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

[Heidi88]

People who ignore your calendar and send meeting invites when you already have a meeting. One guy put two seperate meetings in for tomorrow but I have meetings in already. I have around 4 hrs with no meetings tomorrow that he could have picked from.

Also people who dont accept or reject meetings.

 

[Ensay]

Speaking of hot desking, we have to book desks when we're in the office (sounds like most of you). Sometimes I arrange to go into the office on the same day as another colleague because we're working on the same thing and so it makes sense for our weekly office day to be on the same day if we're working on something together.

She always arranges for the desks to be booked for us both so that we can sit side by side. Weirdly we have to email our office reception to book a desk rather than being able to do it ourselves and they reply to the email with our desk numbers.

She's always in the office before me as she lives a short walk away and she always picks the better of the two desks. So even though the email will say "Ensay has desk 421 and Annoying Colleague has desk 422" if 421 is next to the window, or has a better monitor, or is better in any small way, she'll sit her arse in it - leaving me the other one.

I know it's a small thing but it really fucks me off. If I'm in the better desk then I sodding well want it, thanks! However, I don't say anything as I know it'll come across as petty. It also doesn't help that she talks far more than she needs to, but that's another story.

 

[HEC1993]

I work at a GP surgery. One nurse in particular is so lazy and will do anything to get out of seeing her patients. She usually leaves patients sat there for ages while she’s sat on her phone in the hope that they’ll get up and leave out of frustration. She also is meant to order in injections from the pharmacy but she doesn’t do it on purpose so she then has to cancel her patients that were due in for injections. That said, she doesn’t cancel them, she gets the admin team to do it so they get shouted at instead.

We also have a doctor who refuses to park in the doctors space, as she says every time she parks there, someone scratches her car. So she parks in another space, but then when she has to go on home visits she has to get 3 of us to move our cars.

We also hire out one of our spare rooms to a talking therapies bloke, he comes in once a fortnight and cycles in. He traipses mud through the entire building.

Really bloody annoying

 

[DA Stella]

And there's always that boot licker who raises their hand when the group is asked "any questions?" If someone has questions they could send them to the meeting organizer via email. No need to hold up the entire group!

 

[petitspois]

My office is pretty good really and it's dawned on me one of the big reasons why - no team meetings. They just wreck me.

 

[Sure…Media!]

The current shagging in the first aid room is driving me up the wall as I’m the first aider… and I wouldn’t mind a bit

 

[mee43]

I’ve posted before about the sicknotes on my team, but people who take a couple of extra days either side of a holiday weekend by calling in sick really irritate me.
It’s always the same culprits and I get that they probably think they don’t owe the bosses anything, but it’s the selfishness of leaving colleagues to deal with all the excess work that annoys me.
And then the added annoyance of a boss who has to micromanage how we take up the slack rather than trusting the few of us who are in to get on with it and get it done, which we always do.

Shortly after posting this, two more called in sick! Two of us in out of a possible 7, and absolutely piles of work to get through. My head was banging by the end of the day. Absolute p1ss takers, all of them!
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but you can absolutely predict the sickies coming and when they’re gonna happen.

 

[emmer_moans]

I would appreciate some perspective.

I posted about how I joined a new team a few months ago. A few days ago, I was asked to do a presentation in front of 70 people. My manager knows I’d never done this and public speaking terrifies me. Fast forward, I do the presentation and the manager wasn’t in attendance.

All good. People apparently loved it. At around 5.30pm when I’m about to log off, I get a ping from my manager asking me to talk. I dial in and they go on a tangent about how some people did not like that I didn’t have my camera on! They said it wasn’t good, that I should have had my camera on and the team culture is one of collaboration.

Your industry seems quite cut throat

I explained that my camera was on and if it appeared off when I shared my screen, I apologize but I’m pretty adamant I had it on. Then she goes on a tangent saying she doesn’t want an apology and that she wants to know why my camera is occasionally off (during weekly team meetings with roughly 100 people on and where I’m not a speaker!) I said it’s for personal reasons and I shouldn’t give such justification. Then she goes on a tangent about how she’s not asking for justification. What? You just asked me ‘why’.

Anyways, I apologize, say it was an oversight (even though I 100% had my camera on and maybe turned it off for a second to drink water) and she kept going on a tangent.

At that point, I had enough and I started crying which she quickly gathered and she says ‘this is not a formal reprimand that will go in your performance record, if that’s what you think’ . I go silent because my anxiety went through the roof and she ends the call.

Fast forward, the following day, I log in, no trace of her asking me even as much as an ‘are you OK’. Nothing. I got an email asking for a deck, nothing else.

I was honestly so happy with my presentation and some people even asked me to join their project with leadership as a result of it. She tore it all apart right after. I’ve been feeling distraught ever since because I’ve been in the industry for 8 years, had disagreements with managers, but never cried in front of one and this one pushed me to tears over something so petty.

I‘m genuinely contemplating resigning next week without any other job lined up because I’ve never seen this my entire career and God knows my previous team was awful.

Your manager is an arse. FWIW when there's more than 10 or so people on a video call you can't see everyone anyway, and at my place sometimes the call quality dips if everyone has video on, so we tend to say, let's go cameras off unless we are speaking. And as you say, when sharing your screen you want them to watch your slides/etc, not your face. I would take heart from your peers giving you good feedback. Is your manager like this with your peers?

 

[TheGlossy]

I just dealt with the rudest person in this whole company.

I have a company laptop and my charger broke down earlier this afternoon. My battery died and had no way of working. I therefore went to the office to request a new charger and the IT guy was like: “ I can’t give you a charger off record, you need to raise a ticket”.
Then I explained I needed to finish my work day and couldn’t raise a ticket because my laptop is offline due to the battery being down. He was like “look at the screen next to you, there’s a number”. There was no number on that screen which I pointed out to him. Then he gave me a number to ring and raise a ticket. He was like “you do understand that I can’t give you a charger off record”.

I asked how long it would take to get a new charger and he was like “I don’t know, I only get the charger when it’s delivered”.

They have chargers lying around and I’m asked to raise a ticket and wait days to get a charger?! How am I supposed to work? This is ridiculous. I was about to ring my manager to escalate as I told him I needed a charger urgently to work. Then he finally gave me one. When I asked what to do with my defunct charger, he said “do whatever you want with it”.

All this for a lousy charger. I’m a hybrid worker. No charger means no work. He was acting like I’d ask for a credit limit increase on my corporate card. SMH.

 

[TheGlossy]

I’m on a training and the instructor is like “I will give you FOUR minutes beak only because we’re late”.

Like not 5, but FOUR. I can’t stop laughing because it is ridiculous. We’re late - whose fault is that lol. Yours buddy.

I just can’t right now.

He said we had to take a four minute break because we were “late” but we ended up finishing the training one hour early. How were we late then?! Absolute nonsense.

 

[Heidi88]

I worked in one of the Big4 accounting firms after college and one guy would put his suit jacket on the back of his chair in a Thursday evening and leave his laptop and not turn up to work on a friday and no one in management noticed as the office was so big.

 

[ShadesMint]

One of my colleagues is always talking about how much her husband earns, and how she spends vast amounts of money on things to improve her house, or a nice holiday. It really gets on my wick and tbh I've started avoiding talking to her for too long because it really winds me up. He earns significantly more than her (and therefore me), I just think its really tone deaf atm, cost of living crisis etc but me and my partner have barely anything at the end of the month so it really hits a nerve.

 

[MediumLoad]

I work with someone like this in her 50s. She phones her elderly mum daily whenever something goes wrong.
---

Long emails with no paragraphs

I worked with a woman who spent hours on the phone every day with her mother and her fiance's mother where they micro-managed every single part of the fiance's life for him. The rest of us had to listen to interminable conversations about what he should be wearing or having for his lunch.

 

[Sibz]

Colleagues that are up the bosses arse being helpful, laughing and joking with them then do nothing but bad mouth them behind their back fake fuckers

 

[Ensay]

Breakout rooms are definitely annoying! Most trainers operate on the idea that group activities are always beneficial. Sometimes they are, but they can also be pointless, especially if they're used too frequently. I find most trainers underestimate how long some of the tasks will take, and can sometimes get irritable if trainees don't finish on time.

My annoyance for the day: a lazy colleague who clearly isn't right for the role. I'm hoping he realises it himself before too long and resigns (like the last useless one we had) but I fear this one might not. Whenever I've been in the office with him, he doesn't even try to look busy and when WFH his Teams status is idle a lot more than it isn't. He also constantly uses "IT issues" as an excuse for being late, as though we're all thick. Dead wood really annoys me and just drags everyone down.

 

[TheGlossy]

Three things today:

1. That person in my team who says they can’t be at the office 3 days in a row because it’s ‘a lot’ when they live 30 minutes away. Do they realize doctors, construction workers, teachers, police, firemen etc… don’t have this luxury? How tone deaf is that?

2. Someone who decided to have their breakfast while on camera on Zoom and I’m not talking about a coffee. I’m talking a knife and fork type of situation. I’m sorry but this is not appropriate. If you’re gonna eat, turn off your camera. Some people have gotten far too comfortable with Zoom etiquette.

3. Some senior person wished me a ‘happy company anniversary’ in a group chat and the usual suck up responded ‘I’ve a milestone too coming up in a few days’… and didn’t even bother to wish me a happy anniversary first. Then it turned into all about her and her 6 months milestone. SMH.

 

[Black.bird]

I broke something on the colour printer today. It jammed, so I pulled all the little coloured bits in accordance with their accompanying diagrams, and something snapped off ... and smelt bad. I put a note on it saying 'out of order', along with a suggestion to go to the print place over the road if anyone had any urgent jobs, and went to call the service providers. We have several black and white printers; this is our only colour one.

Within minutes, the accountant approached me, hands on hips, and asked who I thought I was. "Excuse you?" I responded - she started ranting and raving and all I could notice was how red she was getting and how wide her nostrils were flaring. Something-something- expensive-something-check with her first.

I'm normally a very laid-back sort of person unless really pushed, so I let her have it, asking her who she thinks SHE is to constantly interfere in things that don't concern her! Well, that did the trick because she scuttled off into her corner huffing and puffing and she hasn't bothered me since. Everyone else in the office went quiet and put their heads down, except my buddy who sits next to me, who was trying not to laugh.

I'm so sick of this fun sucker woman ... honestly, we've all tried so hard to make her feel welcome but she's just awful and our MD agrees, but doesn't seem to have the balls to get rid of her.

(For the record, we're all responsible for calling fix-it folks when we break stuff, or for ordering stationery if we use the last of something - nobody needs to seek permission to do so beforehand).

 

[Norfolking Good]

I just had a 45 min teams call from my lazy ass colleague telling me how busy she is… maybe if she stopped ringing people and just got on with their job they could get their work done! I didn’t even need to speak as it was a monologue

 

[skratcha]

Congrats, you made the right decision. They sound like jerks.

 

[CatCafe234]

I’m probably projecting but it reminds me of a manager I once had. Massively insecure, and a specialist in those ‘doorknob’ conversations that were designed to leave you feeling upset and unsettled just before the weekend or just before you went on leave. You’d spend your time off fretting only to come back and it was like it never happened. Horrible.