Your worst ever colleague

[CrimsonCattery]

Just a bit of fun. All my current colleagues rate from amazing to only mildly irritating but in the past have worked with some right wankers.

The worst one was a couple of years ago. Civil service open plan office. Friendly team. One man was the same grade as me and started at a similar time never spoke to me which was fine if a little odd as we were all learning the work. We had the same mentor who was a lovely older woman eho had been doing our job for years. Our boss was also female.

Mentor told me he was completely blanking her and would only go to the men in our team for advice. He refused to take any direction from women and would default to our boss' male counterpart. We hotseated and he started kicking off if asked to sit next to someone of a lower grade (we were still relatively junior) which was bizarre as no one else cared about seniority like that. The men in our team also hated him and he narrowly escaped being hit at one Xmas social after a disgusting comment he made about the women in the team (they refused to share what he said). His work was also crap and he got fired for a combination of that and his terrible attitude.

We later found out from Google he had been fired from his previous job where he should have been helping people because he was unfairly finding against people he disapproved of. It was in the news as he lost an employment tribunal after he sued them.

Have also worked with milk thieves, phantom shitters and other oddballs. Its very dull where I am now in comparison!

Urgh at Grimy Santa scaring the children.

@SedentaryCat thats awful! Did anyone warn the women?

I had a boss once who was normally an alright bloke but could be quite sharp tongued and a bit petty. He once tried to make me do something unreasonable I absolutely didn't have to do. After pushing back a bit with no luck I went to the union, who went to SLT and backed me. He then promptly sent me to Coventry for a fortnight until he got over himself and went back to normal.

Also he had a bit of a thing about maternity leave (he was gay - not sure if relevant to his mindset). I once stuck my head round his door to ask for a word and he said: "You're not pregnant are you?" I wasn't luckily for him!

Also he had a bit of a thing about maternity leave (he was gay - not sure if relevant to his mindset)

What an unpleasant thing to say.

Nothing as dreadful as some of these, but I had a gaslighting boss when I was too young and timid to stand up to her (wouldn't put up with it now) –she'd ask you a question and then when you started explaining about it, would cut you off with 'OK, I don't want a whole conversation about it.' We were (tacitly, not explicitly) not really allowed any longer at lunch than the time it took to rush down to the nearest cafe for a sandwich, and if anyone did dare take longer she'd cook up a problem for them and give them hell the minute they got back.
She was also once very ungracious and unsympathetic when a colleague wanted time off to go to visit her godmother, who was dying in hospital.
She was quite unpleasant all round.

Not worst, just frustrating as everyone thinks she is fantastic but she is so bad at her job it's unreal, I sit opposite her so know how often she loses documents, deletes things, asks the most basic questions about our work, yet she is actually quite a nice person so no one seems to notice how ineffective she is.

@jonnybiscuits that has just sparked another memory! In the open plan office I used to sit next to a man who was really nice and almost certainly had undiagnosed autism. My boss asked me to take that desk as I actually have quite a lot of patience and having worked extensively with austistic children in the past, was good at getting him back on track when he started talking to me about his interests.

The only downside was his frequent snacking with LOUD lipsmacking. I brought earplugs to work and would discreetly put them in as soon as I heard a wrapper rustling as otherwise there might have been a rather unpleasant murder that would have put a dampner on my otherwise harmonious office.

I only mentioned he was gay as he seemed almost disgusted at anything that involved the female body. He would make little comments or faces when things like breastfeeding were mentioned in conversation. Its something I have come across before with a minority of gay male friends so just wondered if that was part of it above the annoyance of having to recruit temp staff to cover maternity.

Sloth66

The NHS is the worst for getting rid of - or rather not getting rid of staff. I suppose because of the long drawn out procedures they have to go through?

We had a secretary who threw a chair at her boss, she was just moved to another Dept. Happens all the time!!

My first ever office job was in a huge call centre and this far Scottish wanker took a shine to me. People seemed to like him as he licked managements arse. As I and he progressed we started working in a small team of 8 together. He was obsessed with who I was emailing and would somehow print out all of my emails and keep them in his locked drawer. I never did anything about it becuse they were along the lines of. What time are you taking lunch? To colleagues.

I decided I didn't like him and was cold with him and so he made my life a nightmare, always trying to get me in trouble so I just left.

Last year he was arrested after some pedophile hunters had trapped him.

Knew he was weird even then!

When I think back there have been quite a few! I was truly shocked at some of the teachers I worked with when I was a nursery nurse. They shouldn’t have been within a mile of small children! I was young & not very confident but there is no way I would tolerate their behaviour now & it would be reported. I worked as a social services home help & some of the other carers were awful, bullying me & always saying dreadful things about the clients. No compassion or understanding at all. I got badly bullied by the female Manager of a vets practice ( I was a receptionist). She did at least have the grace to apologise when I left & was very kind to me because I’d suffered a miscarriage ( she was pregnant herself). Where I work now pretty much everyone is lovely but a woman on the tills thinks she’s a Supervisor & bosses me about. She’s been there longer than me but does exactly the same job. Bit of a power trip I think.

The first one was a manager of the small telesales office I worked in back in the late 90s.If you didn't sell something she used to make you stand up and work until you did.
The second was my line manager in a doctor's surgery.Passive aggressive,fantasist and strange with a definite personality disorder she made everyone's life difficult apart from her couple of favourites.I really regret not telling her to go fuck herself coz noone else will when I left.

OK this is not me but it's such a good story I couldn't resist.

My union official once represented someone who got in trouble for weeing in the waste paper basket.
Her "excuse" was that she was drinking heavily at work and sometimes got too pissed to walk to the toilets.

This was a manager!
And it had been going on for years before it got to a disiplinary.

General unkindness, subtle bullying.
My manager and her deputy were best friends. Nothing was confidential. My manager would tell her deputy everything and vice versa. The deputy had mood swings so literally she would be chatting one day, silence the next 3 days. Always friendly in the presence of the manager.
The deputy and her coworker decided I was a hypochondriac despite me having a clear sick record. I had been getting neck pain, that turned out to be cancer. They would just laugh and say here comes the hypochondriac.
One of them wrote on a get well card 'you have proven you are not a hypochondriac'.
I witnessed bullying from deputy and co worker in a meeting. I reported it and found myself in a situation whereby my communication was criticised because I hadn't realised 'they were having a bad day".
Deputy decided we spent too long on our phones and the internet (without any evidence) and told us to lock phones away for the day. She said 'if your child is sick, the nursery or school should manage or call 999'.
Deputy delivered the most boring teaching sessions yet made students sign rules, no yawning, no glancing at phones, no whispering, no leaving the room. Age of the students? 21 - 60.
I could go on. It was like being in Mean Girls. And yet they would all be considered key workers and heroes.

Oh, this thread brings back so many memories!

I guess a lot of us have experienced colleagues with the ‘gift of the gab’, who get away with murder.

The worst one for me was a boss two levels up from me who had absolutely no idea about the work we were actually doing. It didn’t stop him from micro-managing everyone though. Two years of insufferable hell as he wrecked the place.

The head-office of the stuffy old-fashioned organisation was full of public school idiots, male and female, who were also very good at talking. Luckily I was remote from that office, but still suffered the pain of endless emails where they all ‘thought out loud’ about their ideas, and stroked each other’s egos.

The actual rôle of the organisation was not really considered much by them. Brainless people on huge salaries, recruiting more of the same.

Meanwhile, at the coalface, people worked their backsides off for menial salaries, and left when they couldn’t take it anymore.

A woman 10 years older than me. Would comment how my weight was "disgusting". Loved to point out when I wasn't doing as well as her (stats on screen). Would love to mock me when I failed. Loved to point out when I wasn't invited to places she was by other colleagues. (She was mid 30s, I was mid20s).

Another male colleague. All the men had a "hot list". Would list the "top 10 sexy" women in our company. I obviously wasn't on the shitty list but he loved to point it out to me. Would make remarks like "shame YOU can't look like her", or "well YOU'RE not going to get in" (when talking about a certain club that only let in good looking women. Etc. Both were friends with my very young boss. So got away with it all. Fucking hated that company.

Urgh @YouJustDoYou that sounds utterly vile. Institutionalised culture of bullying.

SO many! The BNP voting woman who made openly racist comments, the narcissistic boss who was so unbelievably ineffectual, she dealt with an issue involving me so badly it was almost comical.
The older man who would only speak to male colleagues.
The younger female with a car crash love life who was off sick for months. Once back at work she went awol frequently, so annoying!

@CrimsonCattery Yes - me! I spoke to HR who had a word, but he didn't take much notice and still it seemed to go on. I made it my mission to warn anyone new that he could be a problem and not to be alone with him.

I think he worked on the principle that someone new wouldn't want to make a big fuss. Creepy.

When I was in retail. The lazy cow -who’s mum was a manager- who used to skive constantly. Our immediate manager was her mums friend so nothing was ever done whilst I was run ragged serving everyone and she used to serve 1 or 2 people for every 10/15 that I served.

Different job, manager was a bully. It was horrible. Out of 7 staff there wasn’t a single one of us that hadn’t been signed off with stress by the GP. Someone was brave enough to put in a complaint & it was brushed under the carpet. We all left in the end. The manager was eventually sacked for stealing so at least the new staff didn’t have to put up with her for too long.

NC because anyone that knows me knows these pathetic boss stories.

The "peroxide cowbag" boss. Would look you up and down, sneer at your outfit choice (we all wore suits and smart shoes). She was just one of those preening narcissistic cowbags that delighted in trying to make people feel inferior. She even got pregnant to piss off her sister who was struggling on IVF...despite making a big deal previously about children never being part of her grand plan to dominate the world.

The "WTF" boss. Tried to put me on a development plan because I refused to eat curry on a "fun" team night out (out of work time, unpaid). Apparently I ruined the atmosphere and brought down team moral...despite previously ordering an alternative with the organiser that I did eat. I refused to sign development plan and raised a grievance against her.

The "golgafrincham" boss. She would host teleconferences thank goodness no video ones from her bathtub. Would act surprised that she was expected to do any work and would cry to her boss in tears about her team bullying her (oddly enough we had little patience with a line manager who always spoke to us from her bathtub and was workshy so we repeatedly raised concerns and escalated issues to higher management levels, all professionally done). Thankfully she was only maternity cover so fucked off into the sunset!

I also have the displeasure of working alongside a pathological liar. I don't think he even knows when he's telling the truth. It is fucking exhausting because you have to double back on every task to make sure it really has been done and he hasn't bullshitted a completion. Throw in his repugnant sexist views, comments and actions and I'm honestly amazed that he hasn't been fired. Official complaints have been made about him but they all seem to slide off. Thankfully he's only a peer not superior so I don't have to work for him.

Smelly Simon. We worked in a basement office with useless air con and he was very proud to frequently discuss the fact that deodorant was a scam and just not necessary. It really was.

The ex colleague many moons ago who breezed in like a bulldozer, stole some of my work and passed it off as her own. Fast forward a good few years and she ended up on The Apprentice - quelle surprise!

I had a boss a few years ago who systematically bullied a different member of staff and switched up who they did this to every month or so. They were exec level and we were senior management.

It was full on for a month or so and then suddenly that person was flavour of the month while the next person got berated for everything they did. I loved my role but eventually it broke me. Six of the ten of the senior management team left over the same 6 month period. The exec moved to another company eventually and I didn't purchase a thing from the brand since - it's a massive global brand so it's not like I have any impact but it makes me feel a little better about life!

I started work as a legal secretary in a team which had one other full time secretary and one part time. The full time one was the typical been there years type who used to rule the roost, even the partners. The junior solicitors were terrified of and the partners just used to keep their mouths shut for a quiet life. The part time used to follow her around like a lamb.

Unfortunately when I joined it started showing her up e.g. she used to tell the partners that she was so busy she'd come back into work at night to pick up extra work yet I'd come in in the morning and the typing pool hadn't changed. She actually wasn't really a secretary, more of a typist because she point blank refused to do things like take messages if somebody called for one of the fee earners who was on the phone. She also used to turn to work half an hour late on the basis that she couldn't find anywhere to park yet I never struggled.

In response she started low level bullying, snide comments, loudly making arrangements to go for lunch with the other secretary but never inviting me, making drinks for everybody else, if the printer had run of paper, she would literally put in enough sheets to get her printing out and then walk away leaving it empty again. I finally reported it when she wiped my approved leave off the calendar so that when she applied for the same week as me, it would be approved because from the calendar nobody else was off.

The response I got from the HR person (who was her best friend) - yeah she's like that with all new secretaries so the team has quite a high turnover of secretaries, but she is a really quick typist.

It started getting the team into trouble where she started taking phone calls but then never passed messages on and so clients started making complaints. My ability to leave was delayed by recession but god it was a relief to get out of there.

One of the partners was also a vile little man. Used to make misogynistic comments about his wife in the hopes of getting a rise. When that didn't work he started in on my marriage (my husband travels a lot and so clearly must have a woman in every port) and then the distance learning as I was doing to eventually become a solicitor (why did I bother I was never going to pass and no law firm would ever give someone who was a legal secretary a training contract). And then when I got promoted to paralegal and started going to client meetings, telling the other solicitor what a shame it was that they didn't have any attractive females to take to client lunches as that would make getting work easier and maybe one of the pretty blonds from another department would agree to come.

Three hideous years I worked in that place and I can honestly say I wouldn't piss on those people if I was on fire.

Oo one dentist who used to try it on with each Dental nurse ‘To test their credentials Between the sheets’
From another- Plenty of sexual harassment - insisting on daily cuddles / crude comments about the soap Grading each staff member on how good he thought she’d be in bed
Female dentist boss who turned on each staff member Of her staff in turn - first they’d be the golden one could do no wrong Then suddenly they couldn’t do anything right and she’d bully them until they resigned
All years ago.

Piss on those people if *they were on fire.