OK, she is nowhere near as evil as Hardygrrl’s coworker, from a concurrent Pit thread . . . But my baby-talking cubicle neighbor is at it again. And I finally figured out what she sounds like: you know Jackie from “That 70s Show?” You know how she sometimes does this whiny baby-talk voice when she wants to get her way with Michael? Well, that is EXACTLY the voice I have to listen to EVERY GODDAM DAY.
She’s not a bad person . . . She just really needs to smoke a lot and gargle with sandpaper or something. And to get rid of the fucking baby/puppy/smurf screen savers. I have a VERY low “cute tolerance,” and she is plucking my last nerve. If only Personnel had come through with my request for a hunchbacked assistant, to pour boiling oil on her . . .
Do you folks have any coworkers who aren’t so much evil as just goddam ANNOYING? You know they’re not worth risk jail-time for killing them—but if you saw them about to step into an open elevator shaft, you’d stop to tie your shoelace?
I believe that I’ve discussed our staff horticulturist a bit here in the Pit. She’s got sweet-whiny-baby-syndrome. It’s all I can do to keep from faking a seizure every time she approaches me, because I know that the conversation will turn around to her dogs, and then I’ll be hit with The Voice.
Sorry, Eve. We should lock them all up together. Maybe they would cancel each other out.
I give you Bennet, the mumbling, whistling, tapping, clicking noise machine.
I thought he was going to drive me stark raving mad. He’d sit there, updating some computer tables, and blow these long, tuneless whistling notes. And Tap. And jiggle. And talk to himself.
Thank god he got a different job, or I’d be in the position of of worrying about someone finding his body in a shallow grave in my backyard.
My co-workers are actually quite tolerable, with the possible exception of Anthrax Woman, about whom I have posted elsewhere.
The only person here who really gets up my nose is our group supervisor, and I don’t have to deal with him every day, fortunately. He is Mr. Micromanager. Just to give one example: I sent him a draft of a report to be edited. He sent it back through interoffice mail with perfectly self-explanatory comments. Then he e-mailed me to see if I’d gotten it. Then he e-mailed me to see if I’d gotten the message. Then, literally as I was lifting my fingers to the keyboard to reply, he called me to see if I’d gotten the e-mails.
He also gave us a detailed list of instructions on how to prepare our presentations at a briefing for the new commanding officer, including what to talk about, how much to rehearse, etc. Time allotted for each of us: Two minutes.
Thanks for the input, but I think I can talk coherently about what I do every day for two minutes without extensive rehearsal.
All in all, though, this place compares pretty favorably with some of the office horrors I have heard.
Hee hee-Hey Eve, does she have the “Hang in There” poster
with the kitten in the tree plastered on her cubicle wall?
You should have a personality war with her. For every cutesy
thing, you put up something cynical, such as the “Have a Day” with the straight face poster.
Yeah- I’ve got this co-worker who is incredibly sweet, but totally slow and methodical. 10 minutes after everyone else has called IT about the down server and started on some paperwork in the meantime, you can hear her vioce,
“Ahem…Hmmm…geezz…is anyone else perhaps having a bit of a problem with entry in to their computer? Ummm, I cant seem to access my PC…”
HELLO!!!
And she uses superfluous words in each sentence. Succinct
she is not. Ugh.
I had a cow-orker who was a vocal pauser - whenever he had a pause in conversation, to think of something or whatever, he filled it with an incredibly loud “AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” (I swear to God it lasted that long sometimes). Did I mention he had the loudest voice EVER, and was a salesman, and on the phone all day, and everyone in the office got treated to his vocal pauses all day long? SHUT UP! SHUT UP! IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY, SAY NOTHING!
I’m going to start speaking in baby talk when I take tech support calls.
“Aaawww, did him dewete the wesults file? Did him? Did him? Aaawww, sounds like him make a widdle mistake. ::Gasp:: Such a angwy engineer him is. Aaawww, the angwy engineer shouldn’t use so much pwofanity. No him shouldn’t. No him shouldn’t.”
"You should have a personality war with her . . . "
—Oh, and don’t think I’m not. We can easily overhear each other’s phone conversations, so I have been turning into Tallulah Bankhead. In my best whiskey alto, I have been purring to my friends, “But, dahhhling, you just wait till the heroin kicks in and then leave with his wallet!” and, “Well, no, I don’t THINK the body will resurface till the spring thaw, dahhhling.”
Fortunately, with MY friends, I don’t even have to make this stuff up.
Friends, I give you Mr Whistle Nose, who lives one cube over. As he pumps air through his nostrils it sounds like the wind whistling through a forest. Wheeze-whistle…wheeze-whistle…wheeze-whistle all goddamn day.
Eve,
I’ve got to get down there and help you- I KNOW I qualify as hunchbacked (although, the surgery did wonders). I would gladly pour oil on her.
What is wrong with people??? Incidentally, my Mother In Law does this. We had her over for the weekend (the ENTIRE weekend) and she actually said:
“I gotta go potty befow I make a mess in my pantsy wanties”
I fucking kid you not. And she does not have dementia.
Made me want to gouge out her eyes with a melonballer (I’ve been having that fantasy a lot lately), but I got through OK. I mean, bad enough that you have to fucking announce that you’re going to urniate, but you have to say some shit like that??
We’re blessed with the self-appointed food supervisor. This obnoxious young woman is actually anorexic and has a permanent sneer pulling up one side of her upper lip.
As employees collect every day in the lunchroom, this woman, whose hipbones are more protuberant than her tits, inspects and judges other people’s lunches. Below are actual quotes, not delivered jokingly, but deadly serious:
“That’s not really low calorie, you know. There’s a lot of fat in that.”
“Somebody’s lunch smells gross.”
“That looks like really bad Chinese food.”
“Are you going to eat ALL that?”
“I can’t eat more than this little salad for lunch or I’ll get sick.”
“That’s not very healthy.”
“Is that your lunch in the microwave? Ewwwww.”
Today was especially bad! I’m ready to deck her bony ass.
Eve – not the “Have a Day” poster (although I do like it, I have the lapel button), but the smiley face with the bullet hole in the forehead!
pugluvr – what you do is secretly replace her little salad with a bag of deep-fried chocolate bars and watch her have a stroke! <tee-hee>
Ahh, the joys of being self-employed – no annoying co-workers, and no one cares if I boff the maintenance guy (my hubby) in the office on company time.
Anyone else suffer from the boss that must call you with every little thing, no matter how inane? Mine does, and he also feels obligated to use the speaker phone. Did I mention that my cubicle is approximately seven feet from his office? Here’s a hint: when I can hear your voice through the air better than I can through the telephone, MAYBE YOU SHOULD GET OFF YOUR LAZY ASS AND JUST COME TALK TO ME FACE TO FACE!! I am tempted to put him on speaker phone when he calls, just to hear the deafening screech of the feedback loop as our voices echo back and forth between the eight feet of space separating us.
Annoying coworkers . . . Well, there’s the guy in the next office WHO CARRIES ON EVERY PHONE CONVERSATION AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS, work related or not: “HEY, GORDO! WHEN’S OUR TEE-TIME? TWO? DAMN, I HOPE THAT HOT LITTLE NUMBER’S DRIVING THE REFRESHMENT CART AGAIN, HAR HAR HAR!” He’s really a nice man and he wouldn’t dream of being a sexist pig to any woman in the office, but it’s like he feels sexist piggishness is necessary for male bonding (who knows? maybe it is) and he has to bond at the top of his lungs.
Aaaand there’s my secretary, who makes mistakes ranging from piddling to massive and who refuses in the face of all logic or reasonableness to take responsibility for any of them. Cf: “Why didn’t you calendar this meeting for me?” “I did.” “No, you didn’t, it’s not on my calendar.” “It must have got erased.” Erased? Erased? Who the fuck would erase something off my calendar? The janitor? The Lone Erasing Avenger? Get real. Either (a) take responsibility for your screw ups or (b) stop screwing up. Actually, if she doesn’t do both I’m going to have her ass fired, so maybe it’s not too fair to complain about her.
You should meet my former next-cube neighbor, the Phlegm Swede. The Swedish part was not really a problem beyond feeling like I was sitting next to the chef from the Muppet Show, which was kind of cool sometimes (he even made that “duum-de-duum-de” sound every now and then). However, the transplant from northern Europe to the southern US had caused him some, uh, sinus and respiratory distress, with all the accompanied throat clearing, sniffling, and hacking that usually go along with that sort of thing.
I feel your pain, Jodi. Some of the legal secretaries at my firm are so dumb I don’t think they could masturbate without instructions.
The other day we were interviewing financial consultants and investment bankers to retain for a billion dollar matter. A big deal.
My two coworkers and I were extremely busy, needless to say. We needed one person to meet and greet the incoming bankers, shuffle them off to their interviews, and take down the names and numbers of any interviewees who were participating telephonically.
We tried delegating this task to one of the secretaries.
She didn’t fucking get the concept.
You go upstairs. You say hello. You take a number. When one of the paras on the case tells you to, you go upstairs and bring a group of soulless corps to the conference room.
Comprende?
Nope. This task was too much for her. So charming little me had to to the meeting and greeting.
This woman fucks up more distribution lists in one week than Mariah Carey has personal breakdowns. I swear, if the partner whom she services isn’t fucking her raw all the goddamn time, there is simply no reason for her existence at my firm.
Every time she claims not to understand something, I always suspect that she is pulling the blonde routine in order to get out of doing work. But when I have to cover for her and do [n]non-billable** secretarial work, that theory makes less and less sense.
I dearly love this person, but her insecurity and defensiveness is starting to get to me. She was promoted from a strictly clerical position to an administrative job with lots more responsibility, about a year ago. She’s been thoroughly trained and things have gone well. I’ve never heard about any reprimands (and I’d hear) and I’ve heard lots of “thank you” and “nice job” and “good thinking.”
But she has absolutely no confidence and works in constant fear of “screwing up.” That’d be okay, if she kept it to herself, but if anything comes up that’s even a little bit out of the ordinary, she’ll have to ask someone (maybe more than one person) if she’s doing it right. That’s a waste of time – it usually doesn’t take three people to figure out if someone’s paycheck was short.
I’ve tried my own philosophy on her, to get her to relax a little bit. “Shelly, what’s the worst thing that can happen if this is messed up? Does someone die? No? Then don’t worry about it, you’ve done the best you can.”
She’s constantly defending herself, when there’s nothing to defend.
From today, she brought crackers and a dip to work:
“I should have used Hellman’s instead of Miracle Whip in this recipe. It doesn’t taste right. But Hellman’s is so salty. Do you think it tastes okay this way? I’ll try it with Hellman’s next time. But I’ll just buy a little jar, no reason to get the big one, just for one recipe. I’m sorry it didn’t turn out like it should have.”
She will not allow anyone to make her feel better and she doesn’t accept any compliments with denigrating herself. I really hate that.
Brethren and Sistren, I give you the Sexy-Talkin’ Man.
The Sexy-Talkin’ Man manages to turn every conversation into sex.
TSTM makes “mmm-MMM” noises every time a woman he’d like to bone walks past his desk.
TSTM describes in great detail his fantasies about the new department manager.
TSTM brings in Polaroids of himself naked wearing an electric guitar, passes them around the depertment, and has no understanding of why some people are perturbed by this.
And when TSTM is not doin’ the sexy talkin’, he’s on the phone to his GIRLFRIEND talking about HER KID that he is actually allowed to spend time with.
All the while doing little or no work, I might add.
Lucky for me I don’t even work at the same company as TSTM any more and even when I did I wasn’t in the same department (although we sat across the aisle from each other) so at least I didn’t have to pick up his slack. The only reason I can imagine that he was not shitcanned is that his closet case supervisor had a huge crush on him. It was almost worth it to me to stay just to see how long it would take for someone to sue.
Haven’t been at my new job long enough to suss out the freaks, but I am meeting with my supervisor (for the first time despite having been there a month) and I hear things…
