I work in a small business. Very small. There are normally three of us here, sometimes four if the principal owner deems to grace us with his presence. The pay is generally meager. The work is not overly taxing, although it can become involved and frustrating at times. But all in all it’s a relatively simple distributorship.
Both of my cow-orkers are crazy. Okay, not starkers, but they do crap that I find at least mildly annoying, stuff which to me is just off the norm and after awhile you just gotta say “WTF?”
I’ll start with my first cow-orker. He was hired, ostensibly, to do outside sales. He is the worst saleperson in the history of sales. Ever. He’s been here for more than six months and has not yet sold to a new customer. Anything. This is probably because he’s a total sad sack. Everything he touches crumbles to dust. And he cannot understand why. But I listen to him talk to customers and he 1) goes into long winded tangents that almost no one would care to hear about 2) feels he must point out any potential deficiency in a product “Yeah, that’s okay unless you want to do X and Y” 3) Gets nervous when he’s under pressure and begins to ramble. I’m sure there’s more. Then the pressure of his failure to produce apparently gets to him because he makes more trips into the bathroom than any person I’ve ever met in my life. And worse, he likes to describe to me, in unwanted detail, any physical malady or even the quality of his BMs.
But those aren’t even his annoying habits. He talks very loudly. So loudly that I can hear his full conversations, at normal volume, through the walls of an office two doors away. We also share a bullpen style desk area. If he’s on the phone with someone I literally have trouble hearing a normal phone conversation. He has a very annoying habit of announcing his presence by sighing, very loudly, as he enters a room. He sighs a lot, or blows air across his lips. He also tends to belch very loudly and quite often. And if that’s not happening then he’s clearing his throat at 110 decibels. He also likes to come into my private office, unbidden, and settle into the chair (if there’s not a chair he’ll bring one in) and start to talk to me about whatever. Sometimes it’s business, just as often it’s not. But he mostly ignores any advice I offer, so I’ve now become used to just sort of ignoring him. Sometimes he’ll leave, but just as often he’ll prattle on and on for an interminable amount of time. He is afraid to make any kind of decision on his own, and will find creative ways to try and get me to make decisions for him.
Finally, he lies constantly. Not, AFAIK, on anything terribly important. He’ll lie just to lie. Instead of telling a customer he’ll get back with them in a few minutes, he’ll concoct something out of whole cloth. For example, he can’t find a customer’s file. Ok, fine, get as much info as you can and then call them back or even just put them on hold. But instead it becomes “I’m sorry, I can’t pull up your information because the system has locked up. I’ll get back with you as soon as they’ve rebooted everything.” It is ALWAYS something like that – the simple never will suffice when a situation can be created to blame on someone else. Sometimes this comes back to bite us when I don’t know what story he’s told someone and then they get me and I don’t know to cover his lie.
Sadly, he’s probably the more normal of my two cow-orkers. He at least can be somewhat funny and knows scads of useless quotes and schticks from comedy movies and can imitate some voice quite well. My other cow-orker is just, well, peculiar, in that tinfoil hat kind of way. I didn’t realize this at first. Then one day she mentioned “They’re dusting today”. “Dusting what?” I asked. “Look up there”, she replied, not a hint of sarcasm showing on her face, “see those lines”. It was, of course, contrails. “What are they dusting for?” I queried, curious to see what she might come up with. “It’s how ‘they’ control us” she said, as serious as a heart attack. Oh, great.
Of course since then I’ve come to find there are many things that “they” (which includes the Illuminati and probably the Sanhedrin) don’t want us to know. And she’s terribly passive aggressive. Sometimes she’s a quiet, somewhat timid person, and sometimes she’ll start to chew my head off for no good reason. And example of this occurred yesterday when the principal phoned in from his vacation. He was out of the country and wanted to talk to me and cow-orker the first. On my way to the other room she had something she wanted to ask. I told her, very politely, that I would get with her as soon as we were done with the boss on the phone. She exploded at me that it would have just taken a second and she’d be done if I had just listened to whatever she’d wanted to ask. I know she’d been fighting with her grown son all morning about something he’d “done” to their home computer, so I assume she was angry with him and needed to lash out at someone else. I just shrugged it off and don’t really know what it was she had wanted to ask. This is because when I got off the call she had closed up her office door, which is her way of telling people not to bother her. Later on she acted as if nothing had ever happened and was as nice as ever.
She’s mostly responsible for the bookeeping, plus a couple of other things, and for the most part does her job well, at least as far as I know. But she’s a petty tyrant with the computer system, and gets totally bent out of shape when I try to do anything that involves a change (as background, I have 15 years of experience working on computer systems and in ERP that is FAR and beyond the quaint little system we have here and I’m extremely qualified and have the work authorisation to mandate changes). For a small example, I make sure that when we get confirmation from our vendors that an order has been processed and should ship on such-and-such a date, then I make sure that date is input into an area of the system for order acknowledgments. It’s what it’s there for. But it was NEVER done before. So she told me that I really shouldn’t do that, since those ship dates are often wrong (probably incorrect about 15-20% of the time, but not often way off). I explained this was the easiest way to access information for a customer about their order. She counter argued that she had to go into the system after and change the dates anyway (not sure why, but I suspect so that it will show the correct ship date on the customer invoice). This doesn’t stop the inital entry from being useful information for the customer. Eventually she relented, but it’s not really her call and I shouldn’t have to clear these things with her. It’s just her way of exerting control.
I could go on and on, and have, but I’m just not used to working with people like this, and at times it gets to me. I’ve not worked for a long time in a job where people would pitch minor hissy fits and just needed to vent.
