If anyone does anything that goes against the guidebook, she immediatly goes to the store manager and proceeds to tell him what happened. Even goes so far as to post signs in breakroom pointing out the rules. Most of the things she finds are trivial.(wrong color shoes? It’s a grocery store!) Causes store director to go into fetal position and chant no more, no more, no more… She was the one in grade school who took down the names of the kids who acted up while the teacher was out of the room.
My boss is this as well as the patient and the bearer of the cross. This must make her a Triple Crown.
LeeAnne
She would tell eveyone about her multiple failed marriages, usually within minutes of meeting them. It would usually culminate with “My last husband used to beat me during sex!!” Yes, that’s horrible, but I think that it’s really a matter to dicsuss with the police or a therapist, not the guy installing the new photocopier. She shared every gross detail about her bratty little kid, who discovered that the easiest way to manipulate her was to pee his pants on the spot. “Yeah, last night we went to the grocery store and he wanted ice cream. I said no so he peed his pants. Of course I had to buy it then!” Uh, no, you didn’t.
Sadly, I’m only scratching the surface of this woman’s dysfunction.
lady ice mentioned the snitch. ours will go to great lengths to make a co-worker look bad. i work for a fire and safety company, where the snitch works as a fire extinguisher service tech.
once, while the snitch was on vacation, i worked one of his accounts just to help out. i missed a fire extinguisher that was in a locked room. the next service interval, the snitch found my mistake. his response was to leave a loaner and bring the missed F.E. back, set it on the boss’s desk and complain that “longhair missed this one last year!”
the boss, being a sane man, told the snitch to worry about doing his own job. the snitch had to waste further company time to return the F.E. to the customer, and pick up the loaner.
the snitch is rumored to have opened negotiations with the same competitor the fool has moved to. they will be very happy together.
I deal with a temp like this. I call him Sleepy Boy. He makes 10 bucks an hour more than me and thinks he is underpaid. He has been on time, I don’t know, maybe five times in the year and a half I’ve worked with him. He complains that management won’t make him a permanent employee, but they don’t because he sleeps on the job. I swear, he gets more sleep in front of his workstation than I get at home.
But he kisses ass really well, so they keep him coming back.
I work in a company of about 150, but down in the basement, there are only around 15 of us. On my end, only six. I am trapped near…
The Throat Clearer
You may have seen this commercial for a wireless networking place, and it shows a woman trying to work. Right behind her is this guy who’s clearing his throat, coughing, snorting nasal spray, and doing that oh-so-annoying snarf noise, like a combination sniffle and throat clearing that sounds sort of like a snore. Oh, and he blows his nose like a trumpet, too.
I work with a guy just like that, but minus the nasal spray. At first, I thought maybe he has Turrette’s syndrome, since he clears his throat every minute or so. Literally. I have timed him. It’s very loud, very obnoxious, and occasionally I can’t even think.
Sort of reminds me of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.
On top of this cacophony of esophageal noises, he has the annoying habit of calling everyone “Buddy”. I’m not your “buddy”, so leave me alone. Maybe call Roto-Rooter for that throat problem of yours.
I think I’ll leave him a mystery Christmas present this year: Sucrets, Chloraseptic, a ball-gag, and a tube of hairball paste.
I worked with The Dirtbag at my last job. He usually bathed on Sundays, so Mondays and Tuesdays weren’t bad. By Friday, however, you could see the green wavy lines coming off of him like a stink-aura. I guess some weekends he was busy, and skipped his Sunday bath. When that happened, he’d just wait until his next scheduled bath the following Sunday, instead of breaking routine and bathing during the week.
He had big green teeth. It looked like there were mushrooms growing out from between his teeth and gums. When he talked, it was like being punched in the face by Mike Tyson. As if it wasn’t bad enough he had breath that could peel paint, he was also a ‘close talker’. Our conversations would start on one side of the room and end on the other, because with every one of his putrid exhalations I would take a step back, and he would take a step forward.
He was a disgusting eater. One day I watched him eat a dozen Dunkin Donuts for lunch. The rest of the day he had powdered sugar all over the front of his clothes. If he ate pizza, he’d have a greasy face all afternoon.
The best part was his name was Jesus. Of course he didn’t pronounce it Jee-zus, but everyone else did. It was fun saying things like ‘I can’t find Jesus!’ and ‘Jesus called in sick today.’ I used to wonder if the real Jesus minded sharing his good name with such a stinkpot.
When I worked in retail, there were a lot of these asswipes who made the job far more unbearable than I thought possible. They would cheerfully pester all the customers until they wanted to peel off the skin of any salesperson in a 5 yard radius, and throw them in salt. Then, these sunbeams-from-hell, would try to convince me that retail was A-1. “How much have you sold today? You should sell more. I’ve made my goal all week! I love our new spring clothes!” They would say as I tasted bile in my mouth.
Needless to say, I have since quit.
(I realize that some people really do enjoy retail, and that may be fine, but personally, salespeople ignite the warrior in me)
We should move those people into the sex-trade industry.
Had a boss like this in Seattle. In one managers’ meeting , she started off by whining about how hard it was to make ends meet living on Mercer Island.
Mercer Island is one of the most expensive and exclusive towns in the Seattle area. It’s jokingly referred to as, “Poverty Rock.”
The manager was making more than twice what the next-highest paid person in the room earned, and three to five times what the rest of us were making.
She actually said “It’s hell maintaining my station in life.”
Silence, broken only by the occasional sounds of crickets chirping.
If anybody in the room had been carrying anything bigger than a pen, the bitch would’ve been dead in a heartbeat. Good gawd, you should’ve seen the glares. She sure didn’t.
Voice like a dental drill. Louder than a freight train. Makes all her social plans (and there are plenty) during work hours, at the top of her voice, so we all know that she’s leading a wonderful life. At least we think that’s why she speaks so loudly.
Lines up freelance work and manages other freelancers (this is outside work to her; the company doesn’t assign it) during work hours while others are working. Monitors posts to the message board or chat room that she moderates while talking to some of the posters and trying to analyze the motivation of other posters.
Opines on everything loudly and laughs at her own remarks. I could make this a pit post, except that sometimes she’s so damn funny (just not when she thinks she is).
Completely unreadable handwriting. If it was hard to write, I suppose it should be hard to read. Frickin’ chicken scratch looks like vellum maunscript caligraphy compared to the scrawl this jerk leaves behind on paper. Of course, this is a perfect match for your incomplete knowledge of the job. Of course you know far more about the assembly of robotics vacuum transport cluster modules because your last job was servicing water pumps for the county! Your work habits are so impeccable that you toss metric wrenches together with the Imperial size ones. Complain about it? He’ll just remove the partition between the wrenches to solve the problem. There, now you can always search twice as long for your tools!
Along with the nonexistent penmanship skills comes, at no extra charge, the complete inability to spell correctly if his life depended upon it. Yes, it is always a lot more entertaining if I get to spend a quarter of an hour deciphering your written instructions before I can begin my work. We’ll gloss over how you get into a snit if you’re interupted on the telephone and then let a person sit for hours without a work asignment because your personal call on company time was disturbed.
Best of all was taking these issues to management and having them ask me how long this was happening. I got out my notebook log of my activities and mentioned an exact similar incident that had occured the week previous. Their only reaction was a horrified exclamation of; “You’re writing all of this down?”
Needless to say, human resources got a complete transcription of my logbook after I departed. I now have the intense personal pleasure of making sure that the very same company will most likely not win the side-by-side cluster tool (~$500,000 per robot module) comparison that my company is performing right now. Future orders will be worth several million dollars per year. Sometimes there is justice.
This species is known to inhabit almost all sectors of the industrialized world. Can’t find the correct size wrench in the toolbox? Merely, go to wherever the Tool Pig was last working and presto, there is the missing implement. Are you about to reinstall an assembly the Tool Pig removed previously? Fear not, don’t waste your time going to the toolbox, all of the tools will be right where they were used to demount the unit.
Of course, try to remember, any time you saved by having all of the tools left out for you by the Tool Pig will be lost while you look for all of the hardware that he has scattered over the work area. Leave nuts and bolts on top of the two million dollar semiconductor reactor? Go right ahead Tool Pig, the waist high, view-ported robotics cluster tool wafer transport module looks just like a work bench. Gosh, what it this? Flat washers and wafer fragments almost blocking some of the light curtain fiber optic wafer position sensors? It’s a wonder the robot doesn’t shut down because of all of the garbage obstructing it’s detectors.
Most remarkably of all, the Tool Pig can come from the rather surprising backgrounds. College grads and Ivory tower PhD’s are more frequently susceptible than the trained service personnel. I suppose that has more to do with the fact that the service crew guards their personal tool sets like a sow bear guards her cubs. I’d love to hear any other reminisces from those who have met the Tool Pig.
