Aibu to ask for your pet peeve at work

[Whisperingwinds]

What’s the one thing that your colleagues do that drive you up the wall - emails without subject lines does it for me.

Thehogfather she does that too, they're everywhere! She loves to start a task 5 minutes before she finishes and pass it on.

We have a couple of people who love to start a task then pass it on at the complicated bits. Or something comes in and they will say 'oh that is urgent' while already walking away.

I could go on all day.

• people who take credit for your work

• people who interfere in your department because they don't have enough work

• people who leave on time even though they know you are desperately waiting for them to do something (small) for you

I work on customer services in retail and my biggest one is colleagues not using the handover book or telling me important details. It is not there to make the desk look untidy, it is there for a reason so FUCKING USE IT!

If Mrs Smith is coming in at 5pm to collect the purse she lost yesterday, but it is in the safe in the cash office that can only be accessed by cash office staff that leave at 3pm, it's usually a good idea to leave a note for the person coming in at noon to inform them of this, rather than ending the day with a pissed off Mrs Smith who has made a special trip to get her purse and was promised it would be there and a stressed out colleague who has been screamed at for something that there is zero record of anywhere and they have no knowledge of whatsoever.

Also managers who micromanage yet have zero knowledge of how your job works ... I work in a supermarket and the front end manager in my store (so overseeing checkouts, customer services etc) will constantly tell people how to do their job and what we should be doing. This would be fine, but this manager has never done our jobs and isn't even trained on how to use a till ... I do my job day in day out, you haven't done my job for even five minutes, of the two of us I think I am more qualified to say how the processes work!

Smelly food in the open plan office microwave. I once lost it with a colleague for cooking sardines in there (I was pregnant but not telling and the smell made me heave)
I work for a small company and was one of the first employees which meant a lot of general housekeeping jobs fell to me, pet peeves:
Not refilling the hand towel dispenser in the toilet.
Not saying when they use the last of something.
Bad dishwasher stacking
I swear some of the office believe fairies do these things.
I'm on mat leave, sometimes I think the baby is less demanding. I won't have to deal with this shit when I go back as there's an office manager now.

PEOPLE WHO SEND EMAILS ALL IN BLOCK CAPITALS. It makes them really hard to read.

And people who truly bash at their keyboards as they type- if nothing else it must be awful for their finger joints (and annoying for me hearing this huge thump thump)

Noisy eaters in the office, particularly lip smacking, taking with mouth full, and gross chewing noises

Oh and people who hoard EVERYTHING regardless of how old it is and nobody ever clearing out our desk.

Just after New Year I was working a quiet shift on customer services and I knocked a huge pile of books off a shelf under the desk ... they were all old record books. We do have to keep them for a short time for reference but there were books that went' back A DECADE. Nobody in 2018 still needs to know that Sarah Jones came in for a refund on a £3 double scanned pizza from July 2010! I binned over 100 old record books that evening and needed to keep just 7 from the last 12 months

When I mentioned it to all the other customer service desk colleagues, none of them had ever considered whether we needed them, they just continued to add to the pile assuming that "someone" would clear them out.

Ooh, another one: people getting my name wrong. Particularly when said people work with me every day via phone, email and in person!

The graduates constantly complaining about how little they get paid, despite being on £20k+ (not London) straight out of uni and being funded through a professional qualification.

The NHS seems to have uniquely fragile printers, and none of them are ever easy to add to your profile. So you can usually only print to one printer in the whole hospital, and if you are ten floors away from that one printer or it is broken again that is just unfortunate for you.

The pcs themselves are nearly as old as me so take literally about ten minutes to boot up, or just don’t work. I know places still running Windows XP.

The amount of money wasted by having highly-paid senior doctors sitting around wrestling with creaky 1990s IT must be astronomical. Most people bring their own laptops in from home for anything not directly patient related.

When someone sends you an email and then less than a minute later calls and tells they have just sent you an email... ARRGH

People that go off topic in meetings. People that talk slowly in meetings. People that invite attendees to meetings that don't need to be there. People that finish other people's sentences in meetings. Meetings...I have to go to so many and 90% of the time, an e-mail containing the bulletpoints of the meeting would suffice for most of the people that are there.

People that talk to themselves. Acquire some fucking social skills you idiot. Only way that was resolved for good was by wheeling my chair over to them to ask what they were saying, every single time they did it. I think they thought I was the person in the wrong!

Mansplaining.
We have the same qualifications in that, i know what I'm doing.

Apart from the time he mansplained something I had a qualification in and he didn't, that amused me.

I work in a very small reception area, along with support workers and nurses who pop in to use the printer copier.

As it’s a very small reception it gets busy and very loud, drawers banging shut, people talking and laughing (fine) but I can’t hear what the patient is saying.

When I mentioned how loud it gets, the reply is, “it’s a small reception, suck it up.”.

And I’d have thought that BECAUSE it’s a small reception area, people would think on when I’m having to SHOUT above them. I feel sorry for the patients who think I’m shouting at them...

Meetings that start at 4pm (I finish then). Let's have them at 8am instead, when you're not in?!

A couple of weeks ago the person I was sat next to was coughing all day, without putting their hand to their mouth or using a tissue, they also had incredible coffee breath. They compounded these insults by talking very loud on the phone, I wear hearing aids so when I am on the phone I struggle to tune out fog horn voices in the office to concentrate on the person trying to talk to me. 😬

So by the end of the day I was queasy and headachey and very resentful.

When people dont wash the rim of their cup, and leave lipstick marks on it. Yeah thats clean!

Clinking their spoon on the bowl when they eat their cereal.
We don't even start that early so no idea why they can't just eat their cereal at home.
There is about 4 of them that do this.

People who dictate the new compliance rules and then don't follow them. All
Phone calls have to be noted on our computer system - except apparently only by me. the boss has told me 3 times now to make sure I'm doing it but refuses to do it herself because "she's not logged in". I was already doing it anyway because that was the rule at my last job.

Having to train the apprentice. I wouldn’t mind but he doesn’t retain anything I try to teach him so I end up having to tell him again the following week.

Said apprentice noisily biting his nails

People commenting on what I’m eating. Feck off yes I know how many calories are in this cake Debbie I’ll have 2 if I bloody want to!

The refusal of my manager to let me do ANYTHING despite the fact I have the same qualification she does, I just did mine 10 years after

Personal phone calls (not the odd occasion, I mean at least hourly, for 10 minutes), no subject lines in emails, not being invited to a meeting and then being expected to attend, people moaning how busy they are arriving late, leaving early or taking an hour and a half lunch.

Sprays Lynx after they've been to the gym.

People who jam the copier and then just walk away and leave it

Yeah, that an’ all.

People that feign helplessness when they don't want to do something for themselves.

People that drum on the desk.

People that think standard procedures don't apply to them. ('Oh I know we're meant to give reception notice if we have a visitor coming in but I thought it'd be fine if I didn't... can you do it for me?')

People that send a meeting invite, then roughly one million adjustment followups where they shift said meeting back and forth by half an hour or so each time. Just check everyone's calendar first and make sure you're booking it for a time that suits everyone!

Managers that think that if they say, 'I really want x done by y time' that makes it magically possible, even if there is no physical way that said thing can be done in that timeframe and the reason that it's suddenly urgent is because they didn't pull their finger out weeks ago and get things started while we still had a chance of hitting the deadline.

People that stop to have a chat right in front of the security barriers.

People that think I'm the office dogsbody because I'm the least senior. I have a very specific job and answer to one specific person. No, I can't 'just quickly tape up this parcel and book a courier' for you. I am busy doing the thing I was hired for. General administration is not in my job spec.