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Category: Cow-irkers

Workplace Baby Showers

admin36 Comments

I have a question for e-hell. I have a co-worker who I manage (she reports to me). She is currently pregnant and going on maternity leave soon. She is a very sweet girl from a personality perspective (to other people) but is a NIGHTMARE as someone to work with. She is exceptionally lazy, doesn’t get work done (which I have to then do to avoid missing important deadlines), she comes in to work late and leaves early, spends all her time talking on the phone or surfing the ‘net, she has even fallen asleep at her desk before. She doesn’t have a medical condition, aside for being pregnant, but she milks it where she can. She takes time off for every tiny reason, including tummy aches and headaches and is pretty much the worst worker I have ever known.

The problem is she is generally popular in the office because no one but me experiences her bad behavior. I am always doing her work, because as her manager I am the one who will get into trouble if it isn’t done. She has also lied to me on a few occasions. Recently, a close friend of mine passed away and I couldn’t be at the funeral because she had let me down for a deadline. I therefore don’t personally like her very much and don’t feel hugely generous towards her. I remain civil with her, but I am not taken in by her “bubbliness”.

My problem is that, because she reports to me, people expect ME to throw her a baby shower. This would have to be done at my personal expense (to buy decorations, food and a present) and I unfortunately am having financial issues. I might be inclined to borrow money if it was someone I really loved and wanted to throw a shower for – but how should I handle this when I don’t want to reward her bad treatment of me in the first place??? I am getting nasty comments from people about how mean I am being by not setting a date for the shower and organizing one.
1002-15

It’s been my opinion for years that work-related wedding and baby showers should either be an employer provided benefit that is done on company time and company expense or it is a private affair planned and paid for by individual employees interested in hosting a shower off the clock and off property. If your company protocol for years has been that management hosts a shower at the manager’s expense and on company time, you are screwed. You cannot now play “non-favorites” and decline to benefit one particular employee. If the protocol in your company is that individuals can plan showers for fellow co-workers off the clock, by all means encourage one of the employees to own that hosting duty. Ignore people who want all the fun of someone else working their backside off to host a party they are not willing to host themselves.

Rambling On About How Much Fun You All Had Is Usually Boring To Hear

admin31 Comments

This is more of a question than it is a story. Some of my co-workers who are a couple of years younger than I am, and single, socialize outside of work. I have socialized with some of the individuals during dinner or small evening outings but they have large parties and go on weekend trips together. I have never been invited to these, which I don’t mind since I am married and drinking is not really fun to me anymore. The problem I have, however, is when they get back to work after the party or trip and ramble on about how much fun they had to myself and others who were not included. It has become quite annoying and I need advice on how to handle the situation. 0619-18

Is there something about their ramblings of how much fun they had that makes you wish you could have been there?   Otherwise I’m not  sure what is annoying other than it can be boring.

When I was in college, it was quite common on Monday mornings to hear fellow classmates describe their “awesome” weekend, which began on Thursday afternoons, which consisted of parties and getting profoundly drunk.   Getting wasted, being passed out and vomiting repeatedly were presented as the most fun people can have in this life.  No thank you.   If you are confident about your life choices, what other people do for fun doesn’t really shake the foundations of your soul or irritate it.  It’s boring more than annoying, imo.

How does one deal with a person or persons who talks incessantly about boring things? You change the subject of the discussion.  Or you say, “What an interesting weekend you had,” and leave it at that.

Or you can corral all the other married fuddy duddies who never get invited to these single adult parties and host your own party or outings that are more suitable to your tastes in fun.  Then on Monday when the talk starts of what the young, single crowd did for fun that weekend, you smile mysteriously and say, “Yes, we had a load of fun, too,” and say no more.

Getting Behind Again…Tsk, Tsk

admin26 Comments

I work in a government office. I am a full-time employee. As most of the full-time employees in our office, I have more to do than I can accomplish in my allotted hours, so I am perpetually “behind”. I do not want to go into detail about what we do, nor all the ins and outs of getting my job, or any of my coworkers’ jobs done, let’s just say that being “behind” is kind of a way of life in our office.

One of my coworkers is a part-time employee. She has one specific duty, and the work for this duty can be finished well within her allotted time, leaving her looking for other work to do to fill her hours. Several times, she has walked past my work station and made a comment to the effect of, “Well, it looks like you’re getting behind again…tsk tsk” This annoys me for several reasons: 1. She is not my supervisor, so whether I’m behind or not is none of her concern, and 2. Unless she’s going to follow her observation with an offer of assistance with my work, what positive purpose does a comment like that serve? None. And no, she doesn’t ask me what/if she can do to help.

My question is, what is a tactful, politically correct (government office, remember?) response to her comment that has a good likelihood that she will remember it and not make that “observation” to me again? 0504-17

I would set aside a pile of your work that she could do to fill her hours (like filing, stuffing envelopes, anything) and when she wanders past you tsk tsking again say, “I’m delighted that you are concerned about my backlog of work and how this stresses me.  Your implied offer to help is accepted. Please begin working on this.”

When the “Dirty Santa” Game Got A Little Too Dirty

admin131 Comments

As a new member of the management team this year, I was put in charge of organizing the annual holiday party. I was working with a great team of volunteers to fund raise throughout the year (we don’t get any budget from our organization for these types of events) and put the whole thing together. There were a few details that my team really wanted to do according to our department’s “traditions”, and one of them was the white elephant gift exchange (sometimes known as dirty santa). For those unfamiliar, everyone brings a wrapped gift. Each person then gets a number 1-whatever (in our case, 50) and unwraps a gift or steals one previously unwrapped from another player. There are more rules, but that’s the gist.

Now, our holiday party white elephant gift exchanges can get a little bit racy, and between that and the fact that we serve alcohol at our party, we do ask that no one bring children. Not all of the gifts are all in good taste, but usually they aren’t too offensive and are just sophomoric. Other gifts are often cool little novelties or bottles of alcohol or even children’s toys.

This year, however, a good friend of mine was the last person in the rotation. When she went to get the last item on the table and unwrap it, she had in her hand a small ball that looked like a Christmas ornament. But then she brought it to the podium and insisted that I read what was written on the wrapper. I started to, but stopped abruptly when I realized it was an item from a sex shop, meant for a man use to “play solitary scrabble”, if you know what I mean. I handed it back to her and we finished the game up. We can’t verify who brought it, but we suspect a man who is retiring in the next few weeks. I want to add here that while our field is traditionally male, almost 50% of the department made up of women. Whether this person just assumed a guy would end up with it or didn’t care, I cannot divine.

While I know the item certainly offended my friend (she’s still talking about it a week later), I also know that the incident probably won’t do anything to dissuade the committee from doing the white elephant game again next year. As for me, I think I’ve earned a year off holiday parties. 1217-15

Blunder Or Bully

admin92 Comments

I’ve just run into a bit of an uncomfortable work situation here.

I work in an office that doesn’t have enough workstations. Consequently, we all have to share spaces and no one has an assigned desk or cubicle. Normally, this is fine because we’re never here all at once.

The area that I’m in can get a little crowded at times and power outlets are scarce. We each have a laptop and most of us generally use one outlet for that.

Today I’m with someone who I normally don’t work with. He’s an older gentleman who I’ve always had a great relationship with but who does tend to take offense to things very quickly and easily. We’re sharing a table and there’s one outlet between us.

My laptop needed to be plugged in right away and he had his laptop in one outlet and his phone charger in the other. His phone wasn’t charging and he was away in a meeting so I unplugged the charger that wasn’t in use to plug my laptop in.

Good lord.

He’s furious. According to him, what I did was extremely disrespectful and he cannot believe I’d have done such a rude thing to him. I thought he was joking at first so I laughed. He’s always pretending to be offended (it’s kind of annoying and getting old) and I thought this was one of those times. And that made it worse. He told me that he needs his phone to be charged for work (we all do) and I pointed out that I needed a charger too and that he can connect his charger to his laptop. He cut me off and insisted that what I did was “so unbelievably rude that he just can’t believe it but it’s fine”.

I understand that working in an older building with inadequate resources is the problem here but until the day comes when we have a new building, we’ve got to be considerate of each other too.

I struggle to assert myself and, when I started writing this post, I was feeling pretty guilty for having unplugged his charger. But as I think about it, I’m starting to think that perhaps he was completely out of line. What do you folks think? 0718-16

Is it possible to use a power strip?   The kind that plugs into an outlet but has multiple outlets for more than two devices?   Like these?

 

Or this would be cool for a shared desk space…