To wonder how people who are A Nightmare at work don't realise they are

[CurdinHenry]

You know the ones - not just shit or mean but flamboyantly stressful and awful and if you end up on a project with them you might have to quit entirely. You try to grey rock them but they drag you back in with unforeseen madness and a true belief that they are the wronged geniuses in a sea of fools. In big organisations they go from team to team and everyone shudders when their name is mentioned (oh yes Sue is going to lead that project on NO not fucking Sue) but no one will ever say because you can't really can you.

But they get distressed and have narcissistic rages when people don't agree with them and add more and more and more chaos and never stop to think

Wait

Is it me?

Spent 30 years in public sector and this is exactly the case. In fact the organisational structures and decision making are framed to avoid individual accountability by blurring and watering down who makes the decisions or who took any actions. This is so you can eventually trace a critical decision to someone who has left the organisation. You then blame them, but learn lessons, place another tier of decision making in place and move on, or if it was really bad, restructure.
This culture creates weird behaviour where minor work things become major fall outs, people have too much time to feel hard done by or slighted, entitlement around work expectations get out of hand and basic managing is 'bullying'.
It perculates into you life outside work too as you become cynical and less tolerant.

I think I might be the workplace nightmare!

I'm ASD and no-notice changes really throw me. I go into full on panic mode, even though I know if I can sit it out for 24 hours, I'll calm down. But I rarely CAN wait it out, so I go ape shit for that 24 hours then get used to the idea and chill out.

But I can imagine for those around me, that 24 hour period is bloody awful. Not helped by the fact that I was of a reasonable age / way into my career before I was diagnosed so had no understanding of why I was like this.

I comfort myself with the fact that although I'm a fucking nightmare, that I'm incredibly productive, finish everything I do before anyone else and never, ever miss a deadline. Swings and roundabout innit.

I'm dealing with a rumbling HR issue at the moment and can see ALL the exchanges.

The woman concerned is throwing mud at everyone because EVERYONE is wrong about EVERYTHING. And I am TOTALLY WRONG in my own specialism when I'm trying to meet her needs in the case because EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING THEIR JOBS WRONG and somehow in my tangential role AND I SHOULD BE FIXING THEIR WORK AS I ENCOUNTER IT.

Thing is, she's making lots of errors herself. And she also brought a lot of good to the org too, on a good day. But she has very quickly nitpicked all her colleagues to death by constantly correcting them. Sometimes she's right, sometimes she's wrong, and sometimes it's subjective/not important to correct. But 100% of the time she's gone in with a two-footed THIS IS WRONG response.

There’s always one.
If you don’t know who it is, it’s you.

I sort of wonder if there should be an option for a "bloodless breakup" with an employee. Three months notice plus three months full pay also, dates of employment to run to the end of the whole six months.

Confidential and compensated fuck off.

Having dealt with all manner of prolonged scenarios of difficulty employees leaving, I can't imagine it would be cost more.

(I also wish it was more normalised to have a long notice period and short gaps between employment to make job hunting that bit less stressful)

In the public sector it seems to be completely impossible to get rid of anyone. So many people who are shit at their jobs get promoted upwards not out and it's so frustrating.

Oh god yes - with the added fun of it being a small organisation so there's no getting away from them

we have the "I'm sooo busy, im
sooo busy" team member who is only soooo busy because they bog themselves in irrelevant unimportant detail

the swanning around going to lots of meetings but not actually doing anything team member

and the completely useless at their job but been there forever and everyone is just waiting for them to retire team member

all of them should have been managed out years ago....

My old work I had 2 one was so loud it literally hurt my ears and we worked with young kids.
the other drove me mad she couldn't answer a question quickly. An example is John staying for lunch today so answer is yes or no. The conversation would be he stayed yesterday and ate beans and toast but he didn't like them which is weird he ate them before.remember his brother only ate the crusts. By now chaos is happening in the room as two of us are distracted 😂😂

Loving that people don’t realise that everyone is someone’s nightmare at work, even if they aren’t loud and dramatic 🤣