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Bad Employees

dasdenny

Inspired by the recent thread "Bad Employers", share any examples of bad employees that you have come across.

You don't have to have been in a managerial position while you worked with them, I think it's safe to say that we have all worked with peers who were bad employees and we may have had to cover for them

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Ajsoprano

dasdenny wrote: »

Inspired by the recent thread "Bad Employers", share any examples of bad employees that you have come across.

You don't have to have been in a managerial position while you worked with them, I think it's safe to say that we have all worked with peers who were bad employees and we may have had to cover for them

Share you stories

I have an apprentice I usually work with but he got sent with another lad one morning. He came back to me three hours later. They both had new haircuts.

TheDavester

Working with an owners family member is a nightmare usually....do minimal effort if lucky and it goes in one ear and out the other

pgj2015

I had this awful office job a few years ago, I sent crumpled up letters to other companies, drank on my lunch break, I once was carrying a box of files from one building to another and a gust of wind blew half the files across a wall, i just left them there. all this was because i was deeply unhappy at having ended up in a depressing job like that, I quit soon after.

Birneybau

dasdenny wrote: »

Inspired by the recent thread "Bad Employers", share any examples of bad employees that you have come across.

You don't have to have been in a managerial position while you worked with them, I think it's safe to say that we have all worked with peers who were bad employees and we may have had to cover for them

Share you stories

Share YOUR story

Esel

Anything yourself, OP?

Discuss.

dasdenny

Birneybau wrote: »

Share YOUR story

My bad, of course I should. Where to start

I worked with one guy who spent ALL day of facebook and youtube etc - he didn't even try to hide it, the rest of the office had to pull up the slack for him, fixing his mistakes or just doing his job for him in the first place. The problem was he was a really nice guy, and others constantly accused us of having an issue with him personally which we didn't, just professionally.

ShowMeTheCash

I used to work for this guy who worked hard but was not incredibly bright.
It made for a weird dynamic as it was clear that this was not something that came naturally too him, he was not a bad guy and he did try really hard that was clear to see.
I would even leave obvious mistakes in little tasks for him to pick out just to make him feel better about himself or to make it look like he actually done something of value in front of some of the other office staff.
When he is not around the rest of the office staff talk about him constantly so I kind of had a soft spot for him, would even try and back him up as he is completely oblivious to all of this.
The work slate that would take him and entire day with extreme difficulty I could literally do in an hour so I ended up spending half my day on facebook and or youtube....

I got called into head office on Monday they are debating on whether he is a suitable fit, does not look good, I think a decision is going to be made this Friday!

smeal

I worked with a girl who was hired simply to do menial office tasks such as photocopying, post, ordering stationery, running errands, reception cover etc. I actually started in that job and after a few weeks was promoted to a higher position so the role itself was sort of an entry level position with a view to moving forward if you had any sort of ambition.

Anyways this girl was as thick as a ditch. You'd give her 10 simple pages to photocopy and it would ALWAYS come back wrong with pages missing or something. This was a Law Firm btw so photocopies for things like briefs, contracts etc had to be perfect or else sh*t could hit the fan down the line. Stationery orders were always wrong even though she simply had to renew the previous order most of the time. Things like Wills and Title Docs went missing as she was incapable of filing it back in the places she got it.

Once she was given the task of calling a group of clients who were due to come up from Cork the following week to re-arrange for a different day as the Partner they were due to meet would be stuck in court. She plain blank didn't do it and the Cork clients arrived to Dublin the week after only to find that the Partner they were due to meet wasn't there. They were big clients and the meeting was huge so the office went into a total frenzy. She was pretty much unable to do the simplest of tasks and the worst thing was she didn't give a flying f*ck about it either. Her attitude stank. She'd just shrug or give you this snarly grin if you pointed out she made a mistake.

Ah feck she was totally weird like. She'd land into the lunch room with a sandwich she had just bought and you'd make a comment like "oh that sandwich looks nice, where did you get it?" and she'd tell you she couldn't remember, even though she bought it 2 minutes previously.

As time went on we learned she was a total psychopath also. At the Christmas party she got completely p*ssed and told us her boyfriend had called the Guards on her the previous week because they got into a brawl and she tried to stab him with a bottle.

Eventually she was fired because she was a total liability. About 2 weeks after she left this dodgy woman from some Ann Summers supplier rang the office demanding to speak to her and that the last order hadn't been paid for. Turned out she was getting sex toys delivered to the office and selling them on and owed suppliers a heap of money. Nobody in our office would have passed any remarks on boxes being delivered all the time because she was responsible for ordering stationery and the likes.

Then about 6 months later we facebook creeped her and it transpired she had moved to America and got married.

Totally nuts.

_Brian

A company we did business with rang one day and asked had we a problem with the fax as they were continuing to receive the same invoice over and over. (Shows how long ago it was)
Girl in the office admitted she thought there was a problem as the fax wasn’t sending, she really did think the invoice would go and was awfully embarrassed.

CruelCoin

_Brian wrote: »

A company we did business with rang one day and asked had we a problem with the fax as they were continuing to receive the same invoice over and over. (Shows how long ago it was)
Girl in the office admitted she thought there was a problem as the fax wasn’t sending, she really did think the invoice would go and was awfully embarrassed.

In our industry, most of the decision makers are in their 50's and 60's. The fax is still heavily utilised here.....

[Deleted User]

This was a long time ago and it must have had something do with mental health or something.

Everybody cant be bothered from time to time, but this person could sit and do nothing for 8 hours at a time nothing at all just staring out the window and making tea. The had a horror of any manual work were convinced that woman has better lives than men, that all this was work-related.

They got moved and promoted and then got fired as they got found out eventually.

It would not happen today as there is too much monitoring that is the bouns of the internet and technology it makes it hard for the work avoiders to hide and anyone with an actual problem is offered help but if that does not work they go.

MIRMIR82

CruelCoin wrote: »

In our industry, most of the decision makers are in their 50's and 60's. The fax is still heavily utilised here.....

Same here..and a lot of our customers still use it. We have one customer that refused to buy a fax(all those years ago)....they order over the phone or send up orders and drawings on random pieces of paper with the delivery driver...stuck in the 50's!!

[Deleted User]

CruelCoin wrote: »

In our industry, most of the decision makers are in their 50's and 60's. The fax is still heavily utilised here.....

Isn't there some legal distinction between fax email and snail mail.

[Deleted User]

The one problem is that I do think in today's work environment it's too cut and dried in some ways there are people who started out being dreadful but ended up being brilliant.

Its harder for young people to come back from a mistake today and that is a pity.

Ajsoprano

mariaalice wrote: »

The one problem is that I do think in today's work environment it's too cut and dried in some ways there are people who started out being dreadful but ended up being brilliant.

Its harder for young people to come back from a mistake today and that is a pity.

Yep I find young men are like a sewing circle these days. Even building site men running around like teenage girls to talk about some trivial mistake somebody made that took 15 minutes to fix.

s3rtvdbwfj81ch

According to Unions and the left in general, there ARE no bad employees. It's all the fault of big corp

Hector Bellend

I used to work with a guy who was a chronic gambler.

Rather than be awful at his job it just appeared that life was getting on top of him. He was up to his eyeballs in debt, his wife wanted out and his family and kids hated him.

He was eventually fired and I haven't seen or heard from him since.

[Deleted User]

Ajsoprano wrote: »

Yep I find young men are like a sewing circle these days. Even building site men running around like teenage girls to talk about some trivial mistake somebody made that took 15 minutes to fix.

But that's a function of a society that says all issues can be 'fixed' it's just a matter of finding the correct solution and applying it and voila it's all sorted nobody can be different its a sort of hivemind thinking.

It reminds me of how the former USSR use to put dissidents in mental hospitals because if you disagree with communism they must be mentally ill.

[Deleted User]

Bot42 wrote: »

According to Unions and the left in general, there ARE no bad employees. It's all the fault of big corp

That is nonsense.

somefeen

Ajsoprano wrote: »

Yep I find young men are like a sewing circle these days. Even building site men running around like teenage girls to talk about some trivial mistake somebody made that took 15 minutes to fix.

There's always one fella that's **** at his job but deep down everyone likes having them around so they have something to bitch about and make their own mistakes seem trivial.
If you blow that guys mistakes out proportion amongst yourselves even better.

Every work place has that guy. If you don't know who it is, its you.

seamus

Hah. Have a few.

One place had a pretty generous sick leave policy. As long as the doctor's notes came in, they just kept paying you. I think you went down to half pay after 3 months or something.

One girl went out on long-term sick leave, and the notes kept flying in. 9 months later she pops up on "Off The Rails" launching her new esoteric fashion range. I know the money stopped, but I think the company also sued her to get it all back.

Another guy went out on long-term sick leave and then as suddenly as his sickness has started, it ended 3 months later and he arrived back. He confided in teammates that he had gotten a job somewhere else but been fired from that job for skipping out early and going home - someone rang him in an emergency and he had to confess he'd gone home. Fired.
His colleagues at the original job had been none too impressed that they had to pick up his slack for the last 3 months and promptly let the manager know. Fired again in the space of two weeks.

In another job one guy was known for his "abrasive" manner. One day he decided to go on a facebook rant about some colleagues and managers, even though he was friends on facebook with most of these people. Found himself fired 12 hours later. He claims he was fired because a HR manager saw him smoking weed outside a pub :rolleyes:
Had the misfortune of encountering the same guy in another job. A new manager started in the company who was his new boss. The manager introduced himself and asked him about some task that needed doing. He promptly told the new manager to piss off, he was too busy and then sent an email to the boss's boss complaining that "the new guy" was giving him orders. He was later let go for "poor performance".

I hired a French guy for shift work, who took a smoke break every 20 minutes or so. Literally every time I went down to their desks, the guy was coming or going with his jacket on. He might have been socially inept and uncomfortable so literally couldn't think of anything to keep himself sane but smoke. In a way I was relieved that the company closed down before I had to had to fire him

CruelCoin

MIRMIR82 wrote: »

Same here..and a lot of our customers still use it. We have one customer that refused to buy a fax(all those years ago)....they order over the phone or send up orders and drawings on random pieces of paper with the delivery driver...stuck in the 50's!!

The best one i had was this elderly guy who filled his cart on our webshop, reviewed the shopping cart, and then, instead of clicking "send" he printed off the page and faxed it to us.
Jesus christ.

conor2469

I Worked with a very strange guy before, compulsive liar, a real 4 ball Paul. Always making up absolute s***e and then would get aggressive if you questioned him on it. He was also terrible at his job, arriving in late, avoiding work or pawning it off on others, taking his lunch money from the till. he ended up getting into an altercation with another member of staff over something (Getting up in his face and screaming) and when the manager intervened he told him to f**k off and walked off the premises with about 5 hours left on his shift. He came in the next day acting like nothing had happened. He was let go the following week.

Rerto

I used to work for a company with several branches across the UK and Ireland with a turnover close to a billion a year, they used to charge employees 50 cent for a cup of tea and if you brought your own tea bags in or coffee, they'd charge you 25 cent for taking a dash of their sugar or milk in the canteen.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

Rerto wrote: »

I used to work for a company with several branches across the UK and Ireland with a turnover close to a billion a year, they used to charge employees 50 cent for a cup of tea and if you brought your own tea bags in or coffee, they'd charge you 25 cent for taking a dash of their sugar or milk in the canteen.

And that made you all bad employees???

I worked were the turnover was multi-billion and profits were hundreds of millions but we still paid for any canteen items - it didn't make us bad employees though.

Rerto

Beau Gorgeous Mouser wrote: »

And that made you all bad employees???

I worked were the turnover was multi-billion and profits were hundreds of millions but we still paid for any canteen items - it didn't make us bad employees though.

My mistake :rolleyes: I misread that as "bad employers", and to predict your follow up question, yes, it DOES make them a bad employer.

TG1

I used to work with someone who thought she owned the air con. She was actually quite good at her job and worked away fine, but the amount of drama and whinging she caused by having the heat on in the middle of the summer was not even funny. The rest of us were less productive due to the amount of time that went into strategic planning for the air con wars....

fatbhoy

smeal wrote: »

I worked with a girl who was hired simply to do menial office tasks such as photocopying, post, ordering stationery, running errands, reception cover etc. I actually started in that job and after a few weeks was promoted to a higher position so the role itself was sort of an entry level position with a view to moving forward if you had any sort of ambition.

Anyways this girl was as thick as a ditch. You'd give her 10 simple pages to photocopy and it would ALWAYS come back wrong with pages missing or something. This was a Law Firm btw so photocopies for things like briefs, contracts etc had to be perfect or else sh*t could hit the fan down the line. Stationery orders were always wrong even though she simply had to renew the previous order most of the time. Things like Wills and Title Docs went missing as she was incapable of filing it back in the places she got it.

Once she was given the task of calling a group of clients who were due to come up from Cork the following week to re-arrange for a different day as the Partner they were due to meet would be stuck in court. She plain blank didn't do it and the Cork clients arrived to Dublin the week after only to find that the Partner they were due to meet wasn't there. They were big clients and the meeting was huge so the office went into a total frenzy. She was pretty much unable to do the simplest of tasks and the worst thing was she didn't give a flying f*ck about it either. Her attitude stank. She'd just shrug or give you this snarly grin if you pointed out she made a mistake.

Ah feck she was totally weird like. She'd land into the lunch room with a sandwich she had just bought and you'd make a comment like "oh that sandwich looks nice, where did you get it?" and she'd tell you she couldn't remember, even though she bought it 2 minutes previously.

As time went on we learned she was a total psychopath also. At the Christmas party she got completely p*ssed and told us her boyfriend had called the Guards on her the previous week because they got into a brawl and she tried to stab him with a bottle.

Eventually she was fired because she was a total liability. About 2 weeks after she left this dodgy woman from some Ann Summers supplier rang the office demanding to speak to her and that the last order hadn't been paid for. Turned out she was getting sex toys delivered to the office and selling them on and owed suppliers a heap of money. Nobody in our office would have passed any remarks on boxes being delivered all the time because she was responsible for ordering stationery and the likes.

Then about 6 months later we facebook creeped her and it transpired she had moved to America and got married.

Totally nuts.

Great shag though, I'd say.

Dr. Kenneth Noisewater

I moved to a small town in Donegal for work 8 years ago. It wasn't easy to get rental accommodation, there was nothing on daft and I was badly stuck as I was a long way from home. I ended up going up there a week before I was due to start work, bought a local paper and just rang anything that sounded OK. A girl answered my call who proceeded to question me as to where I was from etc. I knew by her accent that she was from somewhere not a million miles away from my home area, but she wouldn't let me draw it out of her and got really coy. Anyway, I figured out from the conversation that she might be a bit unusual, so I left it at that.

Long story more boring, I ended up working in the same place as her. It turned out she was from the same general area as me. The only reason I found this out was that she eventually started asking me for lifts home at the weekends as she didn't drive and public transport links were almost non existent. But even at that, she'd get me to drop her somewhere in the local town and would never be drawn on where exactly she was from or anything about her (it was hard to fill a 3 and a half hour drive talking about work) but she got loads of info out of me. She'd sometimes get a call and she'd basically whisper down the phone.

People in work hadn't a clue what to make of her and used to ask me, as they presumed I'd be in the know. She told some people she was from Dublin, others Galway.

None of this makes her a bad employee. However, around the end of 2011, she just stopped coming in to work. Her landlord even contacted us to ask what the story was, as she wasn't at the house but had left belongings there and post was piling up. She just went awol, but wasn't down as missing or anything. We were worried something had happened to her, but whatever happened, she just disappeared. I moved away from that job and ended up back in my home town, where I have never seen her, although to be fair, she could be living somewhere else by now.

The odd part was that I got an email from a girl I worked with in Donegal a few months ago. Apparently your one had turned up at the office that morning looking to get a mug that she had left in the canteen in 2011.

gmisk

I work in IT...I had to report a man on reception for continuously looking at porn....he was given a talking too...internet access was taken away...he eventually got back online again using a phone line plugged into the back of the PC...and was physically caught by an employee looking at porn....he was gone the next day never to be seen again.

I did also work with a woman who was above me that literally did nothing whatsoever in the 9 months that I worked there, bar talk to her friends about holidays and do admin work for a running club she was a member of. She passed every single bit of work onto me.