Annoying things your work colleagues do all the time? #4

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People who leave meeting rooms in a mess!

In my workplace it's the responsibility of whoever held the meeting to clean up after themselves, which seems to skip some peoples' mind. Most people are pretty good about doing it - or if they get busy asking someone to help - and if it happens at the end of the day, our fantastic cleaner will sort it. We never used to have this problem ... it's one of many things that seem to be falling over lately.

This morning I showed a new client into our boardroom, to be greeted with a right mess, plus the room smelt funny. Not a good first impression!
 
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People in my current team are insane.

Someone approached me at 12pm to ask me to do something urgently by COB today. The task itself can take days to finalize depending on complexity. I said I’m quite swamped as I’m OOO tomorrow and had multiple deliverables lined up for this afternoon. I’m also flying out to support an overseas project next week, so my own deliverables needed to be wrapped up today.

I said I didn’t have capacity and if my involvement was required, I wouldn’t be able to finish the task today. The person who approached me (who has never helped me on any project in two years) escalated to my manager’s manager complaining that I refused to help.

Then I got dragged into a call with this person, my manager’s manager and other people. As soon as they opened the call, the person said “we want to reiterate the urgency of the matter”. In the meantime, one person had volunteered to take this on but the person who approached me said I needed to handle.

Then I went on a big monologue explaining how this last minute request is unreasonable, that my workload was disclosed to the full team yesterday during our team call and that I had very clearly no capacity for to take on this last minute request. I reiterated how unreasonable it was to approach me at 12pm for a piece of work that takes days expecting me to finish it by 5pm the same day when I’m swamped and OOO tomorrow.

Then, my manager’s manager turned around and asked the person who approach me why this request is being sent at the last minute… It turns out someone had done the work completely wrong, a stakeholder complained and they wanted me to redo it because I’m “very diligent” (their words).

They must be having a laugh! I’m swamped and you’re asking me to drop my own work to redo someone else’s work because they screwed up?

Then the manager’s manager asked me to drop off after this info was disclosed because it’s obvious the person who approached me never shared this info with them when escalating. I dropped them into hot water and left them there lol.

This is the second time this person has tried an unjustified escalation against me and this is the second time it backfires because each time they didn’t have their facts straight when I’m all about facts. They didn’t learn their lesson the first time around it seems. I’m nice but don’t play with me!

I wasted two hours of my day on this nonsense and had to log off at 8pm instead of 6.

Praying to God these two weeks go fast so I can move on with my life.
 
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Today for the second time since my colleague has been working his notice he has been aggressive towards our manager. Our manager made a simple request for some information to be passed to our new hire and my colleague started sulking, so our manager took him aside to a different room, as soon as the door closed I could hear my colleague shouting at our manager. After a few minutes our manager walked out of the room and I could hear my colleague mocking him and laughing at him. It was so awkward and our new hire immediately started asking questions. The new hire asked whether my colleague has anger issues and because we will all be working together for some time to come I just said he didn't. but he does. My manager said he was fine when people asked him whether he was ok and joked that at least my colleague didn't hit him. My manager seems OK about it but I want to raise a formal complaint because i don't want to be in the office on my own with my colleague in case he turns on me next- Have you ever made a complaint? What is the process? Would he know i'd made the complaint?
 
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Today for the second time since my colleague has been working his notice he has been aggressive towards our manager. Our manager made a simple request for some information to be passed to our new hire and my colleague started sulking, so our manager took him aside to a different room, as soon as the door closed I could hear my colleague shouting at our manager. After a few minutes our manager walked out of the room and I could hear my colleague mocking him and laughing at him. It was so awkward and our new hire immediately started asking questions. The new hire asked whether my colleague has anger issues and because we will all be working together for some time to come I just said he didn't. but he does. My manager said he was fine when people asked him whether he was ok and joked that at least my colleague didn't hit him. My manager seems OK about it but I want to raise a formal complaint because i don't want to be in the office on my own with my colleague in case he turns on me next- Have you ever made a complaint? What is the process? Would he know i'd made the complaint?
A few years ago I worked in a small company that had a relatively flat structure aside from the Owner / Managing Director and Operations Manager. I was the only female working with about 15 men.

One afternoon, when the MD and OM were out, one of the guys - who I always found to be very 'off' (I suspected he was on drugs) - walked up to one of the quieter guys in the office and started verbally attacking him. At the time, there was a gentle hum of chatter, which stopped as the bully's voice rose. The quiet guy just sat there, looking down, not giving any sort of reaction, which fueled the bully to then start hitting him on the head.

I stood up and shouted at the bully to 'cut it out' at which point a couple of guys went over and intervened ... I was peeved that they seemed to wait for someone to make the first move! The bully eventually moved away, grabbed his bag and went off in a huff.

When the MD and OM returned, I went straight to the OM and reported what had happened, and he said to leave it with him. I told him I was one of many witnesses but was worried the bully might come after me for reporting it - the OM said not to worry about that. Well, as it turned out the bully was told that I was the one to report it, and he blamed me for him losing his job over it (apparently some things had been leading up to this event, so he had already been issued with warnings). For a while, he would wait outside work and follow me to my car asking why I did it; at lunchtime he'd follow me down the street ... I complained to the police but they were useless. I asked the OM to talk to him - he wouldn't have a bar of it ... it was just awful, but eventually the bully got bored and moved on.

My advice: Be very, very careful about reporting it and becoming involved. Your manager should be the one to report it, and you may be called in as a witness. It's human instinct (I feel) to want to remedy a situation, but it never ends well.
 
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A few years ago I worked in a small company that had a relatively flat structure aside from the Owner / Managing Director and Operations Manager. I was the only female working with about 15 men.

One afternoon, when the MD and OM were out, one of the guys - who I always found to be very 'off' (I suspected he was on drugs) - walked up to one of the quieter guys in the office and started verbally attacking him. At the time, there was a gentle hum of chatter, which stopped as the bully's voice rose. The quiet guy just sat there, looking down, not giving any sort of reaction, which fueled the bully to then start hitting him on the head.

I stood up and shouted at the bully to 'cut it out' at which point a couple of guys went over and intervened ... I was peeved that they seemed to wait for someone to make the first move! The bully eventually moved away, grabbed his bag and went off in a huff.

When the MD and OM returned, I went straight to the OM and reported what had happened, and he said to leave it with him. I told him I was one of many witnesses but was worried the bully might come after me for reporting it - the OM said not to worry about that. Well, as it turned out the bully was told that I was the one to report it, and he blamed me for him losing his job over it (apparently some things had been leading up to this event, so he had already been issued with warnings). For a while, he would wait outside work and follow me to my car asking why I did it; at lunchtime he'd follow me down the street ... I complained to the police but they were useless. I asked the OM to talk to him - he wouldn't have a bar of it ... it was just awful, but eventually the bully got bored and moved on.

My advice: Be very, very careful about reporting it and becoming involved. Your manager should be the one to report it, and you may be called in as a witness. It's human instinct (I feel) to want to remedy a situation, but it never ends well.
ok thanks you’ve confirmed my worst fears! I won’t be reporting it
 
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When colleagues cut you off. I get that there can sometimes be a slight delay on Teams, but it often goes beyond that where some loud person thinks they know better than everyone else.
 
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My manager wrote on Teams: “His voice makes me want to hit him”.

He was talking about a senior stakeholder who was speaking during a team call.

I did not respond at all. He’s not in his right mind to type this on Teams. He honestly needs to remove himself from this team, get therapy and move to a different industry. He’s not right in the head.
 
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people that type like this and dont use punctuation at all so then the message gets confusing and then you have to read the email about six times to work out what they are referring to as nothing makes sense as there are no commas or full stops so it takes up more time and annoys you even more
 
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I've ranted about it before, but people who book meetings in your diary when you're already busy.

This latest one has annoyed me more than most because she's usually more considerate, as she usually drops me an IM to at least try and negotiate clashes, whereas this time she's just booked it in. So I'm pretty sure she's scanned my diary and thought her meeting is more important than the one I've already got.

If she'd asked nicely, I may well have moved the clash, but because she's overbooked without checking, it's made me want to decline her meeting much more. 😂
 
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I flew out for this project and this stakeholder I’ve been working with for two years saw me for the first time. After an hour, he said “Oh, are you so and so I normally work with?”. Then he was like “I didn’t recognize you at all, I only recognized you when you started talking because you have a rather distinctive voice”.

Then one of my colleagues started laughing. What is that supposed to mean lol? I don’t know how I should take these comments. Now I’m going to be self-conscious about my voice and face since I clearly don’t look like my group directory picture taken at a photo booth (no retouching therefore). Lol.
 
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I flew out for this project and this stakeholder I’ve been working with for two years saw me for the first time. After an hour, he said “Oh, are you so and so I normally work with?”. Then he was like “I didn’t recognize you at all, I only recognized you when you started talking because you have a rather distinctive voice”.

Then one of my colleagues started laughing. What is that supposed to mean lol? I don’t know how I should take these comments. Now I’m going to be self-conscious about my voice and face since I clearly don’t look like my group directory picture taken at a photo booth (no retouching therefore). Lol.
This reminds me off a funny incident, in the mid 90s I was in my final weeks at a company.

I was handing over to the new guy, who was a brummie born and bred, but he had a strong Indian accent.

Anyway a call comes in from our Ireland office, and I thought I will let the new guy handle it.

He says hi and the usual pleasantries, and gets an earful of abuse, the guy on the other end says John maybe Indian but he doesn't talk like that, if you carry on like this, I am going to make sure you get fired.

I quickly intervened and explained that was his normal accent.
 
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I flew out for this project and this stakeholder I’ve been working with for two years saw me for the first time. After an hour, he said “Oh, are you so and so I normally work with?”. Then he was like “I didn’t recognize you at all, I only recognized you when you started talking because you have a rather distinctive voice”.

Then one of my colleagues started laughing. What is that supposed to mean lol? I don’t know how I should take these comments. Now I’m going to be self-conscious about my voice and face since I clearly don’t look like my group directory picture taken at a photo booth (no retouching therefore). Lol.
I once had something similiar (ish). Our entire team was made redundant a few years back and we were moving some of our tasks to an outsource provider. I wont mention the country but we were given cultural training in dealing with them. We were told to talk a lot about our families. We were told they would question why a woman wasnt married if she was finished her education etc etc. One gay colleague was basically advised to refer to his partner rather than his husband. The company went to great lengths to give us training not to offend them and once we asked the question what training were they given in dealing with us.

On one of my first calls the woman I was dealing with said I had a voice like a 6 year old. So all this training to make sure we didnt say something inappropriate to their culture and I open my mouth and she offends me!
 
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When an email is sent to someone and then it gets forwarded to you because their emails are playing up, or they can't log into the system.

Funny, as it always happens when it's the same issues. If you don't know how to do it, then be honest.
 
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Constantly putting the heater on. It's November and I'm boiling in a t shirt!
 
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One of my female colleagues is a real pig , she sits in the office constantly eating , loudly chomping down on things , usually fish or the most smelliest smelling food you can get , crunchy crisps etc. Farts all the time, usually silent but stinky everyone knows it's her the dirty pig . Constantly on the phone , you can say something to her 3/4 times before she realizes you're talking to her. Really just gross all round .
Another one is LOUD phone rings , that really pisses off , no one that has normal hearing needs thier phone to ring that Loud
 
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So, one of my former colleagues moved teams after only 1 year in my current team. This person was off/onfor 6 months out of that one year, so they never really took part in day to day operations from end to end. I assume they sugar coated reality on their CV because today they were asked by their new manager to leverage on knowledge from their previous experience in my current team. They were asked super technical questions by their new manager and they had no knowledge on what their manager was asking so they reached out to me for answers lol.
 
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Workmates who volunteer you for something without checking with you first, especially seeing as I blocked out my calendar for a few weeks over the period in question.
 
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I work with a woman who clears her throat really loudly and it sounds like she is trying to get everyone's attention. I find it soooooo irritating. Very silly thing to get irritated by but it gets on my nerves.
 
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