The Psycho: I’ve written about him here before, but I don’t feel like looking up the threads at the moment. This guy was a real piece of work. He had “16 years experience in the field” and was quite arrogant about it. He wasn’t very good at his job either, which made me suspicious of all his supposed “experience.” Anyway, he would get upset about the office politics, or decisions made by the Powers That Be, and he would freak out on whoever was nearby (usually me). One day, he actually had me backed up against a wall while he shouted that he wanted “answers, dammit…ANSWERS!” Whenever I went to my boss with this information, she replied that I should tell Mr. Psycho to “address any and all concerns” to her. She didn’t understand that I was trying to do that, but it was hard, what with all the screaming. Finally, one day, he freaked out on her. I was glad he did, so she could see that I was not exaggerating. However, she quit a couple weeks later. Then came the day when he basically told an Asst. VP and a VP to go to hell. He was given the option of quitting or being fired. He chose the former.
*Yesterday, he showed up at our new building. He came to the side door, knocking and waving at me as though we were buddies. I gestured for him to go around front, but he left. Only one other person who knew that guy was there at the time, and we were both a little freaked out. It’s been almost a year since he left (he was only with us for four months), and I cannot imagine what he wanted. Houdini: This is that co-worker who is able to disappear just when you need them. We had one for a while. You’d need her to cover for you while you went to lunch, or had a meeting, or even while you went for a smoke, and she would be nowhere. It was almost spooky. We’d look everywhere, and even checked that her car was still there. Several hours later, she’d come walking up, and we’d ask where she’d been. She’d tell us, and it was always somewhere we had looked at least five times. This girl could put David Copperfield to shame with her disappearing act.
The Mouth - I’ve written about him here. He would never shut up, constantly talking non-stop, regardless of what I was trying to say. On the few occasions I did try to converse with him, he’d stop listening the second I took up an opposing viewpoint. In the meantime, I would hear him ramble on and on about every item that popped up on CNN and get his in-depth uninformed opinion on every item in the paper that caught his eye. It was bad on the weekdays, but even worse on weekends, when there was no one else for him to talk to and little work to be done.
Thank goodness I’m on swing shift now and don’t have to put up with him anymore.
Zombie - They graduate from Harvard Law School, though they work (I’m using that term oh so loosely) as LAN/WAN admin/techs. They watch the phones ring because Zombies don’t talk to users; that’s for the Pulse-Advantaged to do. Zombies work, albeit at a truly glacial pace; in setting up a rack-mount server, it took our Zombie three working days to drill four holes in the mount. That’s all Zombie did in those three days: four little holes in two pieces of sheet metal. Zombies don’t shower all that regularly. Zombies scratch their ass in public like there’s no tomorrow. They dig for chocolate while standing next to a seated coworker; the view is more wonderful that way. Zombies show up at the office and immediately catch up on the sleep they lost by getting up that morning. When they wake up they head to the lunchroom for two hours to read the paper, then come down to their desks long enough to grab their jacket and go to lunch. The only time Zombies show real signs of life is when they rush out to tell everyone how well their stock portfolios are doing, and they should know, because they spend at least four hours of the day watching their portfolios on the web. How did Zombie not get de-zombified? He was protected by…
Retired Man Walking - This is the boss who’s retiring in eighteen months and he’ll be damned if he’s going to make a business decision. One subordinate’s doing the work of three? That one guy’d better not gripe; he doesn’t know how good life can be. Retired Man Walking wants to be everyone’s friend, but he never lets you forget that he’s been in the company so long that he knows everyone’s darkest secrets. And Retired Man Walking, though he despises the rest of Management because they’re a bunch of reciprocal ass-coverers, he finds that it’s the perfect environment for Retired People Walking. And Retired Man Walking lets everyone know–laughing the whole time he tells it–how the things that go wrong in the department are never viewed as his fault by Other Managers. Life is good for Retired Man Walking. Until Mister Three-for-One Subordinate resigned and the Help Desk (which supports 18 offices) had to shut down and quit taking calls. Then Retired Man Walking suffers a heart attack. And his 401k takes a total nosedive in the last year. Poor Retired Man Walking. He’s no longer showing his subordinates his 401k statements.
Petty Gossip - I’ve written about this type before. They gossip all the time, backbite, get waaaay too interested and concerned about trivial things that don’t amount to much. Will complain and bitch to others about nonexistant “problems” that they imagine, or fabricate. Will make mountains out of molehills. Apparently, their life is dull, and making mountains out of molehills spices things up. Can be petty and jealous if they encounter another co-worker with either an interesting hobby, interest, or talent. (Because God Forbid someone else be doing something besides gossiping and obsessing over the molehills!)
The Whiner The one who comes in every morning and has to run your ear off about how the second shift didn’t do this or didn’t do that or if they did do it, they did it incorrectly. Wouldn’t be so bad if they’d take some of their complaints to anyone who could actually do something about it. No … they have to tell you.
Well there’s the bitch. Technically, she’s my boss. All those trendy catch phrases? She uses them. All the time. Things like “think outside the box” that make me want to shudder. She’s also a control freak. And it’s to the point that I am having stress nightmares about work.
Then there’s Horny chauvinist guy. He and I get along better since the Bitch arrived. United against a common foe and so forth. But he still sends the women jokes around his e-mail list. I just tell him it’s not funny and leave it at that. He’s getting the idea. Hopefully soon he’ll realize that just because I’m nice to him does not mean I want to date him. Of course, that’s been going on for a year, so I have no real hope on that one.
The Cynic: Recognizable by his favorite phrases–“That won’t work” and “Not around here,” not to mention the cynical laugh that follows practically every thing he says. I left a job because of one cynic; I just couldn’t stand the thought of seeing this asshole any more. When we got a several-hundred dollar bonus out of the blue from the company, his very first comment was “Is that before or after taxes?” It is free money, buttwipe, take it and shut up. Like all cynics, he had NO ideas of his own, but felt that he had to shoot down everyone else’s ideas. What a miserable little man.
the fool had the resposibility for the largest and most complex system we work on. his insecurity led him to decide that he needed to keep all the details to himself. this, he thought, would give him the leverage to do as he pleased.
the fool’s personal life was a trainwreck. of course, nothing was ever his fault. bankruptcy didn’t solve the problems, it just freed up more money for the slot machines ect. on the verge of a second bankruptcy way before he is elligble, he desperatly needed more money. he devised a plan.
he applied for, and got, a job at our cometitor. his intention was to use this to get a significant raise and some perks from our boss. it was a bluff. our boss called it by replying to his initial statement “so, i will consider this your notice.”
now i have the responsibility for the largest and most complex system with a company paid cell phone, a new laptop, and an $80.00 a week raise.
the fool had no other option than to take the job at the competitor for $120.00 a week less, working on the bottom level type systems.
i have a great deal to learn, but we don’t miss him at all.
I guess this is the character described by Parkinson (yes, of Parkinson’s law) as the abominable no-man ?
I used to work with a helpless asker - the sort who’d go “I have this teeny little technical problem and I’m not quite sure of my solution, would you take a look ?” - and then present a “solution” that was usually a very loose sketch describing about half the relevant facts of the problem!
Pointing him to the relevant documentation (and Cisco documentation can sometimes be hard to navigate, fair enough) would make him go through the documentation until the first difficulty appeared, then he’d ask again. And again. And AGAIN. Eventually, someone would “help” by essentially doing the work for him instead. GAH!
Question Girl (or Q. Boy): Hired to assist with relatively simple task that has been explained thoroughly. Cannot retain information. Incapable of figuring out any details on his or her own-- like, what to type in the “First name” field in the database form he or she is using. Identifiable by cries of “Roo-oooose… how do you…” every five minutes or so. Also baffled by simple paperwork and thrown into absolute tizzy by complicated instructions like “sign here.”
Getting What I’m Due Man/Woman: May or may not show up on time in the morning. Vanishes repeatedly throughout the day. Just when you think they must be at lunch, they return from wherever they’ve been to announce that they are going to lunch. Lunches typically last two hours. Spends hours on personal calls and can sometimes be heard arguing with Human Resources about “getting what I’m due” when there’s a question of vacation days or overtime. Goes home early every day. Calls in “sick” after freely after telling coworkers the night before that he/she is perfectly fine, but needs a day off (I guess all the stress of shopping and eating during the work day will get to you). Does not make up any of the time or work missed, and is somehow not fired.
The Noisemaker: Usually a largish creature; makes all sorts of annoying bodily noises. The most common is the “ahem… ahem… AHEM… snort” which can be heard repeatedly, followed shortly after by the sound of my (internal) scream of annoyance. Humming, finger-tapping, whistling off-key, burping, farting and toe-tapping are all part of his repertoire.
Oh my GOD does he drive me insane. There are 10 people in my company. It’s a small office. I have nowhere to hide! Fortunately, he’s the worst thing about the job and I love everyone else here.
The Bearer of the Cross She is a skilled and talented worker, but makes every job twice as difficult as it needs to be because she loves to bask in the drama of being self-sacrificing and dedicated. She came in early to “fix the photocopier,”, only we pay someone to do that. The person who has that job is actually trained to fix the photocopier, and he still needs to come and fix it after she spends an hour taking it apart. She then spends the rest of the day commenting on how she didn’t have breakfast because she knew that she had to* come in and deal with the copier, but that’s okay with her, because it’s all right to go hungry if she is needed on the job. Her own work was put on hold while she was “fixing” this problem.
When the CEO congratulated our unit on a good project, she basked in his praise, and then said it was a joy to take the reports home every night for a month and work on them for six hours, even though she didn’t sleep. Hello? Everyone on the team puts in some extra hours at crunch times, but if you’re doing six hours of overtime for a month, then you’re not doing your job right. Especially after other people, who finished their portion, asked around to see if anyone else needed a hand, and she declined. Not to mention that management instructed us to ask for temps if we thought there was too much work to finish by the deadline.
Sorry if she’s already been described (I went through the previous posts pretty quickly), but mine would be She Who Sleeps With Management.
Thankfully, this is not going on at my present workplace. But when I was with The Bank Which Will Not Be Named in Winston-Salem, I had a coworker who was carrying on an affair with a VP on our floor. Damn near everyone knew it (hell, I figured out on about my third day, and I’m as oblivious as they come).
She got treated with kid gloves by everybody because everybody knew what a vindictive a-hole the VP guy was and didn’t want to have him mad at them. Oh, he was also the tech support guy on the floor until he moved on to another location and I got that job. I heard about things … little things he would do to get back at people involving his tech support duties.
Like Rasa, I had a former co-worker who would mutter, whistle off-key, and chatter to himself constantly. It drove every one of us nuts. What’s odder still is that he was, himself, extremely high-maintenance and was exacting about the temperature in his office, the level of noise from the air conditioning unit, and so on.
I am now blessed with pretty good co-workers, except one who is so rabidly pro-Israel you cannot have any sort of conversation with him about anything in the middle east. I am not sure you could even discuss the color of sand in the deserts without him getting completely irrational. But that’s an avoidable irritation. Oh, and then there is the guy who eats kim chee with his lunch every day, which drives all of us a little nuts, but he’s good-natured about our bitching. He also has no self-editor. He will ask any question without stopping to think about how it sounds or how intrusive it is, but it’s more a source of confounded wonder to the rest of us than it is a real irritant.
It’s the people OUTSIDE my office whom I can’t stand. One good example is control-freak Ann, who decided to argue with us about the cost of our office’s bottled-water bill. I am not sure why it crossed her desk (she’s the secretary for someone outside our office) but when she saw it, she decided it was excessive and started to raise a stink. I didn’t know that a secretary in someone’s else’s office had the power to determine what our ounces per diem water consumption per worker should be, but apparently I just missed that memo. She’s also been known to call one of us and berate that victim for every co-worker who had not yet RSVPed to some official event. Right, like we’re each others’ mommies? Some people just enjoy being bitchy and acting put-upon, and she’s one of them.
I realize this is pretty lame considering what some of you have to deal with.
**Knead to Know, **I came within a rat’s whisker of a career at Wachovia… To think I could be wearing a blue suit right now…
May I offer up the nap-taking, early-leaving bigot who sits next to me. Not only does he eat his lunch early so he can sleep for an hour (we get 30 minutes for lunch), and not only does he leave early every single day without fail, but he tells childish, inappropriate jokes ad nauseum, and he’s a bigoted butt-head.
Last month, another coworker and I were bitching about a fellow in another office who’s a grade “A” clueless wonder, and aforementioned bigot butts in to ask “Is he white or black?” I immediately asked “What does it matter?” and received a defensive “It doesn’t” in reply. I wonder every day what I did to deserve his proximity…
The patient-- Boils, diahrrea, and what he terms “cheese-congestion”. He must tell you every disgusting detail regarding his physical well-being. He has a self-diagnosed blood-sugar related disorder, in which he can’t eat sugar. Also he’s lactose intolerant. Typical “Patient” behavior: He invites himself to join us at the ice cream parlour where he has called ahead to ensure that they have frozen yogart. Only he doesn’t like the frozen yogurt, so he decides to have ice cream anyway. Luckily, we were able to excuse ourselves before having to hear about the havoc the ice-cream played on his digestive system.
