AIBU to want to incinerate a junior colleague

[Boosiehs]

I realise IABU BTW - RANT....

He keeps coming over to me, thinking he has found errors in something I have drafted. I have already told him 5 times that this is not the case and that he is wrong.

If he comes over again can I please use my deathray on him?

Pretty please?

You can learn to be robust without someone in a position of power bullying you

redsoxfan, what nonsense - could just be a flat environment. Where I work, there is a clinic, with 30-odd doctors. Because it's part of a larger organisation, they have to fit within the organisation's grade system. which means that about 28 of them are in the same position - same job title, same grade. There is a huge difference in experience, and ability, which would be reflected in where they sit on the pay scale for that grade, but that doesn't give rise to a power imbalance... and there is no shame in being in the same role as the more junior colleagues. The only way 'up' would be to move into management and do much less doctoring, which isn't everyone's cup of tea, even if there were more such roles around.

same in my profession to move up means stopping doing what you actually like doing, so many people with officialy the same job some with 30 years experience some with 30 months

Oh I've no idea about law tbh, just saying that in general I don't think you can make assumptions about working practices and culture by whether it's public or private sector. Law's a specific sector but also what area of law you work in might make a difference to the culture. Also I don't necessarily equate tougher/ easier working conditions with abusive/ non-abusive working conditions. You can have a really demanding working environment which is actually very respectful and correct and a fairly lax one where actually it's terribly abusive and awful - what someone was saying earlier about people who don't do customer service properly is because of poor management, I think there's something in that, but I don't think abusive management is good management, IYSWIM.

I don't swear at juniors either, but I think it is time to stop hectoring limited about the fact that she says she did so once. You know what limited thinks about it, and limited knows what you think about it.

For one thing, I would like some more terrible trainee stories, I'm finding them very cathartic.

My boss has a fund of these stories from his very many years in our sector. His worst was the one who would not stop eating in their (shared) office. He snacked all morning, had lunch at his desk and then snacked all afternoon. The food varied from the innocuous (e.g. sandwiches) to the seriously off-putting (tinned sardines). Boss tried to ignore it but cracked on the day the trainee spent all morning at his desk eating a whole family size cheesecake , complete with finger-licking. After that, he was coldly but politely asked not to eat in the office and to have his lunch elsewhere.

Monstrous I once took my privately educated junior trainee out to dinner in London when we were on a business trip. She was so rude to the waiting staff in one of my favourite haunts she could have spent the next 10 years eating at her desk before I would have volunteered to go out to lunch with her again.

Does clipping nails all over the desk count as a trainee faux pas?

I know a trainee who spent the entire time his supervisor was on holiday going through the supervisor's old case files and tabbing up all the errors in the documents. That went down well....

Does clipping nails all over the desk count as a trainee faux pas?

Yes! As does rather publicly copping off with your line manager's girlfriend at the office Christmas party, which apparently one of our long-ago (before my time) trainees also did.

Then there was the very strange young man (think of a cross between Lurch from the Addams family and the Incredible Hulk, only an odd beige colour rather than green) in the admin office who could not be trained out of answering the phone and saying stuff like 'He can't take your call, he's on the toilet' at top volume.

We thought we had a lucky escape when he quit, but his successor once called up from the nick saying he wouldn't be in as he couldn't get bail!

Boss tried to ignore it but cracked on the day the trainee spent all morning at his desk eating a whole family size cheesecake , complete with finger-licking.

That's so revolting!. UGH.

DH once had a new guy who would be given a job to do, and then go away and do something different, because he'd decided that the other job was more important. He'd then, very slowly and precisely, explain to DH why what he'd done was more important, instead of having done the thing he should have. DH stuck it for 3 days, then called him in to fire him.

As he sat down, the man said, "Oh no, not again." How many times was he fired in the first week?!

could not be trained out of answering the phone and saying stuff like 'He can't take your call, he's on the toilet' at top volume

We had an office junior like that once! I wonder if he was the same one. Ours was in his first job which made it just about excusable but it wouldn't have been tolerated for long.

We had a temp once whose first week didn't go well. He habitually turned up late, took a long lunch hour and left early. He seemed to have great difficulty with mastering pretty straightforward basic office admin tasks. Then at the start of his second week he rang in to say he had a cold and wouldn't be in till Thursday. While he was off several of us told our office manager that he had to go. She braced herself to sack him but on his first day back, to her great surprise and relief, he resigned. The relief was tinged with fascinated disgust because all the time he was expatiating on how the role just wasn't for him and how sorry he was for letting her down, a huge string of snot was descending from his nose and he made no effort to wipe it. We weren't sorry to see the back of him.

Gruntfuttock, the boss was so traumatised by this spectacle that to this day he can tell you what flavour cheesecake it was ! Sadly, I can't remember.

I agree, let's have more trainee stories. We once had one who would fall asleep on the toilet.

When I worked in a pub I spent a long time trying to explain pork scratchings to a new team member. He couldn't grasp that it was real life pig skin.

BoyFromTheBigBadCity I don't get how he couldn't grasp such a simple fact as that. Did he just disbelieve you? Surely he could see the hairs sticking out of it. How odd.

As penance for my part in derailing the thread slightly earlier, I offer up somebody who wrote off a brand new company car on their second day with the company. To be fair, it wasn't their fault as someone drove into them but still...

this person may or may be not be me

And I didn't know about the pork scratchings either! I've never eaten one on my life though.

Real actual pig skin? hairs sticking out of it?!

Not a trainee, but the son of one of the directors spent part of the summer between school and university doing work experience at our company. He interpreted 'work experience' as telling people he was supposed to be shadowing that they were doing it all wrong. He was very insistent that he was right even when the reasoning behind the procedure was explained to him. His Mum was fairly formidable so, rather than slapping him, people passed him on to another department as soon as they could and found reasons why it wasn't convenient to have him back. In the end somebody suggested that he could best gain experience by working on his Mum's projects. We all noted that he never told HER that she was wrong.

Grunt, I have no idea. Purple, yes, real life pig skin.

Tbf. First time I changed a barrel I broke a fob (technical term) that required an engineer come out. I'm assured it would have happened to whoever had changed the barrel but still.

Oh here's another one for the lawyers out there. Trainee was asked to look something up on the FSA website. 3 hours later, trainee comes back and says "I've been looking for ages but I can't find anything about that on the Food Standards Agency website". This was while working in a magic circle law firm finance department...

This morning I found myself sending an email which said OK. It really, in my head, said Fuck Off.

Some days my filter does not work as well as this, though.

Good job all folk don't think like this. I've spotted and questioned mistakes that had potential to kill people.

Wow FreeButton. Just wow.

I have no trainee stories. My traineeship was so strict that we all had our mobile phones confiscated and put in a special bag in a locked cloakroom locker on the first day. We all sat in a room shared with the (robust) Senior Partner's Head Secretary, who watched us like a hawk. My DH made the mistake of calling me about our house purchase on my work number at our official lunchtime, and she listened in, reported it to the Senior Partner and I got a row for taking personal calls at work.

The secretary was far more scary than the senior partner, and he could be intimidating. I actually learnt far more from him and his even more shouty deputy in a shorter time than anyone else. They really kept you on the ball and showed you the speed you needed to work at and the attention to detail you needed.

I've heard of people doing traineeships for free (though I think people paying firms to do them is a fiction, unless anyone knows differently?). I went to one interview where I was told I wouldn't be expected to actually take my statutory holidays, as getting a traineeship was a privilege, especially in a small family run firm. Although they would "let" me take a day at Christmas and one at New Year.

One of the senior partners at work brought his daughters to work one day, who are horrendously brattish little shits.

They closed one of the internal meeting rooms and made a sign that stretched the whole glass wall with their names and a slogan that said how important they were because the director was their dad. Nobody could use the meeting room and, obviously, the dad thought this was hilarious and charming. It was neither.

They then strutted around saying they thought they'd be better in charge because they'd "make all these normal people work better".

In a busy law office it was not appreciated!

Thechandler I was once told in an interview for a trainee position (not law) that given they were training me "I should be paying them"... They weren't joking and offered me the job on £6k a year.

I remember the story of a trainee in an investment bank being told to " go ask Bloomberg", he then went off and emailed asking if anyone has a bloke called Bloomberg phone number.

I’m not a bully and I don’t often shout and swear at people – not sure where that came in but maybe that’s because I’m a good reporter who pays attention to detail and accuracy and some of you don’t and make stuff up either wilfully or more probably because you aren’t good on details.

This particular person on this particular occasion missed the point of his job by a million miles.

He was doing a story and wanted to hang on for an interview that would make it better. I agreed, so let it wait. As the day progressed, while I was dealing with other stuff and other staff, I had to keep asking him, and only him, when he was going to deliver the copy. Any copy. The practicalities of the job are that you write copy and then you can drop in a later interview at the last minute. Subs can do this. You don’t have to write it. You just tell them. I’ve seen them do it in seconds right up to deadline. They often have to change the whole news angle under the guidance of a senior news executive. It’s very impressive.

Anyway, we were approaching deadline and I was looking at dead space or late charges at the printers and serious questions about my judgement and job in indulging this budding Woodward and Bernstein if I couldn’t fill the space.

So yes, I did swear at him and spiked his non-existent story and his career at my workplace. I don’t feel at all badly about my decision.