Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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?