Why are fellow employees so f*cking rude?!?

The BBQ Pit
1

Okay, so I’ve already posted about my new, wonderful, [drippingly sarcastic] beautiful [/drippingly sarcastic] workplace. Lately, there’s a fad that’s been really honking me off.

You see, these desks have metal in/out trays that hang off the rungs of the desk’s accompanying towers. Pretty nice, they’re not taking up desk space, they can be moved around to suit your particular way of working, and they can hold a lot without buckling.

However, they can also be knocked off the towers, and depending on how you have arranged your work area, this can be quite easy to accidentally do. Seeing as there are several hundred people working in this warehouse of an office, the sound of these trays being knocked off the towers happens a couple of times each day.

Now, if I were to do this (and I haven’t yet), I would feel embarassed enough to have made that building-spanning noise, especially accidentally. However, it has come into fashion around here that when someone does knock their tray off their desk, a large percentage of the office population pauses and applauds!

What the fuck? What purpose does that serve other than to show just how rude they are? Do they think that the person really NEEDS more humiliation? Or is it that the applauders somehow think they are better than their fellow employees because they believe that they would never have the same happen to them? About the only way it could be more embarassing would be for a spotlight to point out the momentarily clumsy employee. Sheesh!

I really get annoyed by RUDE people, and we seem to have a LOT of them here at my office…

JOhn.

2

My take on this (entirely my opinion, and therefore subject to being completely out to lunch), is that the employees are feeling like cattle in the barn and are responding to this situation by trying to bring some humour and human interaction to the environment; kind of a bonding activity, if you like. Course, they could just be a bunch of rude bastards, too.

3

Blimey , i thought that was in the lunch hall in schools only , since in the lunch hall as a kid whenever somebody dropped a plate they would do as you discribed which made me think huh? .Good thing i do not work in an office then i guess

4

Sounds like when people applaud when someone drops a glass at a bar or restaurant. I always interpreted that as a way to lighten up the situation by bringing some humor into it. “You broke something! Way to go!” A bit sarcastic, yes, but that’s my sense of humor.

5

I guess the humor/making light of the situation theory could work. It’s really not in my sense of humor, and I would feel picked on, not humored it if happened to me, but I guess I see see that to some people it would be otherwise.

Thanks for the insight.

JOhn.