When Have You Seen Your CoWorker Struggle With A Simple Task? (r/AskReddit)

what is the most painful way you have seen your coworker accomplish something very simple I occasionally come back to my desk to see a post-it note left by a team leader from elsewhere in the business the post-it note says see me please and is attached to a sheet of paper the sheet of paper is a printout of a Word document the word document contains a screenshot of Outlook the screenshot of outlook is showing an email I sent to the team leader more precisely it's a screenshot of a reply to my email that she has decided to screenshot paste print hand-deliver from a different floor and add an explanatory post-it note to me instead of pressing send the reply reads I am not sure what you mean here the phone rings before I can email the team leader hi did you see my note I am not sure what you meant in your email what also I would appreciate your best suggestions as to how she might add another level of stupidity to her actions perhaps photocopying the post-it note onto the printout word from her perspective ensure it wouldn't get separated from my perspective ensure I couldn't lift it to read the email a co-worker uses a calculator to do weekly entries in Excel dear God if I organize things at my job I had someone give me a pile of napkins ripped corners of paper business cards and Nan rolodex attached rolodex papers etc with various contacts on them they arranged in information from half phone numbers to full business cards he wanted me to rewrite all that information on colored index cards and then alphabetically organize them by last name some of them didn't have names just numbers I put them in Excel and gave it to him on a flash drive he thought I was some kind of magician bought me a fruit basket yes to this fruit basket we switched our photography database to Flickr several months back my boss gave the job of uploading the files to a co-worker who subsequently uploaded 500 files one at a time until I caught her and showed her that the other 2,500 images can be selected at once she was just enjoying her time you ruined all the fun and she had to go back to doing real work thanks a lot I have a volunteer that seeks me out because I help her with every problem she has at his computer related it last week she said her monitor was out again her monitor was fine the computer was turned off she says that isn't it because she turned it on I asked her how and she pushes on the big Bell silver badge that is located on the front of the computer so it's on another time she handed me a page of music she needed formatted into a program for printing and had a few changes she shows me what she needs changed so I asked for the original she says that the paper is the original I asked for the file that she typed this so I didn't have to retype it all she says that this is the original and that should be good enough I try to explain that I want the digital file and what that is and why it would be better to have that than to retype it all over again she says that if I can't do this then she will find someone else it shouldn't be that big of a problem so I asked how she got the original page of music and she says it was emailed to her I asked her to forward that email to me she has never forwarded anything before so I show her this new feature of email if she is delighted I am delighted everyone was delighted she is very old and does not trust computers each time they give her her trouble the computer is broken again she sees them as fancy typewriters I keep waiting for her to retire but I fear that this volunteer job is one of her only links to seeing people and would rob her of the joy of seeing people I am her ITB you just described my entire job at a museum except that it's many many volunteers and the only other actual staff person is just as old everyone is delighted my boss once gave me an Excel spreadsheet that had something like 10,000 contacts on it told me he wanted me to scroll through and eliminate duplicates he came out of his office 15 minutes later saw me script in a VB script asked how many duplicates I had eliminated I said none I'm going to get them all in one go he told me to stop wasting company time fooling around code and just do it his way the scroll through and check way so I bet him three paid hours I could have obtained in the next 15 minutes I would spend three hours off the clock organizing his contacts all he would send me home as soon as I was done and I'd get to stay on the clock the rest of the day five minutes later I emailed him the file with seven thousand eight hundred and ninety two unique contacts and pieced out that's actually a pretty cool boss click a link that opens in a new tab close the window instead of the tab open browser and repeat print as an email and send it via interoffice mail then send an email saying I've sent you X write down a weather dress sent in an email switch to a browser type the web address in the search box I spent a summer working on boats I looked over and my now wife was sanding a hatch on an old wooden boat using a power sander with no sanding discs she ended up sanding the entire thing with the velcro that one is supposed to stick the sandpaper to more of a company issue than anything else but my old company had a really outdated website think from the mid-90s and it was overdue for an overhaul so it took 18 months to get approval for a budget of a few thousand dollars to build a new website and much infighting over wire web site should cost thousands of dollars keep in mind this is a mega million dollar corporation that was posting multi-million dollar profits year after year so they finally get funding I volunteer to be on the site committee because I actually have some background in web design we contract with a local firm and in about eight weeks they knock the assignment out of the park I mean we had a fantastic site ready to go with the push of a button but number that didn't work we held a meeting where the shareholders saw the new design with the designers in the room and immediately they launched into what to our fight over I think this button should be red I think this needs more crop can you make our logo Sparkle one shareholder in his seventies actually asked can you make this integrate with the Google machine during the meeting I locked eyes with the head designer as I was the only person under 30 in the room and gave him my best I'm so goddamn sorry this is killing me to look and he nodded I think he understood it ended up taking a total of three years and six redesigns before we ended up with a site that looked okay but it was nothing like the original design and it took dozens of meetings just as painful as the first to finish something that we should have just paid for and gone live with immediately TL DR company took over four and a half years to fix a website and one old guy asked if they could integrate it with a giggle machine I feel your pain me we should hire an outside firm and get a really professional web site made a director of advertising number we have an intern from the local community college and she knows how to code in the HTML I train Realtors for a living the number of times I have seen someone do a search for Google and Bing is staggering it hurts every time I was working one summer for a hockey tournament calling and booking teams to play in said tournament one of my co-workers was tasked with making the program with the full rosters of the kids which is fairly common practice here so she has emails with lists of all of the kids names and numbers problem is the numbers are not always in numerical order some teams are organized alphabetically so instead of using word to fix this in a matter of seconds she chose a much more interesting route where I came into her office to find her on the floor surrounded by pieces of paper cutting up the names and using a glue stick to make them in the proper order I was totally speechless just turned and walked out of the room she was fired about twenty minutes later when someone of power came in and saw what she was doing clicking the first part of an Excel spreadsheet dragging all the way down to Plus pages letting go right before the last row and having to start over again at me just click ctrl + ur supervisor and that is why we hired you Thanks or ctrl + end this is like watching someone play Portal 2 in Portal 1 the concept that you can go through the portals and ether Direction was insanely daunting concepts for everyone I watched clay not a kill worker but my dad types letters in Excel because he knows how to use Excel and not word this is the routine I got to live with for almost three years one asked me how to do something which pertains to their job not mine with the skills overlap such a select all copy switch program paste I show with key functions we were running Mac so command a command C etc to I explained verbally they don't get it three I come over to their computer to show them while they're at the wheel for ask co-worker to come over to my desk and watch over my shoulder while I do it showing explaining how five co-worker questioned me at least five times why in a disbelieving tone I am doing it that way explained six go back to their computer and say can you come over here and show me again every day one write code in Eclipse to copy it's a notepad three save it for open command prompt useful path to Javik which is nested way too deep without using tab completion to compile the file 5 find syntax errors 6 try to fix them in eclipse 7 go to step 2 and he's my college lecturer till about tab completion I'm not a programmer or anything but I've been using computers and command prompt since I was 3 years old I'm so frickin embarrassed I had a co-worker who I suggested using Google Maps too so she goes to Bing types and Google finds Google and goes there then she types maps into the Google search so painful at my first job I had to speak to a procurement guy he told me to wait while he finished typing up an email he got to the end of the message and then started typing his email signature which he copied from printout of another email he kept on his desk he hunt and pecked out every letter one by one including the company phone and fax numbers in his job he would need to send at least a dozen emails a day I was remodeling someone's room a couple of years ago and was in the midst of installing the sheetrock with a fellow that had the best of intentions but a questionable degree of experience we had just worked ourselves to a point where I needed a smaller piece of drywall to cover the gap at the end of the wall so I asked him to cut a piece off of one of the many that was stacked outside while I finished installing the one that we had just brought in if you have worked with sheetrock before this is an exceedingly simple task measure the size needed use a knife to score the paper at the first measurement and bend the board until it breaks it cut the paper on the other side rinse and repeat for the second measurement it takes all of two minutes for a novice familiar with the process my good friend disappeared as I continued to screw the current sheet into the wall I finished up and thought to myself he must have gone to take a pee until I heard the circular saw wind up I glanced out the window at that moment and saw a huge plume of white dust shoot into the air as the saw dug into the sheet thinking back I was glad to see that he had scrounged up a dust mask in the process of retrieving the saw for all my drywall work I prefer to use vintage Distin dovetail saws and more ties them to the wall I finish with a block plane it's all about the craftsmanship this stupid guy called IT one morning to complain that his monitor was all blurry and he needed a new one immediately before he could start work site II came to his office and took away his old monitor and gave him a nice shiny new monitor the guy looks at the new monitor and complained that it was also too blurry to use and weight rubs eyes nevermind it's fine dot disclaimer I was that stupid man it was Monday morning well at least you want a new monitor open print fax scan email I see it every day whenever my boss is in another office and wants something from one of our computers in the office I mean he always tells me to print and fax it to him usually I just ignore that in PDF the done thing and email it to him I'm sure a lot of trees will thank me co-worker of mine didn't understand that when she turned email alerts back on after being told to leave them off that it would overload the mail server for whatever reason it was sending quite a few a second till a distribution list I am just sitting there laughing about the event from the sidelines working on my own stuff just watching things unfold sure enough a few hours later it brings the entire mail server down everyone is deleting emails etc I show a few people how to set up Outlook rules and just trash the Mail's automatically and then I look over at what she is doing manually deleting a page of emails at a time 10 or so in Outlook Web Access there was 180 thousand emails Outlook Web Access is truly terrible manually entering line by line a 5000 entry long excel file on to SharePoint instead of uploading the dang file it--which I worked in IT for a company that sold products to various oil companies at one point I am given a task of updating an excel sheet that needed some acronyms typed out in full as these fields were used in a bunch of different places it turned out that a secretary was already hard at work for months updating the spreadsheets and only half done I go in find and replace all the acronyms about one hour it turned out she was ray typing every cell with the new words not once did she ask if there was a faster way to do things doing budget reports in Microsoft Word and calculating all the totals with a desk calculator if then asking me to double-check all her figures when I started working at an office I had this co-worker who sat in the cubicle behind me she was young but just not very computer literate one day she asks me to fill out a service ticket because her computer is broken I asked her what's wrong with it and she said it's broken and said to just fill the ticket in a very voice I filled it ticket for her and one of our Tech's walks over with the meanest looks on his face and presses the power button on her monitor he then walks away without saying a word to anyone I was on the phone with a customer but afterwards I laughed so hard I drooled on myself and she got be months later the text says she was a repeat offender of the same crime she had an amazing butt and huge teeth so no one gave her crap about being an art it walked in on my boss taking screenshots by taking photos of his computer screen it was a film camera for years he had been taking photographs of his screen getting them developed and then scanning them this is not real it will never cease to amaze me the amount of technological incompetence and inefficiency of people in prestigious or even just respectable mediocre desk jobs I don't want to sound cocky or arrogant but I really believe I could do a lot of other people's jobs in a fraction of the effort just by having basic self taught computer skills and familiarity open Word misspelled word pullout dictionary search for misspelling of word fail leave misspelling print give to me to spellcheck edit spelling I noticed one of my friends was typing up some paperwork and he kept hitting the caps lock key I asked him why he kept hitting caps lock and he gave me a dust air and said he needed to capitalize the start of every sentence I asked him why he was not using the shift key and he gave me a blank stare I explained what the shift key did he admitted that he always wondered what its purpose was then it dawned on me I asked him if he typed every paper through his four years of college by using the caps lock when a capital letter was necessary he said he didn't it blew my mind thinking about how much time during his life has been spent hittin caps lock I have seen a lot of people type like this every time they need to capitalize a letter they stop look down at the keyboard lift up one hand push the caps lock button push the letter they need capitalized by poking it then poke the caps lock key and resume typing I asked a girl I hired to mock my dining room in my restaurant I told her to make sure she cleans the mop and changes the water first I have your standard mop bucket wringer combination I look over and I see her trying to wring out the giant moth by hand in the sink this is more heartbreaking in my opinion than all the tech related posts there are a lot of people out there who until recently have never had a good reason to use a mysterious magic boxes that are computers if you can't mop a floor you are freaked though worked at a u.s. gov office during college in about 1988 our job required blank sheets of paper to be used to scratch paper for making notes while processing travel vouchers we had a small amount to use per day one day the worst happened we ran out of scratch paper fortunately one of my colleagues wanted to help and had an idea unfortunately she had the intellect of a radish I then watched hoove jaw dropped as she took one of the remaining blank sheets of scratch paper and walked to the Xerox machine with a big smile on her face yep she proceeded to make copies of that blank sheet of paper with reams of new paper sitting next to the machine to make more scratch paper for the team I'm not sure what was worse her look of pride for having me more scratch paper for the team or the cheers of my team thanking her I've never been sure how to feel about the award I received that summer for outperforming the other eight members of our team combined two things first there is a person in our corporate office who will take a screenshot from the database printed and fax it to me in order to ask a question second our shop manager asked one day for me to set up a spreadsheet for cor returns I sent it up showed him how to quickly fill in sequential numbers in Excel then walked away every month since then I've been called to his office to show him how to do it again he's probably waiting for you to offer to just do them instead of minimizing the window they'll drag it to the bottom or side to get it out of the way so they can check the desk top every day I watch my coworker fire up his computer he fires up Excel next he opens up Internet Explorer at the end of the day he doesn't have anything done then he closes ridet lies a redditor would never use IE our HR director decided she needed to forward a memo that was a hard copy she didn't have it electronically rather than scanning it to herself and typing a little message to go along with it then using her contact list she spent several hrs using the scanner to send it one by one though very crappy interface to ever employee with an email address related we had a guy at my job recently that helped out HR his job was to scan the sheets in a ton of binders we hired he scanned every sheet individually when he could have just loaded them up in the feed and done them fifty sheets at a time in 1999 the company I worked for hired a 45 wire lady as a secretary the first task fat was assigned to her involved typing some old papers into ms word it's about an hour later I saw her looking scared at the monitor and asked her what was wrong she told me the screen is almost full with letters and there's no more space to type what should I do it took me a while to explain her that she could scroll the white space where she was typing after that day me and the rest of my co-workers took turns saving whatever she was typing to files because none of us felt we were up for the task of explaining her the concept of saving good luck formatting the pages she probably hit return at the end of every line edit sounds like she wanted to do a good job people like that are trainable and I would have helped her if you are new to the channel you can subscribe I publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now [Music]

Channel: Updoot Everything

Views: 50,480

Rating: 4.8563151 out of 5

Keywords: most painful, most painful things, most painful way, painful, work, work stories, on the job, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2019, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh

Id: v5QvvoxW4Js

Length: 22min 0sec (1320 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020