The Assholes We Work With

The problem with places like work or school is you usually have no choice in who works next to you unless of course you run the place, even then people are still going to drive you insane.

Right now, stuck on the afternoon shift (which I hate) I am forced to work near Keith (whom I hate). Keith is the worlds biggest pathological liar who also happens to talk at the same volume of a space shuttle launch. And every second word he says is "fuck" and the stream of bullshit never stops. From this tiny weakling claiming he could hit a softball 400 feet when he was 12 years old to his family owning all of the land surrounding Toronto's Pearson airport so it can no longer expand, to him putting a guy in a coma with one punch and stealing his girlfriend at the same time it never. Fucking'. Stops.

Although I call him out rarely because he's entertainment on a dull night, at the same time his utter in-your-face loud obnoxiousness drives me up the wall. I'm moody being on a shift where I don't see my family all week, I don't need his salt rubbed in the wound.

He's not the worst person I ever worked with. That would be my roofing foreman. Literally Hitler. With a bucket of water and a bad extension cord, that's how I would end him.

Focus: Who is the worst person (or people) you had to work with? What makes them that Special Someone?

 

There are numerous answers to this question. At my former job, my least favourite people were two-fold: One was an idiot with an ego who made my life more difficult because she'd inject herself into situations that did not require her involvement, and she'd ultimately fuck them six ways from Sunday. The second was a whore who banged a few of my friends and gave them herpes.

At my current job, there's my boss. My moronic, bumbling, sulking, fucking weirdo of a boss.

Some examples I have given in the past:

Dude needs to fucking retire.

 

Everyone has worked with a Keith at some point in their life. Someone so insecure, so habitually broken by every encounter in their life they feel compelled to inflate their egos by any ridiculous measure. I have to wonder if they really think people believe them. My Keith was some mongoloid over a decade ago who worked at a pizza joint with me, a driver. Looked like an obese Richard Ramirez with coke bottle glasses. He did everything cool, better than you.

Every day, literally every shift, he would get a bacon pizza and dump a handful of hot pepper packets on the thing until you couldn't see the cheese. "Oh, you think that's too much? I like it spicy!" 15ish minutes later he was invariably shitting himself inside out leaving me with all his deliveries. Which was great, because it meant more money for me and I didn't have to sit in the store listening to him talk about getting laid. You see, he was a pussy magnet when he wasn't streaking his tighty whiteys. The work bathroom was completely unusable solely because of him. Perpetually filthy and reeking of retard shits.

Was a retail manager for a while. Company policy was that I had absolutely zero authority to do anything except send someone home like it was highschool. That sucked because I would then be down a person until/if someone else could be reached in pre-dawn hours. The store manager himself couldn't even fire people. Same store manager hired two people without my having interviewed them. One was the laziest waste of life I have ever met. His idea of stocking shelves was throwing items still in the wrapper behind the shelves, behind other items. I swear he was throwing items away just so he didn't have to stock them. He'd hang out in the bathroom for a quarter of his shift, rude to customers. Fairly typical bullshit except he was over 30 with a kid. Couldn't fire him, corporate doesn't like paying unemployment.

But, no, the other guy was worse. Because he was mentally disabled in some way. Dude was either high as fuck or had brain damage. He looked like some normal kid, but his eyes were completely dead. Nothing registered. His work ethic was worse than the guy above. Breath that could have melted steel. We'd catch him stealing chocolate from the register, caught on camera, he'd still deny it. With chocolate on his lips. He had a kid too. Of course he did. One fine day he smelled like straight up shit. He was actually making me gag up close; we could smell him a 10 feet. I am certain he shit his pants, but kept working. He either had a load in his pants or hadn't showered in weeks. Finally sent home for that. They started phasing his shifts out. I recall a Rant about that a few years ago.

 

I'm in cosmetology.
It's an hours based program.
As long as I am physically in this building for 1500 hours and can pass a state board I will be licensed to cut and color hair.

It doesn't mean I'll be good at it. (That said, I'm pretty fucking good, especially given the road I've had here.)

If other schools are more disorganized than this one I can't fathom their procedures.

The worst person is our head instructor. She's a snide, condescending, favoritism playing, patronizing cunt. Her performance as an educator is consistent in its inconsistency and that's about it.
She's super skilled. She knows what the fuck she's talking about when it comes to hair.
But in every thing else she's ignorant. She's never seen the world, she had no exposure to anything outside this area and no desire to see anything else.
She's sacrificed family and home time to have this job and can't understand why anyone else wouldn't.

Shes not a nice person and can't pay a sincere compliment to save her life.

Ugh. She makes me NOT like being here.

 

I've worked with some weirdos over the years, but my old boss takes the cake. She was insecure, opinionated and unprofessional (but not in a fun way).

Examples:
She frequently bragged (WTF?) to us, her subordinates, about how "wild and crazy" she was. On multiple occasions, she told us allll about snorting coke with her mom in high school. I think I would keep that to myself, or at least outside of my work life. She also frequently bragged about how "rich" she was. Yeah, right. Even if you are rich nobody cares.

She loudly berated me in front of a group of nurses for not answering my personal cell phone while I was in a patient's room. Mind you, I had my work phone turned on and physically on my body. That one didn't so much as vibrate once. "Who else would be calling you at 8 am?" I don't know...my husband, my mom, maybe a recruiter in BFE, Florida since EVERYONE AND THEIR DOG KNOWS THAT I'M LOOKING FOR ANOTHER JOB AND MY RESUME'S POSTED ON ABOUT 5 WEBSITES. Silly me for waiting until I left the room to glance at my phone. All of the drama was to tell me that there was a student there (unexpectedly) to shadow me for the day. Really important, life or death stuff we're talking about here.

Everybody hated her. Literally, nobody liked her. Not even her patients. She did see patients 15% of the time, and I would occasionally treat them when she wasn't there. They frequently told me how rude and aggressive she was with them. They would graciously say, "She must have been having a really bad day." All I could think was, "Lady, you have no idea how unpleasant that bitch is. That's just her personality on an average day."

She knew more than everyone about everything. The stock market, accounting, the socioeconomic issues plaguing SE Asia, oil & gas, fly fishing...she's done it all, seen it all, and the rest of us are simpletons who are doing it wrong. That got old fast. Our workroom was completely silent when she was there because we got so sick of her yammering on and on. We didn't want to provoke the beast, so we didn't say a damn word to each other in front of her.

She called my co-workers and me at all hours of the day about silly, petty shit that could have easily waited until the next work day. 9 pm, 7 am, all day during my day off. It didn't matter. Like a psycho ex, she would repeatedly call or text every 5 minutes until you responded.

She was a shitty manager who didn't support our dept. The hospital overbooked surgeries, and they were freaking out over not having enough beds. My boss called me at 7 pm (a solid 3 hours after I had seen all of my patients and gone home) to drive 20 miles back to work and see if I could clear a patient for home. I rolled in around 8 and saw this lady who was a fucking hot mess doped up on dilaudid earlier that afternoon. Shockingly, she was still a hot mess and I didn't clear her. A decent manager would've said, "No, sorry, but my staff has already gone home today. If you want to send someone home go for it, but they aren't coming back until tomorrow morning."

Fuck that nonsense. That was the stupidest job I've ever had. I could go on and on about more psycho stuff she said and did, but I tried to block it out of my memory. Thinking about it for this post is raising my blood pressure.

 

Tommy.

This is a 55-ish year old Texan who just makes it past the midget level. Literally 5'2" in boots, normal size head, body and hands....just really short arms and legs. He wears an $800 ten gallon hat and ostrich-skin boots to work in KSA. He smokes $12 a stick montecristos, usually 5 or 6 a day because he quit smoking and this was better for him. He constantly brags about his brand new top of line corvette that he bought his wife and how he had a train air horn installed on his F-350.....stupid shit. He brags how he makes $350k a year, not bad for a guy without a degree....he even says this to the guys he has working for us. Despite all of this, he is telling me that I have to stall my home leave because he hasn't finished his home refinancing that he needs to do because of his tax bill. Really? You are 55 or so years old making that kind of money and you still have a mortgage? Brilliant.

He was supposed to be my boss but would find every excuse in the book to stay home in Texas and not come out to KSA. It got to the point that he would show up the day before I went out on vacation and leave the day I arrived back from vacation. Upper management apparently was ok with this too. He had a Napoleon complex and would try to bash me and tell me I was wrong all the time. He was a slow talker and it took him forever to make decisions and I would invariable interrupt him because he was taking too long and he would get pissed. We argued daily and it was ugly, we argued in front of the staff too, which is worse. In reality he was nothing more than a construction superintendent who was promoted beyond his skill level. He really did not possess the basic traits necessary to be a leader or a project manager. He couldn't read schedules, refused to go through the balance sheet (or didn't understand how to), didn't know how to coordinate efforts, was a bad judge of character and ability.....pretty much sucked at life.

In any case, he was the reason I bailed out of the last company I worked for. They tried to keep me: move me, promote me, pay me more but I had had it. I told them flatly that if they were willing to accept his level of mediocrity in that position then I didn't need to be there.

 

I could have an entire thread devoted to my boss.

He sent me an email yesterday telling me to set aside some time for a meeting regarding my goals. This morning, he tells me in the lunchroom that he wants to have "a face to face meeting regarding your goals". I said "the meeting you already set up? Regarding the goals that I needed to submit three weeks ago which are still not done because I'm waiting on information from you, despite four follow ups?" "It isn't a meeting to make sure they're done. It's just a face to face to discuss them." "We've discussed these at length. Just send me the paperwork I need to finish them." "I want a face to face." "I'm in your face. Tell me what you have to say." "I want to have a face to face meeting". "MOTHERFUCKER, I AM IN YOUR FACE. TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS ON YOUR MIND."

 

Oh holy Christ, where do I begin?

I posted a rant few months back about my soul sucking job.(and I'm too lazy to be bothered to find or link it)

This is mostly do to my Direct supervisor, D.

D is one of those ladies that thinks she is always proper, never says a coarse word, and speaks so as never to be offensive. The type of person who just awkwardly laughs about anything that could mistaken as offensive and slowly slinks off.

Nothing too bad, right? Except she is a complete idiot. She alone was responsible for making me a phone monkey. I was suddenly put in the position of doing the work of 3 people when one of my coworkers retired (because as the coworker put it - she was just tired of putting up with the bullshit and a useless supervisor). I put up with this for a year and a half until I finally had a loud and spirited discussion at her desk about how I needed a change of position or I was out. That was October of last year at which time she told me there would be a change come November.
November came and I asked about it. Her reply was , "well, October was a crazy month, let's get caught up first."
Then came December, then January.

Then in February we got a new manager. To get to know her new team she sat with each of us for about 5 hours each. She got the full scope of the bullshit I dealt with daily all the while me informing her of situations that would arise that I would normally ask my supervisor to assist with but I was tired of asking D something only to be answered with, "well, let's pretend you are the supervisor...what would you do?" (I did tell D in our "coming to Jesus" meeting November that if she ever told me that again I was going straight to HR - to her credit that was the last I heard her say that).
I also advised the new manager about various changes that should be made to reduce call volume which would reduce hold times for our customers (and of course make my life a little easier)

Wouldn't you know, not 2 weeks later I was pulled off the phones to do the same work as the rest of my coworkers (nothing glamorous, just order management/entry). There were incentives offered for production and all that as the new manager wanted to make an immediate impact .

And I fucking CRUSHED it. Since the incentives began I have produced over 150% of goal and scored the highest on quantity and quality and really, my coworkers aren't even close. Now, I'm not bringing this up to brag*. I do it to bring up the fact that D's whole reason for me being the lone phone monkey was that she felt I couldn't do nearly as well as my coworkers managing projects and orders. At least, that's what I was told. I'd also like to add that during my time on the phones we hired 4 people from outside our department that needed to be trained that had never touched some of our software before.
One other thing - I had to train an even newer person that took my place on the phone and she sits right behind me. She tells me constantly the the new manager has implemeted a lot of the changes I had been suggesting to D for months and the call volume has dropped considerably and it's actually manageable by one person now. (I was averaging 50 calls a day - she tells me she sometimes goes an hour between calls).

Needless to say I love the new manager.

And I'm wondering just how big of a fucking idiot my supervisor feels like knowing she could have doubled her production by simply switching me off the phones.



*Our VP, directors,and other managers have stopped my my desk to personally thank me for all my hard work from the past few months as it has made their orders go through faster and makes their numbers look better too.



ETA: fuck me, I forgot to add some good shit. She had a Gender Reveal party for her GRANDSON at work. I know more about this little shit than I care to because she talks about him non-stop.
WORSE: she LOVES to bring up this spawn has the same first name as me even though I exclusively use my middle name.

Fucking WORSER : the parents of this shit demon live at the beginning of my street. So occasionally I pass the stupidvisor on one of her 3-5 trips to see him each week. You would think the parents of this kid would get tired of her constantly coming over so much.

 

We are an old, loosely tight knit group.

 

How appropriate that I should look on for the first time in ages and this is near the top of the list. So working in the Middle East doing 12 hours on, 6 days a week. We need to stay on the ball or bad shit starts happening, the last thing you need is a micro makeover, cast iron cock hammer for a SGT. This bloke is a cancerous piece, sucks the morale right out of the air around him. Abusive, panders to everyone above him, can't manage troops and couldn't care less about their welfare. I had him four of the first five weeks, thank fuck there is only one more week of his bullshit.

 

I've written about my boss before and how she's an insufferable cunt who likes to make people miserable to make herself feel better. But let me tell you about our fucking receptionist.

She's from Trinidad and Tobago. She has an accent. She can't say her r's properly-they come out like a w. I don't know if that's because of her accent or if she actually has a speech impediment on top of it. This causes her to pronounce clients' names wrong all.the.time. She's rude. Any time she has an issue with something or someone, she copies the HR lady on her email. If you ask her a question, she thinks you're trying to give her an order, gets defensive and hangs up on you. When she transfers a call to you, sometimes she doesn't say anything and just hangs on the line to hear if you're ignoring her or actually away from your desk. She's obese so all you hear is her heavy breathing. None of the attorneys can stand her, but she's one of those employees that thinks she has way more pull than she actually does. She's just a horrible human being. Worst of all is that she's a "protected class" so she gets away with everything and knows it.