Stupid CoWorkers

June 14, 2007

I have been working for the state of (stupidity) for 10 years. I have seen an enormous amount of ‘Enron’eous type of actions. This is one. Okay, I work in a regimented boot camp where I am a mid level manger, this is ran by my states military department. Our kids are called CADETS. Now here are some, very small idity bitty bit of what goes on here. We have an Alpha company and Bravo Company. A former employee of Bravo transfers to Alpha we will call him D. One of my employees comes to me and shows me 2 radios that he bought off of ‘D’. I look them over and asked him where ‘D’ got them, he tells me that ‘D’ bought them of the internet at e-bay. I asked him ‘then why do they have Alpha Company employee names on them?’ His face went white! I took the radios and photo copied them, ran the serial number with the supply section and yes they belong to the state! Hm. Most people would have at the very least been fired, oh but not this guy, his wife happens to be a department head in another department and the Assistant Director is very close to her :D. When all was said and done, I was the bad guy because I supposedly had a vengeance against ‘D’. You try to do the right thing and you get screwed. Funny thing is, no one every talked to me about the situation. It was just lost in space.

In another situation, our cadets helped the program director build his garage and helped the Bravo Company Director move to another house.

I have a thousand of these type of stories that would make a million bucks for me. But alas, no one wants to do anything because they would probably shut doors and this would hurt the kids. Unfortunately, the Enron type managers know this and it goes up to the highest levels in the Military Department. Anyone got job opening for an honest, Ethical Operations Specialist!

Stupid CoWorkers
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Stupid CoWorkers

May 30, 2007

I worked as systems administrator for a complete and utter fool at a law firm. This guy called himself a “computer specialist” and even had brochures printed that touted his computer expertise. Yet he BARELY knew what a computer was. This wouldn’t have worked but for the fact that his cohorts, the other attorneys, were even dumber than he was. The best description of that syndrome I ever ran across was the saying “in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”

So we got a computer network on the Doofus’ recommendation. This was about 1992 so it wasn’t anything as modern as the networks today. He said we needed to network because we needed to have email capabilities. Just inter-office email, internet email was too new and not even considered. So we networked. Then when it came down to the end, they found out that to buy the licenses and have network versions of the software, which was needed for us to be able to have email, would cost $1,200 more. So the Doofus made the decision that we would then NOT get the network version and he ordered me to borrow the stand-alone version of the software from the office of my friend who worked in a nearby office. I complied and eventually wrote a Word Perfect Macro that accessed a DOS command and ran a Novell Network broadcast message that you could customize. It was like an inter-office instant message. Forever after the Doofus called this “our email system.”

It gets worse. One day, he went to a bar association seminar on computer piracy and came back all pumped up on this new knowledge. He marched straight to my desk to announce to me that he had learned about computer piracy and “it is a bad thing”. He said “We have to make sure we never do that.” I was momentarily stunned and then said “But we do that all the time” and I explained the things we’d been doing that he personally had ordered me to do (buying one copy of software and installing it on all 35 computers, borrowing software from other law firms, etc.) I said “If we did any more of this, I’d have to have a patch on my eye and a parrot on my shoulder.” The sad thing is, I don’t know for sure that he really understood it.

Not long after that, our network crashed briefly and I had to reset it all and I had the receptionist page everyone that they needed to reboot their computers. Guess who called me to see what that meant? You guess it, the DOOFUS!!!

Stupid CoWorkers
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Stupid CoWorkers

February 2, 2007

“We have someone in our office (I’ll call her Ellie) who’ll do just about anything to get out of work, regardless of how morally deficient it might be.

Professionally, Ellie’s been called into The Bosses’ office for just about every charge you can imagine: poor time-keeping, extra long lunches, leaving early without completing the hours required of her, poor performance, excessive sick leave, etc. She won’t come into work if she a) is hung-over, b) has overslept or c) just can’t be bothered, and phones in with various lame excuses. We work in a lenient and laid back office, so to be called in by our mild mannered director takes quite some doing. Ellie was outraged by her poor appraisal this year and claimed that every bad mark against her was ‘someone else’s fault’. Naturally!

Ellie sunk to an all-time low in work-avoidance in July. Her friend (let’s call her Franny) called Ellie in a state of distress because a male friend of Franny’s had been reported missing after the London tube bombings. It turned out that the poor man had actually been killed in one of the explosions. As soon as Ellie found this out, she turned on the “tears-&-quivering-lip” act and raced into our director’s office to explain that “a friend” of hers had perished in the attack and she needed the afternoon off. When asked by a colleague how well she knew the bomb victim, Ellie looked really panicky for a split-second and suddenly burst into floods of tears and ran out of the office (a great way to avoid answering those pesky tricky questions).

A few minutes after Ellie had done a runner, the same person asked another colleague how well Ellie knew the victim. Ellie happened to be returning from her sob session at that precise moment (literally RIGHT past the person who was asking the question) and totally ignored the question. Anybody else would’ve been very indignant about having their integrity questioned but, oddly, not Ellie. She chose to avoid answernig any questions about her relationship with her friend’s friend. A day or two later, another colleague made a callous joke about terrorists and Ellie blew up, chastising him for his insensitivity. About a week later (and in front of our entire office, for maximum effect) she sobbed inconsolably as a 2-minute silence was held for the bomb victims. However she was in the pub two hours later, cracking jokes about the bomb with a pint in her hand. As it turns out, she’d never met or spoken to the bomb victim in her entire life and used his death as an excuse to get out of work.

Life’s sweet when you’re a grifter…

When challenged by the bosses about how she blatantly spends all day surfing the internet and emailing her buddies, Ellie hotly denies it and has openly stated that if she’s ever accused by the company of poor performance in ANY respect, she won’t hesitate in claiming sexual discrimination because she happens to be gay. The truth is, she’s not once experienced problems from anyone here because of her sexuality.

Unbelievable.”

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Stupid CoWorkers
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