Work AIBU.. no im not.

[susanfromHR]

This is a safe space for all of us who want to rant about work things that irritate us without being told we are unreasonable.

Share how Susan from HR takes the comfy chair in the staff room every lunch, how your manager drives past you at the bus stop every time it’s raining and waves without offering a lift or how Linda the cleaner throws things away they deem are rubbish without asking but are actually the countries nuclear codes.

I’ll go first- I work with kids and have this parent who is so intent on making sure their child isn’t criticised that they say ‘that’s okay’ to everything. I’ll say ‘they’re tired’, ‘they’ve chosen their own outfit today’ ‘they pronounced xyz word in a cute and funny way today’ always with a ‘well that’s okay’ YES I KNOW, I’m simply observing and most of the time Saying it with the intention of boosting or complimenting your child argh.

It’s every day and it drives me crazy. What’s yours ? 😂

There is a bloke where I work who, when he messages on Teams, just messages “Hi Kreed” and then waits for a response. Just tell me what the fuck you want, mate. We’re communicating in writing, it’s not a phone call. You don’t need exchange hellos before you ask me something. I also dislike “Hi - have you got a minute?” with no indication of why. If its more urgent than whatever I’m doing, then yes, I’ve got a minute; if it’s not, I’ll call you once I’ve finished. Just give me a fucking clue.

I also sometimes have to attend meetings with an absolute tosspot of a management consultant who, if he disagrees with someone, points at them and says “Counterpoint” before he explains why he disagrees. Every single time. Absolutely fine to disagree, just don’t announce it like a prick.

@KreedKafer send him this link https://nohello.net/en/

Ugh yes the bloody hello on teams.

I work near a guy who, when he’s not conducting phone calls in his foghorn voice, chuckles like Goofy. Hyuk hyuk hyuk… all fucking day long

Why the fuck are we told that we can get cover for our shifts if it’s just going to be written down as an absence/sick day? That makes no fucking sense

There is a bloke where I work who, when he messages on Teams, just messages “Hi Kreed” and then waits for a response.

Oh my God- this drives me round the bend! Whenever someone Teams messages me “Hi Peaches”, I ignore them. Don’t care if my colleagues think it’s unprofessional, if they want me to do something they can email me or phone me.

I also get so annoyed by the nonsense office jargon in meetings. “Let’s circle back” “blue sky thinking” “we’re not teaching granny to suck eggs” “can we touch base on …”. Infuriates me, just speak in normal fucking sentences.

Calling without sending a ‘free for a call message’. I will ignore you and message you back instead unless you are my manager or working with me directly on something and I know it must be urgent. If it could have been an email you don’t need to randomly call at 11:15am with no warning!

Working under someone who does NOTHING and no one else seems to notice :(

There is someone at my office who not only does this.... but blind transfers external calls to me! 24/7!

The caller then inevitably says 'I expect your colleague has filled you in'... errrr no, I do not even know where you are calling from much less any details!

There is a girl at work who talks so loudly and is such a caricature of annoying aggressive arrogant overconfidence

she doesn’t care what anyone thinks and can be really blunt and start arguments with people - like a bulldog in a china shop

Yy to the hi on teams thing. Just say it ffs! And also those who call when I'm in red. And when I don't answer because I'm clearly on a call don't send a follow up message and expect me to just call them back.

My rants:
I work in operations and there us such a them and us culture between us and sales. They blame us for everything, want to ramp up the volume despite knowing we don't have the capacity then moaning about increased SLAs.
Also expecting us to speak to the customer when it's bad news despite it being their job - the clue is in the name relationship manager!!

Pointless meetings no-one has time for run by a department who are supposed to be there to support "operational efficiency"
Justifying thier enormous salaries more like, despite people with actual useful jobs being made redundant.

Being told in 1 breath that my team need to be more productive and speed up, and I need to put them on performance plans if they don't hit efficiency targets, while simultaneously being told that QC is poor and my team need to slow down and be more accurate and I need to put them on performance plans if they don't hit QC targets.

I'm having a bad week, can you tell?

Colleagues who send Teams messages by pressing return after every single sentence. Bam bam bam. I usually ignore until they’ve been quiet for 10 mins to make sure I’m replying to the whole thing.

A workmate who is forever calling in sick at the last minute and knowingly leaves the team in the shit. I don’t know how he keeps getting away with it.

Miniscule pay rises - less than a fiver a week, despite the massive increase in workload over the past year and the company boasting record profits. It’s an insult.

Getting moaned at for wishing to take holiday time. You’d think I was asking for 6 months off starting on Monday, rather than a week 4 months from now.

Obnoxious customers - these have also increased massively recently. Today I had 5 customers in a row have a go at me about things that had nothing to do with us - stuff like the weather, the traffic, the homeless man sitting down the street. I then had several more who were pissed off that we couldn’t resolve their issues immediately, and that we’d need to contact the relevant departments to get answers and get back to them. There’s an ever-increasing number of people who think being aggressive fixes things. I’m very close to being completely done with the job.

I'm in a new job & it's ridiculously hierarchical, usually on length of employment. One of the longer serving staff has realised she can get away with sending me all her client follow up calls instead of doing them herself. She's not nasty, just lazy & seeing an opportunity to dump the crap work she doesn't want to do. I can't object without causing issues as she's besties with the manager.

Zero training but expected to just know how to do everything. And do it a certain persons preferred way. Even if it's wrong.

Bosses who earn millions but pay min wage to support staff (me included), and put massive workloads on staff, then complain staff are inexperienced, don't stay, and don't give a sh*t.

The staff members, who, not giving a sh*t about the job, continually call in sick & dump the rest of us in it.

No, I won't be staying long, just long enough to get back into the game!

People (clients, service users)... who message our live message service:

"Hi..."

And then a few seconds later:

"??"

It's not a text, you have as many letters as you want, it isn't a call, just tell me what you need help with.

I have perhaps 10+ other people at the same time who have sent me this sort of message:

'I have x issue with x thing and we've tried a, b and c, these are the results but we're not sure if we're going wrong, what would you suggest?'

I'll be answering those people first, because I actually don't have time to wheedle out of you whatever the fuck it is you want.

(In reality I tend to ask them how I can help, but we'd all get where we need to be a lot faster if people just asked their fucking question!)

The other ones are the 'I'm going to give you a tiny clue to the issue, that is within a broad subject, but I'll give you none of the details' people. Imagine the relevant field is computer technology...:

"Keyboard"...

So I have to ask them ten billion questions about their keyboard issues, and they'll leave it five hours before bothering to come back, and won't answer half my pertinent questions. Even the ones who waited three seconds between their single word statement and then adding '??' to denote urgency.

And yes they are aware they're talking to a real person, we make that very clear. They have actively chosen to speak to a real person rather than our AI bot.

How come Flossy is allowed to take so much holiday when it's actually organisational policy to have it capped at far less and how come they have that amount of annual holiday anyway when it took the rest of us ten years to gain that privilege?

Why are things happening in the department that are against policy and dropping morale below the floor and the absentee manager is always, well, absent and HR doesn't give a badger's backside?

How come Fluffy is allowed to be off sick every other day (I am not exaggerating) under the guise of working from home and that sickness never seems to trigger any of the actual organisational procedures and discipline the rest of us are subject to?

And why oh why does the absentee manager listen mostly to the stupidest, laziest, most over promoted staff member about everything and seem incapable of seeing their spitefulness, incompetence and vendettas against some other staff? While not listening to the staff who do actually know what they're on about?

There are days it's like working with a bunch of six year olds in charge. Actually, three year olds is probably closer.

I've stopped going into the office on Tuesdays because I cannot bear the noises my colleague makes. He sniffs. Clears his throats. Glugs from his water bottle loudly. CONSTANTLY. I confess I am very sensitive to noise but it's just relentless.

A colleague bangs on endlessly about her daughter. Her grades, her hobbies, her issues with friends, everything imaginable. Nobody fucking cares about the minutia of what your kids are doing. It's tortuous.

I use to work for a boss that if someone was annoying him he would look over their shoulder and say "what's that behind you?" when the person looked behind he would say "don't worry it's just your career"

My current manager will constantly interrupt me when I'm busy and say i need to share this , it's important. She will be holding an email she's printed off (another bug bear of mine) I stop my actual work to discover she 'needs ' to tell me that the next time I stock take (next month) there's been a slight change to procedure. This is an email on the business account which I also have access to and could read my self.

Yes, I know I’m taking the lift to just go up one floor. If you don’t like it, take the stairs. If the lift was only meant for people going up to the 2nd floor, there wouldn’t be a button for the 1st floor.

I don’t understand. Presumably if you need cover, you are absent or sick?

Bloke in the team says everything is a game changer. No it bloody isn't!

Stop sending me WhatsApp messages that should be emails. Just STOP

So let’s say I’m scheduled to work this Friday but I no longer can because I have a last minute hospital appointment. I’ve asked a colleague to take my shift and they’ve very kindly agreed. In our office, our manage would just take my name off of the rota so it looks like I was never scheduled to work that day.

Apparently, too many people have been getting cover for their shifts so now instead of the rota being amended, we’re now getting written down as unauthorised absence etc. It’s just an annoying change that’s come out of nowhere!

A place I used to work had a really annoying bloke.

We were supposed to hot desk, but people tend to prefer a particular desk.

Blokie would use his preferred computer and then not just log off, but switch off the computer.

This would not have been a problem if that computer wasn't also the printer server.

He also used to smoke a pipe. It was just before the smoking ban, so smoking was allowed in the kitchen. Most smokers would open the window and smoke out of it but he would smoke his pipe as far from the window as possible.

Ooh I have one for this. Demarcation of team between 3 who do absolutely nothing and 3 who bust a gut but the lazy fuckers never get pulled up for it, despite very clear stats showing that they are not performing at all. Two of the 3 lazy fuckers are quite arsey which I think protects them. Manager lovely but spineless. It has enraged me to such a degree that I'm compiling the stats of their inactivity so that I can present it to manager and ask her to explain. I know in my heart that this will do me no good whatsoever. Maybe I'd be better joining the lazy fucker gang.