My job in a one act play:
Sales Guy: Enginerd, I told a customer that our product will make rocks float and make water flow up hill.
Enginerd: But Sales Guy, it won’t do that.
Sales Guy: I know, but we’ll lose the sale if it doesn’t. I need you to design something so I’m not a liar!
Repeat weekly… It’s a good thing for everyone that Sales Guy is in an office 2000 miles away.
Two words…poison oak.
I can deal with pissed off clients, missed and/or impossible deadlines, finicky specialists, pulled funding, etc., etc. But I hate the goddamn poison oak.
But, if there is one thing I hate worse than poison oak, it’s my crew bitching about the poison oak. My standard response is “As soon as one of you guys gets it worse than me then, and only then, can you bitch about it!”
Dead people.
IAAL, and the thing I hate is when clients refuse to take, “I cannot and will not guarantee the result of your case” for an answer. If I had a functioning crystal ball I’d be using it in Vegas not trying to predict what the jury or judge will decide. 
Showing up
I work in the study abroad office of a small college. I really, really hate it when parents call me and say “My son is a sophomore and he wants to study abroad next year. Maybe in Latin America. What are his options?” Lady, your son is 20 years old. Why doesn’t your son come see me himself? Are his legs broken? Even if they are, can he not send me an email, asking the very same thing? Are you going to fill out his application for him, too? There’s just a small subset of parents who will not freaking let go.
Informing a patient that they have a fatal disease. I hate that.
Unfortunately (or maybe not) I seem to be fairly good at it, and as the boss, the duty falls to me to do the job more often than I like. And my patients tend to be at higher risks for fatal diseases.
Most of my job is great, and I have enough seniority and experience, plus I’m close enough to retirement that not much pisses me off.
“Team Building” pisses me off. Sanctioned socializing. Contests. Picnics. Happy hours.
I truly don’t care if people get together and have fun. I don’t mind that there’s an official summer picnic and winter holiday party. What gets to me is the constant barrage of emails about “First Friday Happy Hour” or “Burger and Hot Dog Sales” or “Hawaiian Shirt Day” or “Door Decorating Contest” or Branch socials or Division socials or Department socials or Command Pot Luck luncheons. I swear, there are some people on the Rec Committee who can’t possibly be doing the jobs they were hired to do! Our tax dollars at, um, work??
All in the name of Team Building. And almost all “on the clock.” Now, I like the people in my office just fine. I’ve chatted with most of them at one time or another. I’m a team leader, and I’ve had no problems getting my team to work together, and I don’t attend any of the aforementioned functions. If someone is retiring or transferring, I may go to a lunch. But I didn’t see the need to go bowling (I’m serious) with my coworkers over lunch last month. I’m glad they had fun, but I had work to do, and I did it.
Maybe I’m just an old grouch. Maybe I just need to retire.
Jan 23, 2010.
Could be worse, FairyChatMom. They could insist that you do the “team building” stuff outside of office hours, and make it mandatory. That was one of the reasons I left my last job.
Parents. Uh…unreasonable parents.
Drivers are drivers. They amuse me more than anything else. The secretaries and principals at the schools, for the most part are professional and caring. The kids are a hoot, especially the younger ones, they’re like rays of sunshine.
But their folks?
"Move my kids bus stop because:"
===================
"The bus driver yelled at my kid"
Yes he did. Your angel:
Is it Friday yet? 16 more days of school…
Sarbanes Ballgnawing Oxley.
The “vampire” part was pretty much a joke. But if I open mist nets too soon after dawn, I end up catching a few bats, which I hate. Even though I’ve been vaccinated against rabies, it’s tough taking those bastards out of the net - those teeth are sharp!. And if you don’t get to them soon enough, they’ll chew a hole in the net. (Mind you, I don’t hate the bats themselves - I think they’re cool - I just hate catching them. I like to go out with the bat researchers to see what they get. Interestingly, the bat people hate catching birds if they open their nets too soon after dark, since they don’t know how to handle them.)
I’ll stand beside Ol’ Gaffer and add chiggers and ticks to his Poison Oak. Oh, and trying to lop my finger off today… 4 stitches later…
The other employees.
If you don’t want to work leave.
If you want to work but don’t know how leave, learn, then come back I don’t have time to teach you what you are already supposed to know.
If you honestly can’t do it because you are too stupid, leave, jump off a roof, and have a nice day.
F*ing morons.
The customers.
This job would be great if it weren’t for all the customers. 
I don’t like the cranky piece of online software my client insists we use to carry on business.
I dislike the fact that my office is also my bedroom, so my papers and whatnot get everywhere, but that will be solved come July.
Other than that, there’s very little about my job I dislike. Well, sometimes the “having to work” part gets on my nerves, but I understand that’s an essential part of, you know, making money, which allows me to pay for rent and blueberry-pomegranate juice.
The unpredictability.
Will I have work? How much? Where? It’s kind of hard to plan anything, or even take care of my family, if every ten weeks I have to sweat whether or not I’ll still be getting a paycheck. As an off-shoot of this, I also love having to reapply for my job every year. According to my evaluations, I’m doing a good job, yet I still have to reapply? I have a lot of 80-100 hour work weeks to ensure that I’m doing a good enough job to earn those good evaluations, but it’s still not enough.
Now that that’s laid out in black and white, I’m depressed. What the Hell was I thinking?
THE DAMN BELL. oh my GOD I hate that thing.
In the kitchen, there’s a bell. the kind where you hit the top and it goes DING. The reason for the bell is to let the waitresses know if they’re not in the kitchen that their order is ready. It’s fine on days when it’s slow and orders are left in the kitchen while the waitresses hang out in the dining room. It’s useful on those nights. I don’t mind it.
but there are the nights when it’s busy and I’m doing a million things at once and the kitchen guys know that becuase if anyone would know it’s bus, it would be them, and the keep DINGING THE DAMN BELL just to irritate me. I’ll be running up and down the dining room, answering the phone, out of breath and cursing every customer who walks in the door or calls on the phone and DING! DINGDINGDINGDING! like I don’t know I have orders in the kitchen.
It’s also irritating if I’m standing right there and can plainly see that the order is ready and they ding the bell just to get me to jump. then they laugh and say something in Spanish (of which I speak only a little) and laugh some more.
stupid bell.
Aww. That’s the fun part.
You get them pre-dead. I get them freshly dead. They are less fun that way.