Pwincess Pwecious Must Die

The BBQ Pit
41

My office suffers from variations of just about all the folks who’ve been mentioned before, so I won’t bore you with them.

Our unique contribution to the rant, however, is:

The Angel Lady- She’s a fundie, which is OK since she usually doesn’t evangelize. At least not to me; maybe the goat blood on the door and the pentagram on my office carpet scared her off. :smiley:

Her cubicle is filled with pictures of angels, angel figurines, a little wooden nameplate with “Angel In Training” written on it, potpourri, “inspirational” sayings, and so forth. Actually, the whole effect is reminiscent of Della Reese, Norman Vincent Peale, and Martha Stewart exploding in a small space at the same time.

When something goes wrong her favorite expression is, “Ooops! My guardian angel must be sleeping!” To which my reply is usually something on the order of, “Well, see if he can fly over to the courthouse and file this brief I gave you two weeks ago before the time limit runs and I get fired!”

It’s not possible to have a conversation with her. Whatever the subject, she’ll find a way to turn it around to how angels and/or the Power Of God (said just like that, capitalized and everything) made things work out for the best. Yep, it was my guardian angel that knocked my coffeepot off the counter and splashed the cabinets, the floor, and my suit so that I had to spend a half hour cleaning up the kitchen and changing clothes and was late for work as a result. Yep, if that hadn’t happened no telling what horrible fate could have befallen me on the way to the office this morning. The fact that I arrived an hour late to work but didn’t have a safe fall on me while I walked in the door is incontravertible proof that angels are watching over me.

The way she goes on makes me think of that old Twilight Zone story “It’s A GOOD Thing.” You know the one, where Billy Mumy controls the universe and the adults are afraid to contradict him? We all have the smile, nod, and run away thing down pat when she starts to talk.

Sheesh. Am I the only one with a co-worker like this?

Zap!

42

One of my officemates likes to lay on top of my monitor. It wouldn’t be so bad if her tail didn’t flop in front of the screen. My other officemate tends to jump on my desk when I’m eating and get her tail in my food, or press her face into my hands while I’m typing.

43

I present to you:

The Martyr (from my former job): She is just SO MUCH busier than you. She is SO BUSY. She is OVERWHELMED WITH WORK. She stays later than you, she comes in earlier than you, she has to be the center of every proposal, every project, she has to let everyone know how BUSY she is while simultaneously volunteering for every new assignment that comes down the road. She makes sure to send emails at 11:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. so you know that she is WORKING AROUND THE CLOCK. She whines about work constantly. She one-ups you about work constantly. You do the work of 5 people? She does the work of 10. You were here til 9 working on the Bolivia proposal? She was here till 1:00 a.m. working on 6 proposals.

YET SHE NEVER BRINGS A FUCKING PROJECT TO COMPLETION! Everything she does has to be thrown together at the last minute and requires help from other people. Half the time she can’t even get herself organized enough to tell you what help she needs. Yet she walks away with all the credit for being the hardest worker in the department, because the boss rewards people with the least work/life balance.

Right now I am working with…

The Constant Reviser With No Sense of Other People’s Time. I’m on a temp assignment that involves a lot of proposal writing and production, including graphics. There are also many “can you type this up in a table for me” little jobs here and there.

Every piece of paper I hand this woman comes back to me with a ton of edits and changes. In the beginning of a proposal effort, changes, edits, and back-and-forth makes sense. But she changes stuff just to change it - “Could you make this bold? Oh, and could you move this photo over here? And put a line around everything?”

20 minutes later

“I don’t like this line around everything. And this photo should go on the next page.”

20 minutes later

“Where did that line go? Maybe we could add it back in and make it yellow? Oh, and by the way, I need you to scan all this in and make it look like the final report from 1998. You can find that in the files somewhere. Oh, and my plane leaves this afternoon.”

She is in NY right now, the presentation is scheduled for this afternoon, she’s had the completed proposal for 2 days, and she is STILL calling me to see if I can design new layouts for it and email them to her. “We forgot that one graphic from the 1999 program - do you think you can find it?”

People, she had my type up a to-do list for her and she keeps faxing me FORMATTING EDITS ON THAT!

44

Just a few of mild complaints about Distracting Officemate.

He makes a tremendous amount of noise while eating, smacking away at everything in a grotesque and unappetizing manner. He should be the poster boy for teaching your children to chew with their mouths closed.

He also likes to share little tidbits that he’s read on the internet with me. This is not usually a problem, but sometimes, damnit, I’m trying to concentrate on work, and it’s painful to have change gears in order to comprehend what he’s talking about and make some kind of intelligible response–and by then I’ve blown my train of thought and lost the flow on whatever I was doing. If I’m really trying to stay focused, I put on headphones with loud music blasting in an attempt to communicate that I am not interested in conversation, but he just says my name until I take them off and go, “Huh?” (Pursuant to my “Do unto others” policy, I just email him a link if I see something I think me might find amusing, that he might peruse it at his leisure.)

Also, everything has to be a riddle with him. “Who in this department do you think would be the one to get most paranoid about anthrax?” sigh “I don’t know. Who do you think?” “No, tell me, who do you think?” “I don’t know. [Random Person].” “Why do you say [Random Person]?” “I don’t know. 'Cause [Random Person] is kinda nervous.” “No, it’ll be [Other Person] because . . .” Argh. I do not like guessing games, nor do I like criticising other people’s personalities, nor do I like being your straight man so you can share whatever brilliant insight you think you’ve cooked up!

45

:: types away while looking over her shoulder now and then ::

Let me introduce you to Most Likely to Show up With a Machine Gun at Work Co-Worker (but since this is Canada, he’ll probably just show up with a baseball bat (or a hockey stick!) instead): He constantly talks about the problems he has with his kid (he once asked me, “So, what do you know about the drug trade? You into it?”). We’ve heard all of his stories before and I’m not sure anybody cares anymore. Yeah, we know, your kid is a trouble maker. Drop it. My eyes glaze over when he’s in the vicinity.

He is totally obsessed with our co-worker V. a.k.a. Lazy Ass Co-Worker, constantly watching what she does, what time she comes in, how long she is on the phone, how often she surfs the net and so on and so forth. He’s also a conspiracy nut. Whatever you do, don’t tell him (as I did) that he is paranoid. He’ll tell you to fuck off. He keeps threatening to leave but does he? Of course not. We all know the type: he’ll survive a nuclear war.

And then there’s Too Much Info Woman. Do I really need to know about her genital warts? She’s also hard to get rid of once she latches on to you.

I am so ready for work at home! :smiley:

46

Eve, yes, they sounded to me like annoying superheroes too.

So may I present to all of you two people whom I’ve encountered in the past:

Perfume Queen: She was a nice enough person, but she would come in dripping with some kind of perfume. Things would improve slightly as the day wore on and the perfume wore off, but she would recharge daily with a spray bottle so we could all continue to cough, gag, and choke when she passed by. (In fairness, I don’t think she realized just how irritating it was to many of us.)

Hello Man: People with speakerphone problems have nothing on this guy–he’s the man who cannot figure out how to work a telephone. Even after being told many times how to use a business phone, and after trying four or five new ones, he still insisted the phone was broken, and spent every call shouting “Hello? Hello? Have we got a connection? Hello?” You could hear him all through the office.

And the great thing about Hello Man was that he could metamorphose into his alter-ego…

Dr. Hibbert! Yes, just like the good doctor on The Simpsons, he ended every statement (except for “Hello?”) with a little chuckle, no matter what the subject matter was.

It could be just small talk (“Did you see the game last night, ha-ha-ha?”) or work-related (“I’ve got that document for the Chicago office right here, ha-ha-ha”), neither of which were too bad, just somewhat irritating. But where it really got creepy was when he was talking about some kind of bad news, or tragedy:

“If we don’t get that information, we’ll miss our deadline, ha-ha-ha.”

“I see where Jack got laid off in the recent restructuring, ha-ha-ha.”

“According to the morning news, that rapist struck again, ha-ha-ha.”

Hm. Given that last one, maybe “creepy” isn’t a strong enough word.

47

i believe i’ve mentioned this one.

i’m afraid that i may be the office loud talker. it’s not my fault. they keep giving me crappy phone equipment. which, oddly enough, gets stolen several times a week and i have to replace it with even crappier phone equipment. trust me, if people didn’t keep asking me to speak up, i wouldn’t. all that yelling gives me a horrible headache.

48

As I said when I posted about my promotion, I used to deal with No Common Sense Man, who has to have everything new explained to him at least five times. He’s also deaf so all explaining has to be in writing or via an interpreter. I used to share a cubicle wall with Lazy Fussbudget Lottery-Addicted Woman. Yes, sometimes she does fuss about not having enough money and every time she does I want to ask, “Did it ever occur to you that you’d have enough money if you quit playing the lottery!?” One day I did refer to her as “Lucy van Pelt” to some other coworkers.

Now the only somewhat annoying person I have to deal with every day is my supervisor. For some reason she has to start every email with a religious message.

Is he for real or just mimicking the Onion? What do you think would happen if someone brought a TV into work and left it out in the open for him to see? Better yet, dress up all the monitors to look like TVs and set them up to display streaming video.

49

Oh, he’s serious, alright. God forbid he overhears you talking about a TV show, which he pretends that he’s never even HEARD of before. ex: Who Wants to be a Millionaire. “Who wants to be a what? HAH!!” ::slaps knee, shakes his head:: “Ah, the TV viewing public.” I’m sorry, but I refuse to believe that anyone has not heard of that show, whether they own a TV or not. My dream is that there’s a reorg and he has to go work for the WebTV group. :slight_smile:

magdalene: LMAO!! I forgot all about the busy busy Martyr guy, sending unnecessary, redundant EMail at midnight that is so obviously only serving one purpose: to inform everyone that he is working at midnight.

This thread is hysterical.

50

You know, something just occurred to me. What if his work demeanor is all talk and he never really gave up TV? Have you or any coworkers recently been to where he lives? Maybe he brings it up so much because he thinks he wants to live without TV but really can’t seem to go through with it when he gets home? Would be funny if all his coworkers showed up unannounced and he has a TV on.

51

Well here we have the:

Talker About any and everything. Really, if it crosses his mind, you’ll hear about it. If you’re holding a conversation with someone else, he’ll jump right in and lead you off into never never land, or somewhere else entirely off the point. The real tragedy is that he has no stories that are even remotely funny, or interesting, or has an ending. Everytime I’m around him I start feeling like Steve Martin in Trains, Planes and Automobiles.

Next please meet the lady who has apparently never used a computer in her life.

This lady will interupt me no less than 4 times a day to ask me how to do the simplest things in Word. Stuffinb how do you make a Table? "How do you make Excel Average? Why won’t this print? How come my e-mail doesn’t work?

We used to share an office, but I think the boss caught wind of me plotting her violent death.

52

I used to work at a place where the secretary’s voice invoked a murderous response in all of us. Well, it wasn’t her voice exactly, it was the way she said one word. At least once a minute, she’d come over the PA saying “[Empoyee’s name], please call the operaaaaaaator?” And she said it like a question, too. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a joke, in fact, I was in her office when I heard it and I gave her a courtesy laugh (I didn’t think it was a funny joke). Y’know, a sniper atop the next building would’ve had a prime shot through the front glass. See ya l-aaaaaaaaaaater? Gah, still makes my skin crawl.

53

There’s this one guy where I work who spends every minute he conceivably can reading this “Straight Dope Message Board” thing. I can’t figure out how he gets any work done, or why his coworkers don’t kick his lazy ass…

54

That’s fair ball; I’m still trying to recover from my secretarial career (the nightmares are down to about once every two weeks now), so no doubt I’m way over-sensitive about this.

55

I resemble that remark. :slight_smile: Except I do get work done, my supervisors don’t mind as long as I meet my quota.

BTW: I admit to being Belcher Guy. Not that I’ve had many complaints, mainly from that fussbudget with whom I used to share a cubicle wall. I’m sorry, but whenever I get indigestion I end up with excess gas. I do try to let out silent burps when this happens but some are audible.

56

Great, now I have some indigestion and the excess gas that goes with it.

::whoosh::

57

I am abrasive, surly guy. Don’t come to me to pontificate. Don’t come to me if you just want to chat and kill some time.

If you are an attorney and have instructions, make them brief, clear, and thorough.

If you’re not, fuck off. I would rather do my work and read the goddamn boards.

Clear?

:wink:

58

Wow, I may be making peanuts right now and struggling to stay afloat, but at least I have no irritating coworkers. I also don’t work in a cubicle. I have my own office with a glorious view of the Potomac and DC. My two co-editors are intelligent, quiet women with absolutely no annoying habits, and best of all, I only see them when they rout work to me. The rest of the time, I am completely alone.

59

Matt Groenig Work is Hell is worth checking out…

60

The guy next door always comes over to ask me lame interpretation questions. He’ll stand right behind my chair, point at my screens, and politely share his omnipotent anusbreath. I don’t think Mr. Whipple and a wire brush could impart enough aromatherapy on this nasal lint.

Course, he claims to be the script writer that gave Rhoda a younger sister. I guess that pretty much makes up for his olfactory assaults. It certainly explains his ties.