i worked with a person who would write up something on a piece of paper, put another coworker’s name on it, (the coworker sat behind her), get up, walk past the coworker, go down the hall (half a city block) to the mail room and put it in the inter office mail bin to be delivered.
the first time we just laughed it off. by the 20th it was getting a bit old. thankfully she did leave after a few years, there was much rejoicing throughout the office.
someone could have quite the heyday doing a case study on her.
My boss gave me a list of over 300 names of companies and addresses in excel with the orders to put them into a word file of a contract (then we have to send them on to said people to be signed of course).
Thankfully my coworker saved me and showed me how to merge the files automatically with some quick sorting in excel.
(It was something I was never shown, nor heard of. High school and college went over the basics, but I never learned anything fancy with it. Now I know though, so I won’t have to ask her again. I’d have spent HOURS copy and pasting otherwise…).
The entire upper management (all male of course) of the company that I used to work for in the 1980s and 90s refused to use PCs or computers in any way. As far as they were concerned keyboards were something that women used, and they took pride in never touching one. Their secretaries would print out emails, physically carry them into the Holy Office, the boss would hand-write a reply, and the secretary would carry the Holy Writ back out to her small desk and type it in … to the boss’s email account.
The kicker is that we were a computer hardware and software company. Our unofficial motto was “we sell computers, we don’t use them”. The corporate credit union ran all their accounts on hand-written cards. Our service department did the same, a card for every individual machine on every customer site.
Co-irker spent all weekend creating new folders on her desktop and saving word files into them in order that “when the new computer system is introduced we can just transfer the current data into it”.
Because the company shelled out for that million dollar interface, I assume.
Not so much a coworker, but a dispatcher (tells us bus drivers what to do/where to go/etc).
Every quarter we bid for assignments in seniority order. Everybody is entitled to actually be physically present when its their turn, so they set up a kind of ‘relay’ system where Driver B meets with driver A during A’s shift, B takes over the shift while A takes the company car and goes back to the bus yard, picks his assignment, then finds out where B is gonna be and switches back. It does get kind of complicated since you have 300+ bus drivers swapping around so they can pick their work over 3 days each quarter.
In my case, I was going to be summoned about 90 minutes before my shift was over. By the time I got back, picked my assignment and headed back to take over, my shift would virtually be over- there’d be no point in even going out (instead I would just let the relief driver finish my shift). Dispatcher clarifies that no, I don’t have to go back to my route after I bid, since there’s not enough time before my shift would be over.
This same dispatcher yells at me for sitting on my butt and not relieving the other driver later that day after I finished bidding. Apparently he had completely forgotten that he had told me I didn’t have to go back out after I bid and thought I was being condescending when I explained the logic of it
After revewing my scheduling and doing a tremendous amount of backpedaling, he grudgingly let me off the hook. Frankly I didn’t care either way, its their dime, I just figured he’d have the respect to take my word for it when I said there’s no point in taking over the route when I’m only doing 5 minutes of driving before getting relieved at the end of my shift :smack:
When my brother was assigned to a recruiting station right after graduating ROTC, I apparently saved the army dozens of hours of work by leading him through mail merge over the phone. I guess they were retyping the information in each recruiting letter. This was about 2003.
I didn’t know it was possible to load spits of chickens into the rotisserie oven backwards.
But I was told, repeatedly, by a coworker, described to my friends & family as a prince of darkness for her way of sucking any joy or camaraderie out of a room, as she took the roasted chickens off. “I can’t believe how somebody put these chickens on. Who put these chickens on backwards…” and on and on for a good 20 minutes.
Finally, I asked if the chickens were dizzy.
AFAIK, chicken loading doesn’t matter as long as the same varieties drip on each other. The spits fit into the oven pointing either way.
(I really need a real job…)
I had a similar experience in 2007. Long story short, I produced a few Excel sheets that took input from metered devices to produce monthly reports from which we charged back clients for various services. When I arrived, the reports passed through three different employees before reaching their final form - starting from printed output, addition where required using a calculator enter the results into an Excel sheet (basically used as a word processor), print that, pass it off to someone else who sorts it and uses Excel in a half-assed way to arrive at another sum, and enters numbers painstakingly produced by three other G/L accountants using manual database lookups of almost 2000 controlled bank accounts. I automated it to the point that these three reports (which each took about 16 man-hours to produce) are now ready in about fifteen minutes. I have been able to demonstrate to my employers that this and several other procedural changes that I’ve introduced provide cost savings in excess of my annual salary.
My motto is I SHALL RULE YOU, FOR I AM OF MEDIAN INTELLIGENCE!
More specifically related to individually stupid co-workers, one of the new additions to the management team was recently shitcanned. Nobody knows what the hell he actually did while he was there, but every time something depended on him it was agony. I gathered up his personal effects for him. They didn’t fit in the traditional bankers’ box - mostly because of the massage chair, stereo with surround-sound headphones, and electric footbath. I still have photos of him asleep at his desk.
Oh, and all of his e-mails appeared to be written by a twelve year old girl, replete with LOLSpeak, punctuation abuse!!!, and huge, animated clip art.
Did I mention that he’ll tell anyone who’ll listen all about how the U.S. government faked the 9/11 attacks because it was proving to be too costly to clean up the asbestos used in the construction of the towers? He knows, because he used to work there.
I foresee, in his future, a lot of places that that fella used to work.
Wow, there are two people in the world who do that?
There’s a website called TheDailyWTF.com that exposes poorly-written code, funny error messages, etc. In their forums, a guy called SpectateSwamp claimed to have written the ultimate desktop search application. It turned out that it searched only one file at a time; for years, he had been pasting all of his documents and e-mail threads into a single text file.
The application itself was so bad that it seemed like an elaborate troll, considering the site where he chose to publicize it. It was controlled only by undocumented keyboard commands, and it was written in GOTO-filled VB 5.0 code. (VB 6.0 wouldn’t compile it, because like his giant text file, it was a single monolithic function.)
He had other eccentric ideas, too. He posted videos on the Internet… but he didn’t believe in traditional video editing. Instead, he would aim his video camera at the screen where he was playing his original tape, and re-record it while narrating. Some of these videos showed specks that he claimed were aliens. He also thought that storing books on a computer as a video of flipping though the pages one by one was a good idea.
He was so persistent (and the other users found him so entertaining) that he’s the #2 poster on the site. (He hasn’t posted since last May.)
The other forum members created a site all about him: www.thestupidestmanonearth.com
I had to show a member of our team to do a task yesterday.
He has used this piece of software several times now but I have to hold his hand for him to log in.
The login is simple. You initials and then your initials plus three numbers as the password.
So it went like this…
SUN: Okay type in your initials
RLK: types “bk”
SUN: No, your full initials
RLK: types “bXXXXX”
SUN: No, your initials, not your last name
RLK: types “blk”
SUN: No, your initials
RLK: types “rlk”
SUN: Okay now the password is your initials and 468
RLK: types “blk468”
SUN: :smack:
The guy is really nice. Always says hello and all but until I started having to give him some small tasks to do I never realized how airheaded he is.
He also takes notes so he knows what steps to take but never keeps the notes. I have to walk him through the same tasks while he takes new notes everytime.
:o I have a massage chair in my office, ONLY BECAUSE my brother sent it to me for my 40th. I need to take it home one of these days in case more layoffs happen; I already took home my portable AC/heater/fan (no A/C in this office) and plan to suffer this summer. But I haven’t fallen asleep in the chair, and other folks come through to use it when stressed.
I have far too many stupid coworker stories to type them all now. But let me share one about a woman I’ll call Sheila ('cus that’s here name!). I could fill a thread with stories about just her. But one story stands out above all the others.
Sheila thought she might be pregnant. So did she buy a $10 EPT to find out? Nope! She went to a psychic to find out ($50, at least). The psychic said she was. So she came back to work and told her boss she’d need maternity leave in a little under 9 months. Of course, she wasn’t pregnant (and I hope she never got pregnant, for the sake of the gene pool).
Of course, this is the same woman whose psychic told her there was a conspiracy against her at work, involving a man and a woman. (Yeah, I’m telling more than one story. I couldn’t help it.) In support of this conspiracy theory, she brought her boss a dented SlimFast can. You see, she kept her SlimFast cans on the floor of her cubicle. When she noticed one was dented, she believed somebody had gone into her office and pushed their thumb into the can to dent it. When her boss suggested that it was more likely that the janitorial staff accidentally bumped it with a vacuum, she said no, that couldn’t have happened because a vacuum wasn’t strong enough (?!!) – it had to be somebody doing it on purpose with their thumb.
