The Annoying Co-Worker Thread

[midtown]

The guy who tells you about his kids and their achievements. We get it, you're proud of them but I don't care.
The guy who tells you about his medical problems (can be the same telling you about his kids)...I don't care.
The guy who belches loudly.

[window]

I have one who is an absolute know-it=all.
He speaks in such a slow measured cadence it is as if he truly believes the world is hanging on his every word.
In addition he is often wrong about little things like when the Dodgers conducted spring training in Riverside CA---it was the Angels---or the time Floyd Patterson was robbed in that fight in Sweden against Cassuis Clay.
But most of all is his insistence to talk politics all the time even those none of us reply to anything he says.
Retirement cannot come to quickly.

Please don't send him here.

[mikesorg]

I had one that was a classical over-sharer.
First day she worked there we all knew about her hysterectomy and her great love of kelly clarkson...
also, she would corner you and discuss these things for 20 minutes at a time.

She got the boot, and as much as you hate to see someone get fired it was not the worst news on a Monday morning.

[akh]

It was kind of sad on reflection, but some years back I worked with a woman who was in our accounting/treasury group. As a younger, eager, geologist, there were a lot of times when I would need to be in the office on weekends. Working on projects, following wells, I needed to be there. This woman was large, lonely, and would come into the office just to find company. We'd find ourselves having to hide behind closed doors or giving signals to co-workers to call, otherwise she'd just sit down and talk your ear off. If you tried the time-management trick of getting up and walking her away, she'd just follow you and keep talking.

The biggest problem lately are the speaker-phone users and the cube-farm dwellers. WAY too much talking, too loud.

[skypigeon]

This is one topic where being a natural introvert is one of the greatest blessings evah , but... I do have a memory, twenty years old, of a girl named Tammy who was, she thought, trapped in let's just say a very bad marriage.

She felt the need to talk about it... sort through her emotions... let herself have a good cry on occasion...

To everybody.

No, really, I mean, EVERYBODY.

To the point one day at the lunch table, when she was doing it YET AGAIN, no less than the department manager told her we ALL knew about it, we ALL were sorry about it, we ALL wished we could help her somehow but seeing NONE of us could could she please TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE.

Lucky for the department manager, and everyone else at that table, the company was rather small and had no Human Resources department or Lord knows what sort of hell we'd have all had to endure as a consequence, but... as it was... she decided perhaps it was time to find another job, and did so. Later we heard she finally got a divorce, too...

[KevMcNJ]

I bet everybody at her new job heard every detail about her divorce

[MichaelP]

I don't have any co-workers

[KevMcNJ]

One nice thing about my job is there's only 5 of us there. All men.

We all get along, but I know virtually nothing about their personal lives

[jandj]

The shop I worked at had an upstairs storage area full of obsolete parts. We tossed it all and converted it into a break/lunch/meeting room. Every morning we'd gather for the daily safety talk and to get the run down on the day's work. Had one co-worker who was a drinker. Never came to work lit but was always redfaced and hungover first thing in the morning. He thought it was funny to turn loose a silent fart in the middle of the meeting. When he'd be called on it he always apologized and said it was an accident...smiling the whole time. One morning after he stunk the place up (literally) The Bear (who was a big, slow moving, slow talking, good natured ol' hillbilly) looked him in the eye and said "Fred, if you do that one more time I'm gonna take you by the throat and throw you down them ****in' stairs". Fred never had another "accident". Sometimes it's all in how you talk to people...

[Rommey]

I am the annoying coworker...






Seriously, you have to have pretty thick skin to work in our office. You make a mistake, then there will be 6-7 others jumping at the chance to point out that mistake and ridicule you. All but 1 of us are retired military so we have had lots of practice over the years.

[Djski442]

I work with a guy who always has to one up everyone, even though we all know he's full of it. No matter what you've done or have, he's done it better or has a better one. If you live 20 miles from work, he lives 21 miles from work, etc...etc... And he calls everyone bud. He's become the butt of our jokes and doesn't even realize it even when we do it right in front of him.

[grogg]

I had a coworker several years that was a condescending jerk. If I included the number of confrontations I had with him would have this post the size of a Tom Clancy novel so I won't include them. Anyway one time he took a three-day weekend with one of the shop team leaders up in Ohio to do some skiing, at least that was his story. Unfortunately his wife was a little suspicious and called work the Friday that he left and asked for that very same shop team leader. When he admitted he had no knowledge of a skiing trip, the jerk's cover was blown and it was found out he was riding something other than the slopes. He must have done some fast talking because his marriage endured this episode.

The whole next week he was about as nice and polite of coworker as you could have. It made me wish he got caught catting around much more often.

[Turn13]

The guy who tells you about his kids and their achievements.

I do that, though I've moved on to grandkids. But I'm working on it.

... The one across from me is a tapper. He taps constantly.

I do that too. But I'm working on that, too.

Of course, I've been working on them for a long, long time.

On the other hand, I try not to mind the 8 million things other people do

[ZOOOM]

I'm retired...
no cubicles, no coffee rooms, no meetings, no reports, no co-workers......
get to sleep in as long as I want.
leaving the 14 inches of snow and -16 degree weather of Chicago tomorrow morning for the 80 degre weather of Ft. Myers.
ZOOOM

[comfortably numb]

Not exactly 'annoying' but I worked with a guy whose fiance came to me with 'suspicions'.
I knew the content of his character, but no specific recent behavior so i wasn't able to help her.
A couple weeks later a saw him at a party with another woman.
We did not have to work in closely which is good because I treated him as if he had the plague thereafter.
And if his fiance had visited me after that I would not have hesitated to tell her what I knew.
On top of that he knew he was going to work for her father and figured he was set.
The guy manufactured and sold those automatic indoor bug spray dispensers.
He did and was eventually sacked for embezzling.