Things or processes that irritate you at work

[BuzzShitbagBobbly]

For me it's when I tell someone that I will send updates e.g. on a payment being made. And then the next day they ask me if I have any update.

OH YES I DO I WAS KEEPING IT SECRET

And when I get cold prospecting emails asking (sometimes telling ) me to give them the name of the person who does xyz in my company.

Do I look like your bloody secretary?
Even worse when it's on LinkedIn and they can just look for it.

Scratchcard procedure...when we receive them we have to write down the game name, barcode, and quantity in a folder, then update them on the computer system which automatically prints out a sheet with the game names, barcodes, and quantity Printout then gets filed on top of the handwritten page, so 2 copies of identical information.

One of my staff members starts work before me and pounces as soon as I get in every morning - this morning I hadn’t even turned the light on in my office before she had a question about an email that was sent at 7am this morning that I was supposed to have read!!

Walking in, and stood there just inside the door in my coat with my bag on my shoulder and somebody says 'Ooooh Sparkling just the person, I know you have only just got here but can I ask you about XYZ'.

No, I don't start for another fifteen minutes.

I left the corporate world to become a freelancer last year, so I’ve left most of this behind (but discovered new annoyances!)

My big bugbear was when our head of department would send round an email asking for something to be done by the whole department - say put some of our details on a group spreadsheet - and give a very clear deadline.

She would then send round increasingly hectoring emails to the whole department weeks before the deadline, moaning at how few people had done it, how important it was, how she would have to start naming and shaming, how disappointed she was with the number of people who hadn’t done it yet. Of course, it was counterproductive as it would wind people up and they’d leave it until the very last day just to annoy her.

Oh and we used to have a manual time recording system we had to fill in. No-one could tell us what the data was used for, but it had always been done so must continue.

It was a frustratingly slow and laborious system - so much so that one of the entries you could recording time against was the act of entering data into the timesheet system!

Oh and we used to have a manual time recording system we had to fill in.

I sit next to a team that has to do similar. Invariably they forget and then get chased up a few weeks later; whereupon they obviously can't remember which project they worked on at 3pm two Thursdays ago, so they make it up. Or put "admin".

And like you, nobody ever seems to do anything with the data anyway.

OMG how I hated completing time analysis forms

I used to work somewhere with an incredibly heavy workload where some bright spark came up with the idea that we needed to count out items of incoming post and record them. There were thousands of them, so it ended up taking maybe three additional hours out of your working day to fill in a spreadsheet saying that you got 120 of document X and 118 of document Y and 301 of document Z.

They actually gave us less time to do the actual work than they expected us to spend recording the work that needed done. It was hellish.

Appraisals were always depressing and unmotivating yet time consuming

Earlier in my career, I used to take 360 reviews for my colleagues really seriously, and spend a good chunk of time carefully writing them to help the person I was reviewing. Obviously that included some negative feedback sometimes. This would then be used by the manager to appropriately communicate.

I only found out that with negative comments, my then utter cunt of a boss would simply give the person the whole form as signed by me. On purpose, of course. Divide and rule was his preferred tactic as was shagging the most useless women in the office after beating her down with her shit reviews

I stopped bothering after that and just wrote bland platitudes like everyone else did.

360 was hopeless at my work, nobody trusted anyone else not to abuse or misuse the feedback and people didn't dare be honest either

At one of my clients, our driver cards are checked every day. Not just displayed to the desk, but we have to fill out a form with the serials, DOB, addresses, expiry dates etc etc. Then they're photocopied. Then we have to fill out a declaration on fitness, training status, prohibited acts such as showing up without an eye, not telling them about last night's heart attack, using satnavs or mobes. Once a month would be OK, once a week would be diligent, but every day?

Then they showed me the incidents that led to these practices. There's some real fuckwits out there.

Clear desk policy. Some managers took this to mean at all times so you would come back from a quick loo break to find your notes from the 2 hour conference call you had just finished in the confidential waste.

Office policy was leave your desk clear after you finish for the day not if you were across the office asking a pertinent question!

Ditto tibia we have the hectoring email system. Balanced out by another twat that sends demands for something to be filled in with a 4 hr deadline, that takes 3 hrs when it definitely isn’t even necessary, let alone urgent. The result is half the team earnestly trying to explain why they can’t meet the deadline, or which genuinely urgent job should be ditched to prioritise it. And the other half thinking fuck it, nobody is going to manage it so it’ll get extended by a week at least.

Also the general practice of internal support emails. Great when it’s the equivalent of posting on Facebook for an emergency plumber recommendation. Less so when it’s the equivalent of posting ‘help, urgently need the telephone number for dominos’. They should know where to find this info, instead of filling everyone’s inbox with spam.

There's not enough time in the world.

Senior managers who make a big fuss about ‘opening lines of communication’, drag us away from our desks to listen to them waffle on for an hour or so, then we never see or hear from them again.

Or, senior managers who are new to the job, don’t have a clue why we do things the way we do and who decide they want to make a big impact and change processes. Without fail, they ignore the things that do need improvement and pick on the thing that works perfectly to fiddle about with before buggering off to a new job and leaving us to fix things.

Colleagues who decide that they don’t actually want to do their actual job anymore so faff about inventing new jobs (tea & coffee club, lottery syndicate, birthday club, social events team etc) then demand a day a week to work on emails demanding £20 for bowling and a fiver for Gary’s birthday and spend the other four days moaning about how the office wouldn’t function if they weren’t here to run things and how they deserve a bonus for being so involved!

When u have a team meeting and instead of concise, succinct updates people talk for 15 minutes because they think the more they talk the more we think they are important/busy.

I used to work for a place which recorded time in decimal.

6 minutes = 0.1 of an hour and take it from there.

We had smart arses recording by the seconds.

The fact that it is freezing in there and I am already having to switch the heater on under my desk and almost sit on it to get warm. In the winter it sometimes drops to eight degrees in the office and we all have to keep our coats on.

I hate it when someone bounds over with a cheerful 'are you busy?'.

No Linda, just sat on my arse waiting for you to give me something to do.

Oh god the bitching, whispering and back stabbing. If they put as much energy into working we wouldn’t need overtime to meet our SLA’s 🙄

The whole environment, the pettiness, the politics, the endless meetings with the same people whittering on about the same old stuff, just the Groundhog Day feel of it all, now freelance working from home and will never go back

When I was working a new system was brought in, everything was counted, weighed, measured, we had sheets to fill in to show what we were doing every minute of every working hour, we worked flexi time but at the beginning of every week we had to state what time we would start & finish work, how long we would be out for lunch. Every day the whiteboard would have figured of how much work should be done every hour, we had a meeting every day to discuss the previous days figures & why the targets hadn't been met, then our managers went to a meeting with their managers to discuss the same. Work dropped by nearly 50%, morale in the office was terrible, sick leave nearly doubled, this was called progress.

People asking me ridiculous questions : who do I ask to get a reimbursement? Who do you think? Accounts, maybe? Note : I DON'T work in accounts.

And use of the the 'middle man'- whether I am uneccessarily one (they could do it this themselves), or I'm included in shit where I'm implicated but don't need to be. With email volume as it is be careful who you copy in!

Also HATE being asked stuff that's easily Google able.