We’ve got all types here.
The boss ‘plants’ things for us to find in wierd places. Usually something that doesn’t make sense where it is, like an old work boot in the filing cabinet or something like that. Not outrageous, but odd.
Manuerisms. There are some strange things that certain people here do. One guy, in particular, you will never, ever see him without his cup of coffee. He’s in a constant state of clutch.
Restroom etiquette is another one of them. Certain people will just never wash their hands. Other guys wipe boogers on the wall above the urinal (never seen it done, just the lovely end result), some can’t seem to find the garbage can even though there’s a minimum of four in each restroom and one by the door.
From time to time, I’ll just see something odd and think, “Who DOES this?”
It takes all kinds, for sure.
We have a 50-odd year old woman who speaks in ultra-annoying babytalk regularly, including to customers over the phone. Even if someone regards her as a valuable employee and doesn’t want to get rid of her outright, you’d think they would transfer her to a position where she won’t have to talk to customers. I cringe to imagine what they must think of our business after getting off the phone with her.
In all likelyhood some of your customers think it’s “cute”. If any sales reps tried to baby-talk to me during a sales call I’d be on the phone complaining to their boss so fast they’d have to change their diapers.
I have a co-worker who does this, and in an annoyingly LOUD voice. After 3 years I couldn’t take it anymore, I stood up and shouted “Goddammit, knock it OFF.” she stopped for 2 weeks.
I felt great.
She’s back to doing it again.
I have anyother co-worker who buys a new cel phone every month, just under the 30 day return policy. It’s always wild and colorful and full of gizmos that she doesn’t even comprehend how to use. She does this out of boredom I think, like buying a new purse or shoes. Oh, and the phone number changing? She doesn’t care, never even writes it down, you see she has a regular cell phone for incoming calls and voice mails that her daddy pays for. So one phone to call out with, another to answer. Weird.
We have one woman who sits in her corner cubicle and mutters to herself, non-stop. I think it may be some sort of a Tourette’s thing – I haven’t had the courage to ask her. She just narrates everything she does to herself. It’s a bit annoying to work around her. “Where is that form? I’ll just fill that right out. Ermmm… Strata Plan Number is… This pen doesn’t work well… I’ll get another one… Oh yeah, nice and blue…” She also has a little tic – a sharp nasal inhalation, every fifteen seconds or so. If you’re on the other side of the office, you’d swear we had an exotic bird, because it’s so high-pitched and regular.
I used to work with an odd 50ish New Zealand born lady (at an animal hospital) who would eat dog food for snacks and would pick up poop with her bare hands. I used to offer to buy her a candy bar because I could smell her dog food breath (YAK!!)
She also would have nervous breakdowns and start crying if she was left alone to work the front desk but adamantly refused to ask the doctor to staff another receptionist on those days. I had clients tell me regularly that they were in on her days and she was in tears. She worked really hard and kissed the boss’s ass almost obscenely so he wouldn’t listen to anyone that brought up her “issues”.
I had one of those (I think I may have mentioned her in a thread somewhere). I practically had to clamp my hand over my mouth to keep from yelling “STFU” (the full phrase, of course).
Oh, good, the perfect place to put this mini-rant.
My place of employment does a lot of conferences and trainings, and we have a lot of catered lunches in our dedicated dining room. For less formal meetings over lunch, we also can order in box lunches from the caterer. We also have a lot of students in the building.
After a boxed-lunch meeting in November, a student asked me if he could have one of the leftover box lunches. I said sure. My coworker bitched and moaned about the students eating the food for the clients, mooching meals, etc. and has continued to bitch about it for weeks, even after I’ve told her repeatedly that I told the student he could have the lunch.
My manager spent an entire day making a robot out of cardboard boxes. He also spent six hours making a funeral display for a broken scanner, complete with little open casket and fake floral display.
One of my co-workers spends all her time worrying. She comes up with things to worry about that would never, never have occurred to me. She’s the most stressed-out person I’ve ever met. She once almost didn’t go on vacation because she was worried that, while she was away, a wasp might get in her apartment and sting her cat. I’m not making this up. Lord, she’s neurotic.
My 48 year old coworker speaks in a normal tone unless she’s discussing her dog or any animal in the news. She showed me pictures of her dog (about 20 all taken the same day) and spoke in that “itty-bitty baby voice” the whole time as she gave me play by play for each photo. “Here’s widdle puppy on the couch…here’s widdle puppy on the floor…here’s widdle puppy on the other side of the floor…”
My boss once asked her why she was late for work and she actually started using the itty-bitty baby voice, “ooooh my widdle puppy had a sick tummy and I just couldn’t weave him.” I was shocked.
You know, when the TV show The Office is discussed, people often express disbelief that someone like Michael Scott would be able to keep his job. But this just proves that there really are people like him out there.
And the baby talk would drive me right up a wall.
I work with a decent group of people. I can’t really think of my own example.
I worked with a guy who would stick his finger in his ear, twist it around, pull it out and examine it closely and then smell it. All the while he was talking to you. He was my boss so I couldn’t say WHAT THE F*&% ARE YOU DOING???
Gaaaa. Just thinking about it again makes me nauseous.
I work in a call center. We have all women, so you can imagine what kinds of nutso stuff goes on.
We have one lady (who is about 900 years old) who is exceedingly southern. She is also completely computer illiterate. Our company is very “progressive” and the company handbook is published online only. We don’t get paper copies of it, because the online copy is constantly updated, by the time you print out a copy, it’s already obsolete. Kaye* always insists on a paper copy when a new training class is in session. She just doesn’t get it. She also tends to speak to our customers like they are total morons. I have literally heard her say “Honey, you just need ta learn ta speeak English, cuz I just cain’t understand ya” Yeh, she still has a job here.
We have another lady who apparently has allergies. She sneezes all the time. Not a normal, sinu-clearing loud ACHOO sneeze – nope, a little dainty, totally fake-sounding ichoo. Drives me batty. First few weeks, I honestly thought she was playing.
One of the other ladies has about 600 kids**. Every week, they get a new pet – because the one from the week before either: a) died of mysterious causes or b) ran away. She has been through literally 40 pets in the year I have worked with her.
I could go on, but seriously, what do you expect in TN?
*not her real name
**actually only 4 and 1 on the way
I had a co-worker that had a brain like a sponge when it came to ANY song that past him by. He would unconsciously sing it in his cube all day long. Even better, he would approximate the voice of the original singer. And he would do this while you were trying to give him detailed intructions. He would look off into the distance and start murmuring and humming.
One morning he was sing at his desk singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in a high-ptiched, baby flasetto. The co-worker in the neighboring cube put a stop to that.
We have a guy here nicknamed “Conspiracy Carl”. He believes in and regularly tells anyone unlucky enough to pass by about how UFOs are here and abducting people, the moon landing was faked, 9/11 was perpetrated by the government and that there is a race of people living in our hollow planet! He is an expert on the Holy Grail as depicted in The DaVinci Code and will go on ad nauseum about how JFK was assassinated by a combined CIA/Mafia consortium using a Cuban sniper.
I’m trying to think up absurd conspiracies to plant with him to see if he’ll believe them.
We also have a woman with plants in her cube. I don’t just mean one or two, I’m talking vines that literally cover her cube walls! It looks like the outfield wall at Wrigley Field. Every morning she gives them a little spray and sings to them. When one plant started to die (the guy in the next cube was dumping his Red Bull ™ in the pot) she actually became depressed and weepy.
Finally, we have a man with severe lung problems. No diseases, just allergies. He is constantly hawking and spitting, driving up gallons of phlegm throughout the day (sorry if this is TMI). All day long you can hear his rattling, ropey cough and the sound of him bringing up another lung nugget or honking his nose wetly. He then checks the Kleenex out to see what kind of treasures he has brought up. Yum! He’s a joy to be around at lunchtime.
I hate to admit this, but I worry like this, too :o . It’s an honest-to-God anxiety disorder, and I think most of the things I worry about are pretty stupid, too, and I laugh at myself a lot (this morning, I freaked out on the way to work, wondering what would happen if my house burnt down while I was gone and no one got my cats out), but it’s impossible to stop worrying about these things. (Yeah, I’m working on getting in for treatment again…). I’m not outwardly stressed like your co-worker, but my mind goes about a million miles a minute with the ‘what ifs’.
(But I laugh at myself, too, especially when I worry about things like a car careening out of control and crashing through the front of my house… :eek: )
I do have one co-worker where I HATE to ask her a question because if I do ask a simple question like “What time are you planning to leave for your appointment this afternoon?”, I will get a VERY long-winded response about how if she leaves by four, she’ll probably get there on time, but she’s got to take the mail…and speaking of mail, she got this sweepstakes thing in her mail yesterday that she might send back in, but her son was laughing at her for doing it, but he’s not one to talk because he always wants to order those sea monkeys he sees in comic books, and if she could only get him to read more than comic books, so maybe when she has his ADD meds adjusted, he’ll be interested in reading more, oh, and she’ll probably leave at four.
Tell him your boss has secretly agreed to work on an immunology experiment with the CDC, and has been surreptitiously wiping certain office doorknobs with diluted culture swabs of experimental pathogens.
(These ones are the more harmless variants, of course, but the CDC wants to see if effects are noticeable on the general population in small doses.)
See if you can get him to open all doors with his hanky that he then must burn.
We have one lady around here who severely annoys almost everyone else. In fact, one of my coworkers recently moved into the cube next to the annoying one, and has since started a blog detailing her annoyance. It’s priceless.
My favorite quote so far came from an episode of the annoying one imposing a looooong chat on my coworker. She detailed a trip to McDonald’s where a customer had a loud conversation with a McD’s employee. “And you know both of them were Mexican so I couldn’t understand a word they said but I heard him say potato.”
I don’t know why, but that sentence just cracks me up.
