Co-workers that act like children

[potpie]

I'm having a very hard time coping at work. Part of the problem is that I am a temp. and I get paid $8.70 an hour. My job is also done in a few weeks. Anyways, I have a couple "problem" co-workers. One is a girl I refer to as "teen mom" and another as "Ms. Deflect Blame & Ask Questions later".

Teen Mom is close friends with all the supervisors, who are lazy as hell, and uses it as some sort of authority (even though she is a temp like just everyone else). She is snotty, rude, has no problems swearing excessively or calling people losers, and cuts out of work early or takes extended lunches. The supers know she does this, they just don't care. She is referred to as Teen Mom, btw, because she is 19 years old with two kids already and has her mom (who she badmouths) raise them so she can party with her paycheck. She's the reason I feel dumb for having bothered to go to college. I should have just got knocked up, right?

And then there is Ms. Deflect Blame. She has to have bipolar sydrome. When she is chatty, she is pleasant. When some odd mishap happens at work (ie new person screws something minuscule up due to poor training), she loses it. She starts screaming, blaming whoever happens to be near her at the moment and almost comes to tears. Today, she flipped her lid and was so wound up, I couldn't even understand her to help her out. I had to move 100 lbs of parts to look for what I thought was important material but instead was to find a stupid shipping sticker that would have taken me 2 seconds to print out. I was ....angry, to say the least.

Well, to make matters worse, 2 of 3 supers are on vacation this week.
Again, why did I bother with college?

[twiggy101]

Just wait. The teen mom is going to get a wake up call when she had a hard time finding/keeping a job. Karma's a bitch.

I used to work in a shop full of losers. Probably the worst of them was the guy who works at the back handling big sheets of glass and he's a drinker. He would go missing for a few days and leave early whenever he feels stressed because the boss gives him shit. And he got shit a lot because he can't cut glass without breaking the whole thing. Finally he stumbled while he and some other guy was carrying glass and the other guy got hurt and he eventually got a letter notifying his termination.

[strykerdarksilence]

I can relate, my last big office job was working for the tax office here in the UK in a call centre, and I was surrounded by 4 types of people.

1) Which was the smallest group there and the one I clung tightly to, which was the nice, normal down to earth people who just wanted to earn a living and who has nice, normal down to earth hobbies and things they could talk about in lunch breaks etc.

2) The ladder climbing jobsworths who were predominantly in the pay grade above me, most of whom had never actually answered the phones and some of whom didn't even understand how income tax systems worked. These were the snivelling douchebags who eventually caused me to walk out of the office and resign the next day because they would constantly tell everybody how to do their jobs and to increase their call volumes without actually understanding what the work entailed. Not one of them had an empathetic bone in their body and if you tried to reason with them, they would all adopt a snivelly, high pitched nasal tone and pull rank on you.

3) Were a group of women of all ages who would fall very close to how you describe 'teen mom' in how they conducted themselves. These along with number 4 made up the largest part of the office.

4) Idiotic 'macho' manchildren who's sole existence was fart jokes, making crude remarks to everybody and laughing loudly at their own 'jokes' and boasting about how drunk they got last Friday.

But the positive I take out of this job is what one of the few rational managers (one of the very highly ranked guys in the office, about 4 pay grades up) told me when he did my exit interview. Essentially he said "the reason people like that [the one's I've just described and had lamented about in great detail in my resignation letter] are so numerous is that they don't care about anything real and so they're happy just to exist in their pathetic little bubble. The people who go on to achieve things and get better jobs surrounded by more sensible people are the ones who come, gain the experience and become good at the job and then get sick of the environment and go elsewhere. Their record and conduct speaks for itself and helps you get a better job." He pointed out his own example as proof (he'd left the tax office, worked elsewhere in civil service for a number of years and then come back in that much higher position).

Unfortunately you will meet douchebags in every work environment, because lots of people are, but if you can gut it out in the short term, you'll generally do better because those kind of people congregate in certain jobs where they can happily wallow in their own mindless bollocks.

Not the greatest of comfort I know, but I think it's true for the most part.

[legendkiller1985]

My Job is a mix of retirees, people in their 30's-40's and College students. the only one I have some "issues" with are the arrogant college students who think that just because they have a degree, they can talk down to everyone and they are better than everyone else.

[EvenBaldobombHasAJob]

my job's mostly great (Blockbuster), but we're stuck with one idiot who the boss won't fire for some unknown reason. he's been there for 2 years and still can't do basic, simple things like put through a giftcard for a customer, can't check in movies, and can't be given closing shifts because he whines about it and won't do his share of the closing jobs. he routinely takes 15-20 minutes longer on his break than he's supposed to, and takes a 30 minute bathroom break on top of that, usually just as we get too busy. he "sells" a lot of rewards, but he also usually gives the customer an 8-10$ credit for no real reason just so he can get the sale, so he might as well not be selling it at all. and now he's taking a month off for no reason. and whenever he has a problem, instead of dealing with it like an adult, he gets his mommy to complain for him.

[default]

There was a guy at my last job, who would stop everyone and ask them the most random non-work related questions you could think of. Science, religion, politics, etc. So basically, he annoyed or angered about all of the plant by just seemingly trying to talk over their heads. This wasn't on break, so much as it was on the floor. It didn't help that he was given about the only job with some real downtime while most were rushing through stuff.