I'm sitting up front at the Receptionist's desk today because our receptionist is one of the laziest people working here @ this company.  Now I'm stuck doing TONS of my OWN work and on top of that, I now have to ANSWER +300 calls/day, AND do ALL of the invoicing for the company (which includes cross-checking for price discrepancies, and many other things that I simply don't have the time for).

Yesterday she says she has a doctor's appointment at 3:20 for today, then at 5:30 I get a phone call at home saying she's not coming in AT ALL today becuase of her "Appointment".  Many time she claims "I'm taking a 5 minutes smoke break" and then comes back 25 minutes later stating it wasn't even a real break because she was talking about work with another worker.  TONS of people use their addiction as an excuse to take 5+ breaks per day.  This is annoying.  Whenever I give her shit for smoking all the time & making me cover her a$$, she always retorts "You don't know what it's like to be addicted to something..."  She thinks that my 2 years of anti-depressants isn't the same, writing it off as a "Dependency".

Well.  Hmmm?  Isn't smoking addiction a dependency?  "I need a cigarette!"  She claims to quit from time to time, but what she really means is that for a short while she quits BUYING them, and just bums them from other people.  Finally I got fed up with it & said, "I'm going on a 5 minute smoke break, I'll see you in 25 minutes."  She said, "Not funny!" then I didn't come back for 25 minutes & she was PISSED!

So here I sit, gathering job security, and trashing her work habits on the internet.  [b]Please tell us all what's bugging you at work today.  Even if we don't understand proceedures, etc., it's good to get it off your chest.[/b]

We've got a guy who lives two and a half hours away from the building. We moved the command 8 years ago and the guy decided to stay in the old house and make the commute.

To save milage on his car he sometimes sleeps in his office and doesn't take a shower - for more than a few days at a time. Smells like I'm back on the streets of Baharain again. To top it off the guy loves to talk while you're suffering from the smell.

From time to time we leave a bar of soap or can of deoderant in his office. There are showers available here, he just doesn't take them.

I don't even know where to start.

Slackers who do a half-assed job and disappear for hours at a time. They think they have to leave something for the next shift to do.

Incompetants who couldn't troubleshoot their way out of a paper bag. Lazy asses who abuse worker's comp, stay out on disability for a year minus a day, then come back and do it all over again. Slobs who don't clean up their messes.

Persons whose original language isn't English who don't follow instructions and then claim they didn't understand. Persons who can't use a two-way radio.

Self-important assholes who think the rules don't apply to them. Thieves who nab anything not fastened down, and some things that are fastened down.

Selfish dipshits who load up plates of meat at company BBQs to take home with them, BEFORE everyone has had a chance to eat. On more than one occasion, I have paid $5 to $10 for the BBQ and had nothing to eat but vegetables and salad.

The company had a 10th anniversary party a few years ago, and the manager caught one asshole putting a whole cake in the trunk of his car, and made him bring it back. This was an expensive cake too, something like $300-400. His house got robbed last year. GOOD! What goes around comes around.

One mental case who believes there is a conspiracy to keep him down. He thinks he's better than everybody else because he was educated in India. He got promoted to supervisor (by default... he was the only one who applied for the job) and they fired his ass and sent him back to the floor because he ordered someone to do a job without safety precautions that could have got them killed. I now have to deal with this guy on a daily basis.

There's alot more, but I'm done ranting now.

I have some emergency procedures to deal with at work.
It wasn't always like that.
In lieu of written procedures, we were told "Use your common sense!"
We did our best with that.
One time an Air Handler Unit malfunctioned, so me and the guy I was on shift with made all the necessary phone calls, but had a real hard time getting ahold of anybody.  Nobody in charge was answering pagers, cell phones, or home phones.  We finally took it upon ourselves to call the maintenance contractors, an outside company.
We heard about it the next day.
"You people are NOT authorized to be calling for a service call!  Everytime they come out there, they charge us $75.  Next time use your common sense and call the people you are supposed to!"
Me and my partner informed them that we would be happy to do that,  if SOMEBODY - ANYBODY! - would answer our calls.
Our call list quickly got updated, and everybody got told not to ignore pages and to keep their cell phones on at all times.

In '90 and '91 I worked for a no common sense pin-dick viewgraph engineer - anytime you sit down at his desk, he takes a quad pad, turns it sideways and puts a title at the top as if he is laying out a viewgraph of your discussion. He would make charts just in case he might need them in the future, even though no briefings were scheduled.  His pussy spineless boss was even worse.  When I left the project, I told both of them they were the biggest chickenshits I had ever known at the company and I didn't need a job bad enough to work for either one of them again.  A couple of years later I nearly got reassigned to their group; fortunately someone else resigned so I took his job.

Today I coached my manager on how leaders and managers handle blame when the team fails, and accepting the consequences when his own decisions are the cause of the failure (essentially setting schedules by reading a crystal ball).  Of course, he thinks he is a leader.  I didn't bother to tell him which I think he is.

The worst are the petty career builders that stay away from the real work and decisions as far as possible - if you don't design, build and test anything, it is impossible to fail.

i work for IBM. There is an old company saying that IBM stands for:

I'm
By
Myself

nuff said.