Petty things that start wars in every office

[BarensMom]

I just remembered the coffee wars at Evil Oil Company.  I was pulled into more battles between  the Starbucks people and we had the Peets people.  There was always a race in the a.m. to get in and make that first pot of coffee.  I finally had to label each carafe for each brand/type and, since I was usually the first one in, I would make each pot to avoid the complainers.  The irony was that I didn't like coffee before and I despise it even more now.

[rose red]

I once worked at a place where there are two businesses in one building (Big Company and Small Company).  It's a one story building with an open floor plan so we all just mingled a lot.  One day, a note showed up on one of the water coolers that said "This water cooler is paid for by Small Company.  Big Comany, please do not use this water cooler as you have your own."  OK.  The next thing you know, there are signs on the multiple and conveniently located water coolers owned by Big Company telling Small Company not to used them.  Also, signs showed up for one of the microwaves, the only coffee machine, the basket filled with coffee/tea/hot chocolate/sugar/creamer/spoons/stirrers, etc., all owned by Big Company. 

Small Company was not happy, but since they started it, they couldn't say anything.

[SoCalVal]

I once worked at a place where there are two businesses in one building (Big Company and Small Company).  It's a one story building with an open floor plan so we all just mingled a lot.  One day, a note showed up on one of the water coolers that said "This water cooler is paid for by Small Company.  Big Comany, please do not use this water cooler as you have your own."  OK.  The next thing you know, there are signs on the multiple and conveniently located water coolers owned by Big Company telling Small Company not to used them.  Also, signs showed up for one of the microwaves, the only coffee machine, the basket filled with coffee/tea/hot chocolate/sugar/creamer/spoons/stirrers, etc., all owned by Big Company. 

Small Company was not happy, but since they started it, they couldn't say anything.

I feel no sympathy for Small Company -- Bed. Made. Lie.

[White Dragon]

POD to just about every previous post! I would also add- not refilling the copy room printer with paper or the stapler with staples, and failing to close the ice machine door. Apparently these require a higher skill level than I would've expected.

To anyone who's never experienced these annoyances, I have two questions: 1- where do you work? 2- when can I start? 

Not a problem in my office. Everyone is really good about the copy paper etc.
I even have a theory that our machines are intelligent and wait for my cowrker Amber.
The machines *always* seem to run empty in the middle of her print jobs. I think she fills it up more than anyone!

Oh, and while I'd love to have you join our team, I'm kind of hoping to stay on after my temp contract ends, so can you please wait till then? Thanks!

[bansidhe]

I can't believe no one mentioned flushing toilets (or should I say, not flushing well enough or at all).  Seriously - it just takes a minute to flush, watch and make sure everything goes down, and flush again if necessary.  I'm tired of finding paper (or worse) floating in the bowl when I go on there!

The ones where I work auto-flush - at least in theory. In actual practice, sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. I always push the flush button to be sure, then half the time it auto-flushes right afterward anyway. 

Loads of folks, knowing about the spotty auto-flush feature, still don't flush manually.

[Miss Misha]

<snip>
On the coffee, we had the coffee wars, and that was when I bought a one of those cup and funnel sets for making one cup at a time and supplied all my own stuff. 
<snip>

I did the same thing at my all-time worst job.  We shared the facilities with the Sales group, the coffee pots were supplied, but not the coffee.  The Sales guys all chipped in and bought their own coffee and supplies.  No one else in my group drank coffee (or bought it outside), so I brought in my own Melitta set and coffee.  Cue one of the sales guys popping up in the break room and saying, "Wow, that coffee sure smells good.  Can I have some?"

I replied, "No, this is coffee I brought from home."

He then started to argue that I if I drank their coffee and I should share some of mine.  I told him I didn't drink theirs which was why I brought my own.  He then started saying how selfish I was to make my own coffee and not contribute to their coffee fund (which I had pointed out I didn't participate in).  As he got louder and louder, I ignored him, finished my coffee-making and walked away from him in mid-bray.  To this day, I cannot even begin to understand his vehement reaction to someone making coffee for themself, using their own supplies.

Office refrigerators are their own special beast.  I gave up after someone literally threw their lunch, in a manila envelope, no less, on top of a specially decorated cake in the office fridge.  Yes, there was plenty of room on other shelves in the fridge for the manila envelope lunch.  I have a whole wardrobe of insulated lunch boxes and little blue ice packs.

Lastly, similar to the tomato soup story shared by a PP, at the aforementioned awful place to work, I opened the microwave one day to heat my lunch and there was a large puddle of soup.  I groaned, "Oh man, who spilled their soup?"  An indignant, disembodied voice floated over the cube farm, "I did so clean it up!"  I looked closer and they had taken a paper towel and made one swipe, leaving a clean trail in the puddle of soup.  Yep, that's cleaning up I guess.  I was never so happy to leave that place, let me tell you.

[blarg314]

Seriously, people?  How do you get to be a graduate student in physics without knowing that putting metal things in a microwave makes shiny-flashy-boom and the microwave no make hot anymore?

Oh, but you have to experimentally verify the photo-electric effect.  That's how Einstein got his Nobel prize, after all....  The worst microwave incident in a physics department I've seen was when someone was re-heating pizza late at night, punched in one hour instead of one minute, and left the room.

My current office is pretty mellow. People eat at their desks, the kitchen is generally reasonably clean (more thanks to an excellent cleaning staff than anything else), a whole durian is considered an acceptable thing to bring in to share at  tea time, and we have a single use coffee machine.  Selling stuff for your kids is not part of the culture here, and they don't do potlucks.  The thermostat thing is pretty much solved by the combination of no indoor heating (AC only) and a government regulation that prohibits setting the thermostat lower than 26 C (79 F). There were some problems in the new building with the AC efficiency, when some offices wouldn't go below 30 C (86 F), but they fixed that.

In  previous places, the big issues have been the fridge and eating in the lounge. In grad school, we had an admin assistant who freaked out if people microwaved food in the lounge, because it smelled bad. Of course, we noticed that if you microwaved foods from *her* ethnicity, it was no problem, just the funny foreign stuff.  This was a grad program where it wasn't uncommon for students to be in the department 12 hours a day, 7 days a week because we needed to use computers - we didn't go home at five the way she did, and ate most of our meals at work.

My personal peeve is people who have long, involved personal phone conversations in the office that you can't help but overhear.

[Gyburc]

Regarding office microwaves...

A friend of mine once worked in a medium-sized company that was rather dysfunctional. There were two kitchens with microwaves, one on the ground floor next to the break-room and one on the top floor. The top-floor kitchen was right next to the office occupied by 'Bertha', and most of the top-floor staff used the microwave in there to heat up their lunches, rather than trek all the way downstairs and back up again. Naturally, Bertha could smell the food from her office, and sometimes the smells were less pleasant than others.

But Bertha never complained.

Instead, the top-floor staff came in one day to find the microwave removed and an email sent round to the top floor only by the company's HR manager, explaining that carrying hot food around and eating at desks was an unacceptable health and safety risk, so staff would have to go downstairs and use the break-room instead. Staff downstairs continued to eat at their desks without sanction.

Guess who Bertha's best friend was? 

[andi]

Right now my pet peeve is people having loud, long, detailed personal calls in the share break room (which echoes everything). Also - people who watch TV on thier phones with no head phones - I am not easily offended but I don't want to hear your show during my lunch time!

[LazyDaisy]

Right now my pet peeve is people having loud, long, detailed personal calls in the share break room (which echoes everything). Also - people who watch TV on thier phones with no head phones - I am not easily offended but I don't want to hear your show during my lunch time!

Ugh, I with you on loud personal calls in a shared space. I have a co-irker right now who is: 1) having a spat with his girlfriend about him going out with his friends without clearing it with her ahead of time; 2) having financial difficulty resulting in him being late with his rent, and child support to his ex-wife, and receiving multiple collections calls on his cell phone; 3) he's also in a band and the group is constantly breaking up and getting new members then bringing back the old members; 4) he's always always buying drum equipment over the telephone...yes while not paying rent and child support...  How do I know all this? He keeps talking loudly about it on his cell phone rather than take the call someplace else and it's never on silent ring. Seriously, it's like he's in high school rather than in his 40s.

[Sirius]

Right now my pet peeve is people having loud, long, detailed personal calls in the share break room (which echoes everything). Also - people who watch TV on thier phones with no head phones - I am not easily offended but I don't want to hear your show during my lunch time!

Ugh, I with you on loud personal calls in a shared space. I have a co-irker right now who is: 1) having a spat with his girlfriend about him going out with his friends without clearing it with her ahead of time; 2) having financial difficulty resulting in him being late with his rent, and child support to his ex-wife, and receiving multiple collections calls on his cell phone; 3) he's also in a band and the group is constantly breaking up and getting new members then bringing back the old members; 4) he's always always buying drum equipment over the telephone...yes while not paying rent and child support...  How do I know all this? He keeps talking loudly about it on his cell phone rather than take the call someplace else and it's never on silent ring. Seriously, it's like he's in high school rather than in his 40s.

One of my former co-worker's mother would call her at work practically every day and scream at her, leaving the co-worker in tears.  Finally my boss took a call and told Mother to stop calling at work.  From what I heard, Daughter had told Mother several times to stop it, but Mother wouldn't stop it.  Finally Boss took a call and told Mother point blank to stop calling because she was getting Daughter in trouble.  That worked - Mother stopped calling. 

There was one time right before I left when two female sergeants suddenly got into a loud screaming argument.  The only other people in the office were me and a couple of young airmen who didn't know what to do; I walked out of my cubicle and told them to sit down and shut up and and that I didn't want to hear another word from either of them that wasn't job-related.  Not ten minutes later I got a call from the sergeant in charge asking me what was going on.  He had gotten vastly different stories from each sergeant, but one thing they agreed on was that I had told them to stop the screaming and sit down and shut up.  They both ended up being written up for their behavior. 

[Outdoor Girl]

We have a dishwasher at my office.  When it is running, people leave their dishes in the sink.  Where they stay for several days until someone finally unloads the dishwasher.  I used to use the dishes and silverware from the lunchroom and got so frustrated over the dishwasher situation that I brought in all my own bowls and silverware to use.  I take it back home and run it through my own dishwasher and bring it back.

I do end up either loading or emptying (or both) the dishwasher about once a month or so because I use the odd item to put out baking that I bring in to share.

My biggest pet peeve are the people who's lunches explode in the microwave and they don't clean it up.  I exploded one day, in non-Ehell approved fashion when I opened a microwave door to a very disgusting mess.  I think the whole office heard me.  And I think I scared the living daylights out of one of our summer students.  I did apologize to the student later because I was pretty sure he wasn't responsible.

Not so much a pet peeve but I just don't understand the people who bring food in and leave it in the fridge to rot.  Or the people who don't put their lunches in some sort of bag.  They just put their sandwich container and fruit and yogurt in a pile in the fridge and expect to be still all in the same place when they come back to get it at lunch.  Really?  You don't think that little pile you put right at the front, right in the middle of the shelf isn't going to get moved so someone else can fit their lunch in?

[NotTheNarcissist]

They forgot to add:

7.  The people who eat at their desks.  And the food is usually messy or smelly. OR, they chew everything with their mouth open and gross out the people around them.

Agreed! Nothing like a fork clanging against a plate to ruin my concentration! Except maybe....

Those dang pencil drummers!

[2littlemonkeys]

POD to just about every previous post! I would also add- not refilling the copy room printer with paper or the stapler with staples, and failing to close the ice machine door. Apparently these require a higher skill level than I would've expected.

To anyone who's never experienced these annoyances, I have two questions: 1- where do you work? 2- when can I start? 

Oh, a thousand times YES!  I'd like to add sudden ignorance about how to clear a jam (or at least asking for help if you aren't sure about poking around the machine)  I can't tell you how many times I've walked into the copy center to find the machine has ground to a halt and no one did anything about it. (and you can tell how longs jobs have been sitting in the queue and the culprit's originals are usually nowhere to be found.)

[weeblewobble]

ROTF, the burnt popcorn brought back lots of unpleasant memories.

Warning, discussion of morning sickness.

Augh.  We had a guy in my first office who loved to make extremely fragrant tuna-based meals and bring leftovers to work for lunch.  The smell would radiate from the breakroom microwave throughout the rest of the building.  The office would reek for the rest of the day, if not part of the next day.  It was awful.  And nothing we said could dissuade him from doing it, because "tuna's my favorite!  And it's healthy for me!" We went to the boss who said we needed to find more productive uses for our time than complaining about a coworkers lunch.

One of our other coworkers was pregnant at the time and very sensitive to smells.  She tried to suffer in silence because she didn't want to be a drama queen.  Tuna Guy would heat up his lunch and she would run to the bathroom as quickly and quietly as possible to be sick.  Well, one day, she didn't make it.  He brought his lunch to his desk, which happened to be right across from her desk.  She stood to run to the bathroom, but knew she wouldn't make it and dropped to her knees over her wastebasket and was very very very ill. 

Tuna Guna yelled and carried on as if she'd been sick on him directly.  She was sooooo disgusting, he said, and she should just stay home if being pregnant was going to make her do that.  We pointed out that he wouldn't have been "traumatized" if he'd listened to us and been considerate about his stinky lunches.  He insisted he should be able to eat whatever he wanted.  He continued to bring the tuna meals for a few more days.  Pregnant coworker got sick a few more times in her cubicle. Tuna Guy was so disgusted that he "magnanimously" agreed to bring less offensive meal options.

For the record, I believe that public bathroom behavior, coffee supplies and birthday cakes are also huge sources of workplace contention.