Office pet peeves...
 

[Apologies in advance to ditto and megmeg] :p

What do people do at work or at school that really gets under your skin or at a minimum is mildly annoying?

Here's what kills me: when people who make coffee use one bag and part or all of another bag because one-bag brew isn't freakin' strong enough. I blame Starbucks for this but I digress. Why should the rest of the office have to drink coffee-flavored syrup just because one person likes coffee so strong you have to spoon it out of the pot. Making matters worse is that we only have two burners one of which is decaf so I'm stuck with it and have to hunt around for some "normal" coffee in another pantry somewhere.

Anyway, not the biggest of infractions but it is pretty annoying mostly because I don't realize it till I'm back at my desk with a mug full of the super-dense brew.

What are your pet peeves at the office?

[edited to correct spelling error- content unchanged]

When you try to help someone or be their friend and they refuse.

the one guy that i used to share an office with INSISTED that room be cold all the time. it could be 10 degrees outside and it didn't matter; he had the windows open and fans blowing cold air in. it was like a goddamn meat locker in there. and, during the summer days, he complain about his body temperature being too high and would take his shoes and *gag* socks off in the room. two words: toenail fungus. i couldn't beleive it! also, he had some kind of severe sinus condition that forced him to loudly clear his throat every 3 minutes. i could have set my watch to it. thank whatever powers that be that i have my own office now.

Awww...*sob*. Have you ever BEEN in an office? Like umm..worked?


Actually...here's the thing that dirves me insane every morning. And yes I know it's really stupid...which is exactly why.

See every morning we get a box of donuts delivered to the kitchen. Some regular donuts, but the best donuts are the ones with filling.
Well every single day somebody takes those filled donuts and CUTS the top open to see the filling in it!
Why?! Why must they cut the top! There is a HOLE on the side where the filling can be seen! There is no need for the hole! Agh!!

I mean yeah it's still the same donut..but it's like it's been molested or something, it's not 'pure' anymore and when I eat it I think of the stupidity of cutting a hole in it and that just drives me even more insane. Yeah laugh...

When people talk about eating fried babies and turtle garnish.





Thats FNF and Insoulbe or whatever.

I'm talking about school and this site.

Here we go again... sigh

:(

School isn't your office. You don't 'work' at school. As in you don't get paid.

This site isn't your office. You don't work at this site. As in you don't get paid.

Have you ever held a job?

I'm sorry Beestie, I'm trying to stay awawy from them but they keep coming back. No I've never worked, school is work its hard, I didn't fuck around like you did you little bitch. I'm getting so sick and fucking tired of your ass.


LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!

School hard? Yeah um..see I started working when I was a freshman in High School at Delaware University doing data entry and minor sysadmin tasks on a IBM AIX box.

There's a link for you below.

wow - I need to learn to resist the urge to reply to April! Fuck ... so hard ...

So april - does the difficulty at school lie in your daily skirting of the web security policy or in finding the letters on the keyboard?

I give up. I'm gone.

There is a guy that sits across from me who has been given the nickname "The American Dream" -- eight solid hours a day he spends on the phone with a minimum of four people per day telling them about how the market is doing ("its up FIVE POINTS!"), how his kids are doing, etc. During this eight hour phone-fest, he does no work and actually repeats, almost word-for-word, the first conversation to others he calls during the day. He's like a damn tape-loop.

But the real substance behind "The American Dream" is his treatment of his co-worker who is here from India on a work visa. This poor guy gets daily lessons on American life, the stock market, how to retire, what a heart attack feels like, and even special knowledge like "in America, we drive cars to work".

When my headphones broke some weeks ago, I had to make an emergency trip to purchase new ones -- I couldn't even take five minutes of this guy's constant banter.

Re: Office pet peeves...
 

FNF, did you miss this part, or did you just hope no one would notice it so you could be a complete asshole?

HEY! FnF!


Enough......!! just friggin ignore her. you're beating a dead horse. and you ruin every thread that you two post to. quit it quit it quit it!

fuckin hammer

What kind of work do you do, Kitsune?

juju -- the worst job in the world right now, IT. I'm not sure what American Dream does, as I've really never heard him speak of actual work. Its real nice to know he's getting a fat paycheck for it, too.

Oh, and for lumberjim, I did find this the other day which has to do with a related thread you started a while back about office hijinks.

Good ideas or made to order office pranks! :D

I have some office annoyances that normal people don't. i mean I GET the regular ones ... people who turn the AC off in December, bad coffee making (or no coffee making), other shifts using up my goddamn coffee with my name on it and a note saying ask Wolf if you have a coffee emergency and need to borrow some, etc.

This week alone ...

Having to deal with a really crazy woman's purse. You know the ones, you've goggled at them in stores. Huge suitcases full of random pieces of paper, cigarette butts, and clumps of hair.

Being the only female on the shift and having your male coworker come to you and say ...

"The woman in restraints has to pee. Can you take her a bedpan?"

"There's someone on the phone that will only talk to a woman." This is inevitably a nasty suicide call. Incidentally, we have an unwritten policy ... you answer the phone, you deal with the situation. period. Which apparently does not hold for ONE of my coworkers. Just one.

Having a coworker say "I can't see one more person." Which means, incidentally, that I have to see that person. I have seen as many people (sometimes more) than the whiner.

You posted this at 10:15 a EST.

You posted to another thread at 11:40 a EST.

Check a dictionary with respect to the word "gone."

I knew it was too good to be true.

Seconded heartily.

This one's for you, megmeg and ditto!

Actually, my job isn't too bad on a day-to-day basis. Boring, yes... but there are worse things.

One thing I dislike are long, windy meetings. Most one hour meetings could be replaced by a five minute conversation, and still communicate the same useful information, cutting out all of the pointless gum-flapping.

I also hate office-speak. Non-technical people here (*cough* management *cough*) get jargon envy, and start slinging fancy-sounding euphemisms for just about everything. For instance, to learn about a new product, we no longer go to a training, but to a "knowledge transfer." We don't do research, we have a "discovery phase." Gah! Shit like that makes me want to "inertially alter" people out the third-story window.

I could go on, but I know how you guys hate hearing me bitch about my job. :)

Jargon envy? OMG that's funny HP!

Have you ever had a meeting on how to reduce the amount of meetings held?

Dangerous prospect. Such a meeting would probably collapse into a meeting singularity where no useful information could escape.

H_P: ha!

The guy in the cubicle next to mine has really bad gas. I wish I were joking. I can't hear it, but I can smell it sometimes. And he's really loud about how he eats chili every day for lunch. I don't want to say anything because I just started working here. But, ewwww.

Yeah, that's what I tell people, too. "It's the guy in the next cubicle!"

Just kidding. Probably. ;)

Originally posted by none other than hot_pastrami
omg... that is the funniest thing I have read all day!!:thumb:

Does eating hot pastrami give you gas? ;)

He sounds like a philosophy major.

No, but it has been known to produce jewelry. :D

Well, I'm the "computer guy" (and telephones too). The one thing that really aggravates me is this kind of thing.

Them: "We need some kind of computer program to do X."

Me: "OK, that sounds like a good idea. Can you tell me what are the most critical features it needs to have to do X the way we like to have X done?"

[a conversation follows... some days later.....]

Me: "OK, I've found some products that look like they might work. When can we get together so you can see some demos and try them out?"

Them: "Oh, I don't have time for that. Can't you pick one?"

Me: "I'm just going to install it. You're the one that's going to have to use it every day. We'll make a better choice if you're involved in the decision."

Them: "I really don't have time. Why don't you just buy the best one?"


I hate it.

it was choice.

No, honest! I passed out on my keyboard, and when I regained consciousness, all I had to show for it was that post, and a face covered with imprinted keyboard squares.

No big picture or long range planning. Communication as power. Power trips that manifest in avoidable crisis, drama, and the loss of one of my favorite coworkers (he quit) due to such stupidity.

I meant it in the slang way, like "Choice, dude!"

I have a guy that sits behind me. He's the religion editor, real nice guy, good heart, loves a great laugh.

My only issue is that he ALWAYS FUCKING asks everyone about food. "What'd you eat for lunch today?" "Did you order chinese with everyone else?" "What'd you get on that cheesesteak?" [10 minutes later] "Hey, you ever try a philly cheesesteak?" "Hey, there's free donuts on the back - only about 300 left, you better grab them while you can" (I had already eaten about 12).

In fact, as we speak, he's going through the remains of today's lunch order. Okay, he just grabbed the extra carton of fries and brought them over to the [hot, super attractive] news clerks and distributed.

I just realized 2 weeks ago that I've never seen him eat the kind of shit that goes around the office. Dunno why that never occurred to me, but I offered him a piece of super sugary cake a few days ago and he refused. Turns out he's diabetic, and doesn't eat any of the sweet crap that he's always preaching.

I had a coworker that was fixated on two things. Food and sex. It appeared (from the look on his face) that he sometimes confused the two.

There are quite a few of us that still have terrible flashback shudders when someone mentions "sharp provolone."

Now on the topic of office food, I am reminded of something else that drives me batshit at my office.

Tuna. Specifically, the tuna salad that someone near me eats daily for lunch. The stink is compounded by the guy leaving the bowl to sit until he leaves for the day. No human being should eat that much mayonaise in a week and survive to see another day.

My office pet peeves are:

The folks who purposely let calls roll to voice mail so they can avoid work.

The folks who foist calls off on me because they avoid work. - Always seemingly prefaced by a "Call Dagney, she's the guru"

The folks who 'forget' what I've told them multiple times during training sessions, because (let's all sing along now) they can avoid work.

The folks who play stupid (although it's not much of an act) so they can (insert chorus here)

I'm the manager of a help desk. I can tell you stories of stupidity on the phones, in the cubes, and in the trenches.

Agh.

And don't even get me started on driving to and from the office!

The folks who purposely let calls roll to voice mail so they can avoid work.

Does voicemail serve another purpose other than this?

also, listening to the guy with the gas listen to his voicemail on speakerphone. Is that nec'y?

And then do they use it, find it to not be to THEIR satisfaction, and then cry to you about it (after you told them that they should have been part of the decision)?

I have a friend who goes through the same thing. :(

Office pet peeves...

People who eat out of containers that are not theirs (from the office fridge). That's just nasty! This hasn't happened to *me*, but to many people that I have worked with. Or worse: their food is totally gone from the fridge!

I've heard of funny revenge tactics, such as putting interesting ingredients in the food like laxatives, hot pepper, and other goodies. :D

If you cut out the middle it sounds kind of cool

Those words have never tumbled out of slangs mouth.

Sometimes... sometimes I'm able to avoid making the decision. It's still a pain.

Your job description is your salvation, Steve. You da man!
Sorry, but our processor won't interface between the hardware and the softdrive because the CRT is linuxised whereas the magwarp depends on the thermal efficency of windows but of course any idiot knows that.
Who can dispute "The Computer Guy"?;)

Yeah. "Nick Burns" em, SD.

Sorry..useless post...Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off.... just lost 10 pounds of ass...

Followed by...This f&*#ing program sucks, you computer people are incompetent....blah blah...blah...blah


I've got anotherone....

Person A..wants to get data to point F, gets it through B,C,D, & E in some wacky and complicated hairball steps. (i.e. out of a database...into a crystal report...to a text file with shit missing...to an excel spread sheet...trying to get it back into the database) Wants to know how to get it from E to F but has transformed the data to a useless blob. Won't tell you where he/she started....you figure it out how they F-ed everything up and offer a direct A to F step ....they absolutely refuse a simple step because they are hung up on 'solving' it themselves... fukkin fools...

My biggest pet peeve is when people come into my office and sit down to chat while I'm trying to read The Cellar!!!

can't they see that this is highly sensitive and very important?!

I hate anybody who asks for help when they could so something themselves, or ask for help only because they see i'm "not busy" (like i'm waiting for something that's going to happen in 30 seconds or less). I ask for help 1-2 times per shift. I get asked for help 10 times per shift. I used to work with this idiot girl who asked me to follow her out with food. she had 3 plates to go out...guess she didn't feel like using a TRAY. WHY ARE PEOPLE SO HELPLESS?????

They're waiting for a new Federal government entitlement program. You're new so I'll help you out.

Classic.

Explaining idiomatic American English to foreigners.

Today I had to explain to a Spanish-speaking, Nicaraguan, female psychiatrist that "Fuck You" is not an offer.

One of my favorite examples of this involves the BIG boss. The CEO/Medical Director. The signer of my paychecks. She is of Portuguese and Spanish Descent, was raised in Spain, and speaks (at last count) 12 languages with a fair degree of fluency.

She was preparing some snacks for a board meeting to be held at the hospital that afternoon when I went to inform her that one of her outpatients was being brought in for an emergency evaluation and that her presence was required in the crisis service. There were several other departmental supervisors with her at the time. She indicated that she would be down to deal with the problem "as soon as I am done cutting the cheese."

Several of the supervisors snorted and supressed giggles.

She noted the reaction and looked around the table. She asked, "What have I just said?"

All of the people at the table who get paid a lot more money than I do looked away in embarassment and shame. None of them offered an explanation.

Bastards.

So I had to do it.

"Well, doctor, it appears that you have accidentally stumbled upon an American saying."

"Oh? What does this mean?"

"It's ... um ... an expression that describes extreme flatulence."

OnyxCougar wrote:
Sounds like the mullet-head needs to switch places with slang. THAT would fix him :)

I don't get the meeting tho. He cursed you, and hosed your call in the most obnoxious and intentional way. He needs to be shown the door.