’t do a damned thing because I’m responsible for her all damned shift. I’ve tried to bring it to my boss’ attention, and it bit me in the ass. She’s my boss’ friend.
People talk all day all around me. There’s never a moment’s peace here. I work in a call center, so I suppose that’s to be expected.
When I worked in retail my supervisor was quite the talker. He’d chat up his customers, many of whom seemed to know him personally, but he just had a way of talking to anyone as if they had been his friends since high school. When he arrived in the morning he would give me a task and then go off to shoot the shit with the people in back for as much as half an hour at a time. Meanwhile, I’d be the only other one in my department and I’d have to wait on customers and take phone calls while trying to set a merchandise display or restock a shelf. Because of this, I often times could not complete my work as the day became progressively busier. After noontime I could pretty much forget about getting anything done at all. The next day my supervisor would then harp on me for not getting my work done. We went around on several occasions. When I brought up the fact that he was bullshitting around in back and should have been on the floor taking care of customers so that I could get my work done he told me that it was none of my business what he was doing and to work faster. It’s a true wonder I didn’t eventually go postal on him.
When I worked as a printer tester there was a guy who had everything automated so that he could set his tests to run and then go off and gab to everybody until lunchtime. In fact, there was a lot of inter-office banter that had little to do with actual work. I’m just glad I could listen to my music on my headphones and drown out everyone while doing my work.
This is a BIG pet peeve of mine. It’s bad enough that there’s usually a table full of 20-somethings nearby, all saying “like” every third word, when we go out for a late night meal at Denny’s. but there I only havd to put up with it for about an hour or so at the most. I’d have gone mad long ago if I had to put up with this all day long on the job for eight hours.
Firstly, I don’t bitch about everyone in the office (mostly because I don’t work in an office), only about one particular loud ‘n’ lazy individual. I interract with my colleagues and my patients all the time, while doing the work I’m paid to do. Loud ‘n’ lazy hangs around the desk, not attending the patient care, regaling all and sundry with tales about her dreadful ex and her social life. The work gets done but not by her - by her colleagues who constantly have to pick up the slack or the patients would suffer.
I’m in a different state, but I thought we were working in the same call center. I share a space with the gossip, and I have a highly sensitive job. If I have to talk to a supervisor, I have to take them out of the office to this person won’t hear. It’s not pretty.
Those kinds of people that are inconsiderate of your work space just annoy the piss out of me. I will actually tell people “hey** CAN YOU KEEP IT DOWN OVER THERE??** I’m trying to work. Thanks.” It helps that our work primarily on phones so it’s easy that way to have an ‘excuse’.
My case is a bit different: my coworkers talk way too much while doing their jobs well, it’s just that they make my workday hell. (What I consider astonishing upthread is that people of the female persuasion also seem to have finite tolerance for nattering).
I have the misfortune of working next door to the only two women in our department. In an eight-hour workday they surely talk for six hours - often at the same time which, apart from generating double the noise, is also deeply mystifying to me.
Unfortunately they also do their work well.
Things that did not work:
- asking them to shut up (they cannot understand the concept of unnecessary talk)
- complaining to my boss (who does not understand the fuss, having his own room and also being away for trips and meetings a lot)
- complaining to my boss’s boss.
- asking for my core work time to be moved from 8:30-16:30 to 16:00-24:00 (denied - customers need no reach me)
Things that do work, to a point
- using a CD player with noise-cancelling headphones (gets a bit repetitive though. I look forward to the 72 discs of fresh Brahms, Mahler and Wagner that I ordered recently)
- scheduling my vacations to not coincide with my colleagues’
- tracking their most voluble periods in the morning and scheduling a half-hour breakfast break in a nearby café accordingly.
- arriving an hour earlier (gets good work done), occasionally on a noisy afternoon take a two-hour gym break and work in the evening instead
- sometimes come to the office on Saturday or Sunday (cannot officially do that; need to store work product in the e-mail Draft box, to be sent on monday. Apparently people don’t notice that I seem to be very productive on mondays).
- when I get a phone call from a customer and cannot understand what I am saying, I make a note of his number, promise to call back, go to a conference room and call from there.
So, a lot of my thoughts at work revolve around avoiding my colleagues loud talk (when I listen to it, for the most part I cannot understand why these subjects require a conversation at all).
Recently my reaction to the news that my colleagues’ kid was going to be sick for days was euphoria (and, on reflection, a guilty conscience). If one of these two ladies had a nasty accident keeping her from work for a long time I’d be hard put to hide my relief (when only one of them is in the office there is no problem with the other).
Try an MP3 player – I have days worth of audio on mine. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane some days, especially when certain people decide that it’s a great idea to hold a screaming match at the conference table right outside my office.