Work irks part 2 (rolling)

:joy: I went down a rabbit hole of going for a kitkat break immediately after a chain-smoking former-colleague came back from a fag just to make some kind of point. Put on 4 lbs in a month. Silly idea.

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Probably PS4 or Xbox one tbh mate.

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ya but mate imagine being asked that many fkn questions when you’re in an environment you don’t want to be in, your nerves are fried from insomnia, and one of the things you must dislike and distrust is people who ask so many questions about yourself that you feel like you’re being interrogated.

edited for being too downer a reply: hmmm idk, not big on this kind of thing. i like to turn up, do the work, go home, be left alone while i’m there.

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yeah sorry, see my above edit. you haven’t been insensitive, don’t worry!

Join a union. go on strike.

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Simple instructions.

Me: Please do not begin this work until we’ve had the kick off meeting tomorrow
Direct Report: Shall I make a head start on this now?
Me: :persevere::gun:

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not really an irk, just an observation. do you know what i mean when i mention the archetype of the work fuck up who always, somehow, styles it out? ours just called to say he won’t be in today because his car window is stuck halfway open and he can’t just leave it parked out front. last week he went home early and then had 2 days off because of a sudden bout of flu. the week before he had a doctor’s appointment that took him 7 hours to attend (his GP surgery is 6 blocks away, he let it slip).

thing is, they’re usually quite fun to be around imo. always quick with a quip or a laugh. but they’re always late, always calling in sick, always have ridiculous reasons for both, always screwing stuff up, sometimes involved in dramas. yet somehow they remain employed, the managers buying every single tale of woe they spin.

until one day they just…disappear. have they been fired? no. they simply…do not arrive for their shift. nor do they answer the manager’s increasingly frantic calls as the day wears on. they have simply had enough. they want to take a break from this game. they have better things to do, and who can blame them?

time goes on. they are never seen or heard from again. no notice, no nothing. but you know as sure as day becomes night that they will fetch up in a similar middling job a few months later, their references somehow working out despite not being able to use their last few bosses. they will have a story for why the last job didn’t work out - “i had an illness in the family”, usually. and they will have a reason for why they can’t use the last boss as a reference - “he died and then he moved to canada”.

and thus the cycle begins again. and at their previous place of employment, they become as legend, only heard from secondhand - “so and so saw a facebook/instagram post of theirs, they’re working in swindon/for direct line/picking fruit in australia now”. and who are we, as mortals, to question these trickster figures and their mysterious methods and ways?

unironically, i think these guys are absolute heroes.

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when you call in sick at our place anyone can answer the call on our team, so i got it. so he first called at 8am to let us know he might be late for his 10am start cos of the window issue. the best part was that he called back around half an hour ago to say he was actually in the office car park, just so we knew he’d made a good faith effort to get to work, but his blasted window ruined his plans and he was left with no choice but to go home and wait for “the guy” to come and fix it :grinning:

there’s no management in until 1pm, genuinely curious to see how they react to this one.

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I’d love to have a direct report like this, it’d be real fun to ramp up the psychological warfare with them.

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Know these guys well. Working in ‘The City’ you can easily be earning £50k a year doing this kind of caper, without literally ever breaking a sweat. Particularly easy to circumvent any CV/reference issues as well as people tend to have worked all over.

Remember one guy at an old gaff, Dan The Rat - so called because his name was Dan and he looked like a rat. He was absolutely fucking useless. Would leave every deliverable until the last possible moment and then go off sick for a day or two when it went overdue so someone else would have to pick it up/deal with the fallout. This eventually became so stressful that his team stopped allocating him any work whatsoever, preferring to divide it up among themselves and deal with it that way rather than the constant missed deadlines. Not entirely sure how Dan filled his days, but he kept showing up for work. Until one day he didn’t - as per your example, just gone all of a sudden.

Anyway, time went on and Dan The Rat became something of a work legend and yardstick for worst colleague ever. A couple of months later, the head of the whole department (30 or so people) got sacked for being fucking useless himself, but nonetheless landed himself an even better paying job at an investment bank. Through the grapevine we heard that one of his first hires? Dan The Rat. Maybe these guys stick together in some form of mutual cooperative organisation to shield against the real/working world?

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i want in, dammit

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This was me for a few years. Fucking no idea how I got away with it all.

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same, especially early 20s :grinning:

think you settle down when you realise you’re basically doomed to this grind and all the sickies and fucking around in the world can’t change that

I’ve settled as i ended up in a place I actually like working!

I was thinking about it there and when I worked for Amazon I was the absolute worst. Thought I was going to be fired in May so downed tools and pulled sickies left right and centre. Only got let go in the last week of December! Kept turning up pissed to the 6am shift and I’d have sobered up by the time managers arrived at 9am!

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Have people visiting and presenting this week. Booked a room for the 3 days (not easy), only to be directed to an email sent around a month ago to everyone saying x department had booked it out for a month.

As opposed to using the room booking system. Now i’ve had to divide the days by different rooms which are really too small. And don’t tell me you know how I feel? You don’t know my pain.

Department X sound like they might be kind of bad-ass - don’t mess with them

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Definitely don’t sneak down after 5pm, then accidentally get infected with the radiation samples left lying around.

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Just took part in our annual company wide employee satisfaction survey. Always take great satisfaction from ticking the “Strongly disagree” box for the question “are you proud to work for the company”.

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enjoy being dragged into a brainstorming session with flip boards to formulate an action plan to improve those scores