I give him ninety days.
Put me down for 47 
Being as amazed as I have been by how incompetent jerks manage to stay employed, I give him six months. Sorry, Verbose.
But it is SO much fun to watch the meltdown: the ass-covering, the ass-not-quite-covered, the higher-ups noticing the ass, the subterfuges trying to keep the ass covered…
I still remember the day that my boss (a pathological liar) got found out. Things happened fast; TPTB questioned me and another supervisee, listened to the last of the boss’s lies, finally realized it’d all been lies, and immediately escorted him out of the building.
Schadenfreuuuuuuuunnnnd!
That must have been soooo satisfying.
I’ll let ya’ll know what happens.
One other thing, and this sounds absolutely nuts, but hell, it’s the Straight Dope. And we’re in the pit, so you’re welcome to flame me. Anyway, there’s a woman at work I have to interact with almost every day. She’s nice enough. And I have a lot of respect for her. But…her voice tastes like a cherry, ok? I have synesthesia and her voice tastes like a big, fresh red cherry with crisp skin and cool, tart juice, especially when she says the word “solution.” It’s extremely distracting, but it’s not something that can be changed, like perfume. So I do as much as I can via IM or e-mail, but damn it’s hard to listen to her. Ok, that sounded absolutely bizarre.
Not really.
Okay, yes, that sounds bizarre. But not in the flame-the-shit-out-of-the-pedophile way.
You should start an ‘ask the user with synesthesia’ thread. Plenty of opportunity to share knowledge/experience in that under-examined topic.
Shrug, your “her voice tastes like a cherry” may sound strange to the non-synesthetic, but “I find her voice distracts me from her words” is an experience most people have had. Middlebro is synesthetic and I understand his synesthetic “jumps” - when I found out that’s not a common ability I was completely stumped. What, you mean that “the blue pain” and “tastes brown” and “whine it’s greeeeen!” aren’t self-evident?
“Why do you spray whipped cream in your mouth every time I talk?” 
You should totally try that, overly. 
That would be AWESOME! (And it might make the coffee I bought recently taste a little less pointy.)
OK I just had to post here before hitting my coworker. She a nice girl and we get along great but she had this freakin’ habit of using her phone on hands free. Being assistants, we are in the hallway, with a glass separating us. Why! Oh Why! do I need to hear her conversations?
I have told her again and again that once she has an office with a door she’s more than welcome to use hands free but for now could she please pick up the phone. I even gave her my headset… but I have to remind her to use it.
Finally to stop from hearing her I put my headphones on and keep on typing my little heart away…
And then what happens you wonder??? She needs to fucking relate to me whatever was said on the conversation (with her sister, mother or boyfriend), a conversation that I could’ve listen to in the first place. :mad:
“Dear sweet coworker, how shall I put this? the reason I’ve been begging you to pick up your phone, or at least use the headset I gave you is because I don’t need or want to know about what happens in your phone conversations. Unless the conversation is work-related, in which case I’d still prefer an email, just to make sure I get everything as accurately as possible…”
Kaylasdad i wished that goddamned worked. I was polite, cranky and as of this morning I have just ignored her… put on the earplug listen to music. I heard her talking to me but I have ignored her.
She also has issues with the intercom, why use it when you can yell to a lawyer three doors down???
I guess I should forgive her and be understanding, she’s young!
If she’s over age 3, that’s not an excuse for sharing both sides of her phone conversations with anybody within hearing. If she’s under age 3, she shouldn’t hold a job there.
Why is it that the loudest people use their phone hands-free? There’s a colleague in a different department who’s kind of loud/brash, and I have to pull the phone away from my ear when she calls because she’s on speakerphone and YELLING AT HER PHONE. I feel sorry for anyone with an office near her.
I thought I’d share an update on the hellhole of a workplace I recently escaped from. I got a call over the weekend from one of my former cashiers.
Little back-story, he’s the college-aged son of a good friend of mine, and I hired him to be part of the summer crew. A regular daily cashier position opened up during the summer, and I offered the position to the summer kids first because they already knew 90% of the job. I said first one to respond gets it, and this kid spoke up first. He did a good job, the customers loved him.
Anyways, this kid asked me if he could use me as a reference. I said sure, then asked him how things were going at my former job. He says he got let go. I panic, thinking that Bosshole fired him because I hired him. That’s just the sort of thing Bosshole would do.
Kid says no, it wasn’t just him that got let go. He says that things have rapidly gone downhill since I left. The company lost three big clients and is in danger of losing a fourth. I knew about one client leaving but the others were a surprise. Which in turn lead the company to close two cashier locations, thus causing four cashiers to lose their jobs.
I was thinking :eek: with a little mixed in at this point. Then the kid tells me “oh by the way, the service manager quit about two weeks after you did.” He took a few days vacation, came back for one day, and at the end of that day left his keys on the office manager’s desk and said he was quitting. The service manager had somehow managed to put up with Bosshole for twelve years.
I did manage to contain my laughter until after I hung up the phone. I feel bad for the office manager, I’m sure she’s putting up with all sorts of shit now. Maybe this will finally persuade her to leave as well, she deserves better.
Schadenfreude is a wonderful thing, innit?
I’ve always felt that anyone who holds a phone conversation like that where I can hear it all is inviting me to participate. So I do.
Oddly enough, after a few comments like “Well, if you’re always bitching at him, no wonder he stays out with his buddies half the night” they shut off the speaker phone and use their headset. And sometimes even shut the door or lower their voice – hooray!
Oh yeah. 
I do feel bad for all the cashiers who got let go. They were good people and hard workers and I really liked all of them.
But anything that hits that asshole in his wallet can’t be all bad.
Less of job ranting, more like happy news:
Holy damn, I got a LinkedIn message today from a recruiter at a large company I wouldn’t mind working for, telling me that have several openings in their field engineer training program starting soon, including one location where I live.
Jesus hot damn, if I could get this job that would be amazing. While being able to stay here, where I have friends and family, would be the best, even if I got one of the other positions and had to move that would be better than the crap I’m doing now. We have a “phone screening” (their words, so I guess kind of like a phone-pre-interview,) tomorrow afternoon. I need this to go well…but I’m also worried. I’m pretty sure I suck at interviews. I’ve had a bunch of interviews, both phone and in face, and the only one that went “well” was for the job I have now. 