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Wacky Co-Worker Habits?
weekendWarrior asks: "Every office has 'that guy.' The one that performs some bizarre or nonsensical action almost daily. The guy with an almost love-affair for the company's standard issue red stapler. The guy who prints out every email he receives (even the spam - thank god he's not on some pr0nographic spammer list). What strange, bizarre, and wacky habits do your co-workers have?"
You mean besides showing up for work?
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
I used to work with a guy who would submit the weirdest questions to slashdot.org and then spend the afternoon obsessively refreshing his browser window, waiting to see what sort of flames resulted.
I once shared a cube with a guy who farted constantly. I got used to it, but it caught most folks off-guard. He would even do it in mid-conversation. The look on peoples' faces when he would rip one during a meeting was priceless.
..."
A typical scenario went something like this:
You: "Hey, man. You have a minute?"
Guy: "What's up?"
You: "I'm curious about this section of code in
Guy's Anus:
You: "Uh, um... main.cpp"
Sales team was given Treos for "increased effectiveness"
The team is technically inept and couldn't figure out the optical mice installed on their new workstations.
They leave the ringers on high and on their desks when in meetings. So the IT department started changing the ringers to different tones, just to watch them tilt their heads when the phones ring. Like when you talk to a dog...
Then we changed them to other sounds - like farts, people talking, or other wacky things.
It's fun... so I guess we have the wacky habits of messing with the sales team. Fun!
Once worked with a sales representative who was rather exuberant in her use of punctuation.
Every email she would send would have a subject line like, "VERY IMPORTANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" or "READ THIS IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!"
Her letters were similar. Her grammar and spelling were fairly decent. However, do interrogatives seem more pressing when they end like this?!?!?!? She was prolific in the amount of email she generated, and making every subject sound like an emergency along with the abuse of the punctuation made for rather brutal stuff to read.
One day, I told her that our license for Office required micropayments for usage of punctuation and that accounting was concerned about the ridiculously large overusage fees we were paying Microsoft for exclamation points.
She went pale. I wish I could have kept up the ruse, but another sales person fell out of her chair when she saw her reaction.
I am 'that guy', you insensitive clod!
I'm the office weirdguy. I have toys all over my desk ("Why do you have teenage mutant ninja turtles at your desk?" "because, they make my code better by defeating evil bugs for me"), postit notes with odd sayings stuck everywhere, the outside wall to my cube is the 'wall of dissent' with politcal comics all over it, and my while board has been turned into a piece of art when I decided to connect all the vowels in my todo list with a line then colour in the resulting shapes.
... and I've got the only seamonkey farm in the building.
.. it's some surplus that us techs use and it jams all the time and beeps constantly, all day.
.. people come visit me when they're having a bad day cuz they know I can cheer them up. My toys are all over the floor in other peoples desk now .. I have a lending library really (just sign out a toy on the white board).
... we have an important role to play in office dynamics.
I bring a beer pitcher full of ice water to meetings, and drink out of a scooby doo cup. When I'm stuck on a problem, I'll unplug my headphones and play bagpipe music until someone tells me to shut it off (bagpipe music is very inspirational!). I have a Jesus action figure (now, with real blessing action!) which sits on top of my monitor, despite the fact I'm a staunch athiest.
Oh
I frequently yell at the printer behind me
it's fun being the office weirdo
don't knock the office weirdo
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
A friend worked for Harlequin Romances.
One editor (male) at the company would stop at least once each day, stomp around his desk, and mutter "KILL! KILL! KILL!"
Another woman, even more scary, was heard to say at lunch one day "If I ever had boy children I would have to malnourish them so that they would be smaller and weaker than my girl children".
Think for a moment how many millions of women are reading three, four, or five of these books every week...
Three Squirrels
So I'm working at a small company over the summer. One of my friends was the sys admin/lead programmer there, that's how I got the job. This new guy comes in a few weeks before I go back to school. So my friend goes on newegg and buys him the usual 400 dollar computer. He also always gets a standard logitech optical USB mouse and the cheapest keyboard which has the correct button layout.
He presents the computer to the new guy. The new guy says he doesn't want the mouse and keyboard "I'll bring my own ergonomic keyboard and trackball in from home." he says. So he comes back with a big old dirty microsoft ergonomic keyboard, the kind that has the keyboard split in half with a hump in the middle. And he also bring a fancy logitech trackball.
We think nothing of it really. He's just an anal guy. But then I look over into his cube one day to see the most hilarious thing ever.
The dude types via hunt and peck. I don't think that ergonomic keyboard makes a difference when you only use two fingers bub!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
This is /.
Everyone reading your post is that guy.
Molly, who I work with, seems to spend *way* more time than is reasonable just wandering around the office, or going outside and, again, just wandering around. Not a smoke break, just wandering. Or I'll just look up and she's standing there, just staring at me. Not a word. Just staring, maybe smiling, maybe not.
I don't want to be mean, but she's just.. quirky. I can't imagine she gets much work done. Her typing skills are horrendous, she clearly doesn't have a clue how to refill the paper in the printer (I think she just pretends she didn't notice it was empty, and waits for someone else to come along), and sometimes I see her just sleeping, or sitting there by the computer doing absolutely nothing. Watching the clouds go by outside. Watching the birds. Who knows.
I don't want to give the impression that she's utterly silent. No, sometimes she can be talkative, even loud, but it's like gibberish to me. Maybe I only understand techie talk nowadays, but from the looks on other people's faces, I get the feeling no one else is following her either.
She's actually kind of cute in a way, but she's startlingly hairy in ways most women simply are NOT (I'm SURE she doesn't shave, anywhere), and she can somehow be simultaeously very affectionate, but still a bitch. Her breath is, well, not pleasant, and I think I know why -- I've seen her peering interestly at food other people have *thrown out*, yes, in the trash, and I swear one I saw her munching happily on what looked to me like dog kibble.
Did I mention I work from home?
http://myannoyingcoworkers.blogspot.com
Hilarious stuff on there.
-bZj
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A French-Algerian chef who ran a panini and crepe stand outside our office building would regularly barge into the office, fire all the employees, steal supplies (phones, chairs, etc.) and demand that someone make him coffee. Of course, he was best friends with the CEO, so he was the only person who could open the CEO's door when it was closed without fearing for their life. If anyone else did something like this, the CEO would run up and down the office hallway yelling "Unbelievable!!! Un-f*cking-believable!!!!" But with this guy, it was okay. Note that it didn't matter if you were on a conference call, or conducting an interview. He had free reign.
:-)
Fortunately, he always brought stuff back. And the panini's were excellent. So all was good
First day I started as a postdoc I was shown to the office I was sharing with another postdoc. Walked into the room and found his wet socks pinned to the noticeboard - as he explained later, they'd got wet when he was cycling in and this was the best place to dry them.
Universities seem to foster strange behaviour. Once got sent around to see a lecturer in another department to negotiate use of his photometer microscope. My supervisor warned me before I went that he was 'a little ecentric', but even so I though I did rather well to keep a straight face when I found him in full boy scout uniform.
Get an AirZooka. Quite effective at knocking the pile of cans over from afar, with no projectile to retrieve.
/usr/games/fortune
There is an employee at my place of employment who can make anyone laugh. Out of nowhere, he will break into a whole episode of SouthPark. Every voice is done with perfection and every line is without error. But the best part is when I check my voicemail and hear, "Timmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy!"