I’m not really mad enough for the Pit, as this particular bit of idicoy doesn’t directly affect me. Anyway, I want to hear stories about idiot coworkers in the hopes that I will be comforted by the knowledge that things could be worse.
But first my own tale. I am a training manager in a call center. The people in my department makes sales and service calls to business that have a continuing relationship withour company. They are account executives, not telemarketers; they don’t people at home or at dinner time, and they take a good number of incoming calls as well. Their job requires them to maintain a good rapport with their clients and to create, on a regular basis, sales presentations and proposals. Anyway, one of the sales managers here–I’ll call her “Lobelia”–has just written up three of her account execs for the stupidest imaginable reasons.
In the first case it was for using the word y’all while talking to a customer. You see, our call center is in the South, where we use different forms for the second-person singular & plural pronouns to avoid ambiguity. But Lobelia is a Northerner by birth and thinks this sounds uneducated. Thus she has given a formal, written warning to one of her top sales people for use of that word in a conversation. Even when it was pointed out that, in said conversation, the CUSTOMER was using the word y’all, and thus the account executive was mirroring the customer’s diction in the aim of maintaining a comfortable rapport, she refused to relent. She went so far as to say that it doesnt matter if the customer uses the word; WE must not sound uneducated.
In the second case, a different exec was written up for making unauthorized changes to her computer. Said changes were CUSTOMZING MICROSOFT WORD. The exec had moved the icons around in the Quick Access Toolbar so that the functions she used most often could be accessed by hitting ALT+ a number; she also added words to the Auto-Correct feature, so that words she often mistypes automatically correct themselves, and also so that she can abbreviate commonly used phrases and have the full term come out–say, changing StDp to Straight Dope. Lobelia feels that this might be confusing if anyone else has to use that machine, even though EVERYONE has their own computer, and even though IT pointed out that the process of assigning a new user to a computer includes wiping out all hints of things like that, so everyone starts with a pristine mchine. But that matters not to Lobelia. She wanted to write someone up, and so she did.
And the third person was written up for taking half-hour lunch breaks rather than hour long lunches. Even though department policy is that everyone gets to make their own schedule, so long as they work exactly 40 hours a week and do their assigned time on the phone. Even though the person being written up routinely does BETTER than the goals for both productivity and sales. Again, Lobelia doesn’t give a damn. Professionals take hour long lunches, she says, and that’s what she expects from her team.
Anyway–anybody else got a stupid coworker story to share?
