Worst work attitude you've ever witnessed

DeanAustin · 19-07-2014 05:57AM

Would love to hear the other side of some of these stories...

pampootie · 19-07-2014 06:44AM

Every single employee I've ever managed or worked with that went on and on about not taking lunch or working overtime for free were rubbish at their job. They'd do the extra hours alright but it was a because they were so rubbish at time management they couldn't get their job done in the allocated hours like everyone else

mikemac1 · 19-07-2014 07:08AM

Jawgap wrote: »

During the boom when no one wanted to work in the Public Service

Funny as I remember sitting in the RDS in 2006 with several hundred others doing the test for the EO competition.

Finished in the top 95% for the 1st exam and top 90% of the scenario exam and never got a sniff of an interview, I was way down the panel

We were there looking for a job, no other reason to be there

ringadingding · 19-07-2014 07:28AM

In the Celtic tiger days, I used to advertise chefs jobs.
I would say that 80% of the people calling first question was
" how much will you pay me?"

No introduction, no little opening chat, no questions about the food/ place.

I used to make up wild salaries like
" roughly, with tips 2000 a week cash in your hand"

I used to like the sound of them orgasmically mentally spending the money , before hanging up on them.

Grayson · 19-07-2014 08:12AM

dwayneshintzy wrote: »

Not nearly as bad as some mentioned here, but there was a really arrogant young lad worked in a call center I was in. Really seemed convinced he was too good for the job (even though he was 21 and didn't have a degree), and showed he was too good for it by literally not putting any effort in whatsoever. Flat out telling customers he couldn't help them, blind transferring to other departments, dropping a large proportion of his calls (i.e. simply hanging up), showing up hungover, etc....eventually got sacked for muttering that a customer was a "****ing retard" on a call. Customer hadn't caught it, but it was a recorded call that management had pulled. And they did catch it.

I worked with a guy like that in a call centre. He didn't have an attitude problem, he just didn't give a ****.

Customer: Hi i bought something on your website and it hasn't arrived.
CS agent: ahh. yeahhh.. have you cleared your cache and cookies. That'll fix it.

It was actually kinda amazing how little of a fcuk he gave. I was kinda envious. He got fired eventually but it took a year

Now, in the same place there was a girl who worked there. She hated the place and acted like she was too good for it. She worked on an outbound campaign for a few years. It was a really cushy number with a pay rise. That wasn't good enough for her. She figured out that if she called her mobile it counted as an outbound call so she'd sit there all day dialling her mobile. She even won a prize for making so many calls. Then she got found out and was sacked. She still thinks she's too good for the job.

dd972 · 19-07-2014 09:32AM

dwayneshintzy wrote: »

Not nearly as bad as some mentioned here, but there was a really arrogant young lad worked in a call center I was in. Really seemed convinced he was too good for the job (even though he was 21 and didn't have a degree), and showed he was too good for it by literally not putting any effort in whatsoever. Flat out telling customers he couldn't help them, blind transferring to other departments, dropping a large proportion of his calls (i.e. simply hanging up), showing up hungover, etc....eventually got sacked for muttering that a customer was a "****ing retard" on a call. Customer hadn't caught it, but it was a recorded call that management had pulled. And they did catch it.

Not so much a bad or negative attitude, more a case of someone who treats a call centre with the contempt it deserves :pac:

Colonel Panic · 19-07-2014 09:34AM

The worst thing about call centre jobs is fobbing a customer off, then logging the call as resolved makes the worker's stats good, but the person who fixes the problem while being hounded to take more calls is not good and "difficult" when they (and by 'they', I mean 'me', of course) point it out.

I was working as a contractor and there was a girl like that. All nice as pie but just told people to reboot their machines and call back if there was a problem.

sdanseo · 19-07-2014 09:37AM

Dunnes Stores in general - management especially. They seem to treat their staff like human waste, and unfortunately when you do that, it also affects the customers.

UCDVet · 19-07-2014 10:32AM

Cake Man wrote: »

In my last job there was a fella (department manager at the time, fairly high up, well paid etc) who was caught working two jobs at the same time.
There was a printing company about 50m down the road where he was holding down the other job. He'd go into our place in the morning, grab a coffee, say good morning to people and load up his computer so he'd be seen.
A while later he'd head to the printing place and do the same thing, head back and attend a few meetings. Go back to ours, another few meetings and do a little bit of work etc.

This apparently went on for about six months before he was nabbed and sacked and even at that I heard it was only because somebody from our company was in the printing place getting something done and saw him there. His role was such that he could disappear for a few hours here and there and always be able to say he was at meetings or doing x, y or z etc. if called up on it.

Neck like a jockeys boll!x! I heard his manager in our place got a bit of a kicking also for not spotting his regular disappearing acts. I often wonder if he got to keep all the money he would have built up over the time he was doing the two jobs!

What's really sad, is that nobody noticed his not doing work. They just noticed him being in another place.

Maximus Alexander · 19-07-2014 12:14PM

Cake Man wrote: »

Neck like a jockeys boll!x! I heard his manager in our place got a bit of a kicking also for not spotting his regular disappearing acts. I often wonder if he got to keep all the money he would have built up over the time he was doing the two jobs!

A lot of employment contracts have an exclusive service clause in them so I wonder if they could have gone after him for the money? I can't imagine any company being bothered with the hassle or expense though.

tritium · 19-07-2014 12:47PM

There was a story a while back of a guy who was fired for outsourcing his work to China (and not actually telling anyone). He paid a tiny wage to some Chinese lad to do his job and was drawing a six figure salary to take long coffee breaks.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/item/31078-computer-programmer-fired-f

Tbh I would have said firing someone with that much initiative showed a lack of any strategic thinking.

major bill · 19-07-2014 12:58PM

I'd rather stay an hour late than not take lunch and go home on time.

Lunch is important not just for health/mental reasons but you need to be sociable in the workplace. You are spending 8 hours a day 40 hours a week in an office with the same people, if you don't like them you won't like your job and I do find how you interact with colleagues plays a big part in promotions etc.

shane9689 · 19-07-2014 01:00PM

tritium wrote: »

There was a story a while back of a guy who was fired for outsourcing his work to China (and not actually telling anyone). He paid a tiny wage to some Chinese lad to do his job and was drawing a six figure salary to take long coffee breaks.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/careers/item/31078-computer-programmer-fired-f

Tbh I would have said firing someone with that much initiative showed a lack of any strategic thinking.

haha, they should have just found out who the chinese kid was and brought him over to take his place!

ColeTrain · 19-07-2014 01:00PM

partyguinness wrote: »

Her downfall was not that she did not assist during lunch but the back chat. She could have just kept her mouth shut and passed the message on. Hell she wasnt even being asked in the first place! It didnt matter a **** it was her lunch break.

She needed to be reminded of her role...it worked.:D

partyguinness wrote: »

Try reading my next post. As for Trade Unions...dont make me laugh....too late...LOL

Their sole purpose is self preservation at all costs...of course they will spin the 'helping the poor downtrodden working class' crap. Trade Unions are a blatant sign of an inefficent work force. Funny that trade union membership is highest among the public sector.....is that a penny I hear dropping?

partyguinness wrote: »

Asking to pass on a message during lunch time = "wait on you hand and foot during her lunch break". Really now?

Not moaning about Unions at all. IMO they are self obsessed dinosaurs who are only interested in their own cushy jobs and preserving the status quo at all costs.

Don't give me that guff. TU are not interested in the millions of exploited workers around the world, atrocious conditions, forced and child labour. TU are only interested in themselves. They are the biggest Me Feiners around.

If you believe otherwise, you are delusional and you can buy into their bull**** all you like.

Funnily enough, there was another lady at the same office and her nickname was 'Union Rep'. All she did was complain about everything and anything to do with the job. Sounds about right.

Loving the Jim Larkin speech though....;)

I have to say from reading this thread, I don't think i've ever seen anyone on boards come across as badly as yourself. Imagine coming onto an internet forum to reiterate that you're 'the big shot'? That really is fu€king pathetic!

fatbhoy · 19-07-2014 01:13PM

mikemac1 wrote: »

Funny as I remember sitting in the RDS in 2006 with several hundred others doing the test for the EO competition.

Finished in the top 95% for the 1st exam and top 90% of the scenario exam and never got a sniff of an interview, I was way down the panel

We were there looking for a job, no other reason to be there

I'm not surprised. :pac:

Arthur Beesley · 19-07-2014 01:21PM

fatbhoy wrote: »

I'm not surprised. :pac:

They were only interested in interviewing the bottom 10%

TerrorFirmer · 19-07-2014 01:44PM

How partyguinness sees himself.

How the rest of us see him.

Cienciano · 19-07-2014 01:50PM

This could go on!

How partyguinness sees himself

How the rest of us see him

NinjaTruncs · 19-07-2014 01:55PM

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

How partyguinness sees himself.

How the rest of us see him.

Cienciano wrote: »

This could go on!

How partyguinness sees himself

How the rest of us see him

Just wait until Monday when partyguinness gets back into work, you two will be put in your place.

LynnGrace · 19-07-2014 02:07PM

pampootie wrote: »

Every single employee I've ever managed or worked with that went on and on about not taking lunch or working overtime for free were rubbish at their job. They'd do the extra hours alright but it was a because they were so rubbish at time management they couldn't get their job done in the allocated hours like everyone else

Agreed. A few stick in my mind, but one or two in particular. One talked so much about all the hours she did, and not taking lunch breaks, that in itself wasted loads of time. She was quite a competent person, but definitely could have managed her time a whole lot better, and just stop wasting so much time going on about working so late and so on.
The other talked about 'working her lunch', that really meant disappearing for a good half hour to get a sandwich, then going on the internet, doing her shopping, booking holidays etc, til the layabouts

, i.e. the rest of us came back from (shock horror) taking a lunch break.
She was last in the door in the morning, and first out in the evening.

Kinzig · 19-07-2014 02:13PM

Worked with a girl once who made out her job was so intense that no one else on the planet could do it, she inputted information into a computer system that kept the plant running for the next 24 hours, this job could have taken her all day and even had her working on at times as it was so intense..she was also a horrible person to boot and wasnt easy to get along with but the bossman humoured her because of her "workload"..

anyways the day came when she was going off on a course for a few weeks and the manager was ****ting himself about who was gonna fill in for supergirl when the HR manager said that he would ask the receptionist to fill in as she had trained a girl to fill in for her, the manager was really nervous about all this as the running of the plant over 24 hrs was determined by accurate input of info..anyhows come the first day shes off and this receptionist lands in from the sister plant at about ten in the morning after getting things running on the main desk and asks what needs done..the manager shows her the stack of info that needs inputted and she sets about it immediately and keeps the office in chat at the same time..a real breath of fresh air!:)

Cue about one hour 30 minutes later she hops up and says thats it sorted ill be off see yous tomorrow:eek:..the manager looks at her stunned and cant believe she just put supergirls full days work into 90 minutes:pac::pac:
I really relished telling supergirl how useless she was after that;)

Cienciano · 19-07-2014 02:15PM

NinjaTruncs wrote: »

Just wait until Monday when partyguinness gets back into work, you two will be put in your place.

His manager will send us a strongly worded PM :pac:

dd972 · 19-07-2014 02:49PM

Another person sprang to mind, a former Team Leader in a Banking Call Centre, 30 % of the time he was full of hail-fellow-well-met hot air and the other 70 % of the time he was grumpy, unhelpful, ignorant and arrogant, ask him a question or for some help and he'd barely acknowledge you or give a one word reply with little or no eye contact.

Used to swagger around the office, chewing gum and staring at the advisors like he some Gordon Gecko from Goldman Sachs when in reality he was some jumped up Call Centre jerk, ''Mr Gravitas'' was my nickname for him. Had an ugly mot as well.

Cienciano · 19-07-2014 02:50PM

What he sees

What we see

mikemac1 · 19-07-2014 02:50PM

fatbhoy wrote: »

I'm not surprised. :pac:

Hah, you knew what I meant :P

ZeroThreat · 19-07-2014 02:50PM

McChubbin wrote: »

I used to work for a very well known Dublin food and clothing department store when I finished my Leaving. I was barely 18, painfully naive, socially awkward from spending the last 5 years in a purely girls-only enviroment and undiagnosed with AS at the time so I was painfully, acutely unprepared for REAL work.
It was a part-time job in the Lingerie Section and the pay was reasonable (IMO at least) at about €200 a week. It was fairly simple work- work the cashier's desk, rotate stock, help ladies in the changing rooms and whatnot. Anyhoo, about 3 months into the job, the store was undergoing a massive refurbishment in which the small ground floor coffee shop moved up to the second floor to a wider, snazzier premises and people were getting transfered to work as baristas as they needed staff. Fair enough.

Being wholey uneducated about the different techniques of steaming milk for a cappuchino or a latte, I politely declined the option to move the coffee shop as I was comfortable enough working on the lingerie section for the time being.
It was my first "real job" and I didn't want to get in over my head. Besides, I'd signed up to be a sales assistant, not a barista.
Annnyways, the coffee shop was finished and I was working away happily enough when my usual nice, kindly manager got called away on family matters and was replaced by this pure evil bitch who immediately zoned in on me as target for completely unprovoked verbal abuse.

She'd quite literally scream at me to clean up after the messy customers in the changing rooms IN FRONT OF CUSTOMERS, stand over me when I was ringing up purchases and nitpick over every tiny action. It was pure HELL.
Keep in mind that I was only a young pup at this time and very quiet, shy and unwilling to stir the pot, so to speak.
Instead of standing up to this ballbuster like I should've done, I kept my head down and worked away as best as I could but the job was stressful under her management and I would soon come to dread going into work.
Still, I needed the money so I endured the onslaught of unwarrented abuse for a few more weeks.

Then, something happened that I still can't explain to this day.
I got called into HR one day and told that *somebody* had made a complaint about my behavior on the changing room floor, that I had apparently made a "derogatory remark" about a customer's bra size and I was to be be transferred to the coffee shop which had more staff to "keep an eye on me" which was bull**** as I knew I was innocent. Sure, I joked and engaged in banter with the other girls on the shop floor when it wasn't busy but I never let it get in the way of the work to be done.

But HR didn't care about my protests. I was moving and that was that.
At least I didn't have to deal with Super Bitch Manager anymore, I though. Oh, how wrong I was. She too moved to the goddamned coffee shop and once my two days of very basic training on how to work a coffee machine, I was thrown into the deep end and expected to keep up with the rest of the more experienced baristas. In addition to brewing coffee for the masses, I was also forced to work on the hot food counter despite having no HAACP training whatsoever and work on a dishwasher with water so hot that I regularly scalded the hands off myself desperately trying to rush through the paces in a bid to appease Super Bitch.

It was 3 months of torture. I tried and I tried to plead my case to HR but they wouldn't listen and told me to suck it up or be fired in no uncertain terms. At this point, I was having anxiety attacks and regularly using my scant toilet/lunch breaks to cry in the staff toilets but I still put up with it because at the time, I figured I was lucky enough to have a job. I was also paying off a small but sizable credit union loan at the time so I didn't have much choice.

Eventually, it all got too much for me one day and I openly burst into tears after once again scalding my hands on the bloody industrial dishwasher jets. I flat out told Super Bitch Manager that I was going home for the day and walked out.
I took sick leave for a week to gather myself and then I once again went to HR about the damned woman. As always, they were no bloody help. I officially quit the job but in reality, I was forced out of it by the antics of this wagon who made my working life a living hell in those few short but traumatic months.

These days, I'm still bitter about the experience but moreso for the fact that I'm kicking myself for not reporting them to some sort of Employee Tribunal on the grounds of unfair dismissal. If I had only stood up for myself and nipped it in the bud in the beginning, perhaps it would've gone differently. Even so, I still occassionally pop into this store but I never bother to see if Super Bitch Manager still works there.

Regardless, I'm confident that karma will bite her in her flabby arse sooner or later, shy of me actually running into her and physically punching her in her smug piggy face. I'm not a violent person but that woman was a homicide waiting to happen.

Sorry that got so long. I've kept it in for a while and I was going to post in Cries of Retail but it seemed appropriate enough here.
I could easily name and shame the store. It's fairly famous but I won't 'cause I don't like a paddlin'.

Does the name of the Store start with D and end in S by any chance??

bobrawn20 · 19-07-2014 02:52PM

ZeroThreat wrote: »

Does the name of the Store start with D and end in S by any chance??

and does the middle rhyme with fun?

ZeroThreat · 19-07-2014 03:00PM

bobrawn20 wrote: »

and does the middle rhyme with fun?

lol well if that is the store in question I'm not surprised.

Worked in the restaurant section of said store back in late 90's (student summer job), manager (northern Irish) would send people on lunch break first thing after arriving in morning, so that you'd be working for the next 9 or so hours straight and not have to take a break during the 'busy' hours :rolleyes:

shane9689 · 19-07-2014 03:45PM

ZeroThreat wrote: »

lol well if that is the store in question I'm not surprised.

Worked in the restaurant section of said store back in late 90's (student summer job), manager (northern Irish) would send people on lunch break first thing after arriving in morning, so that you'd be working for the next 9 or so hours straight and not have to take a break during the 'busy' hours :rolleyes:

pretty sure thats not allowed, but it was the 90's lol

Roquentin · 19-07-2014 04:18PM

Remember the one in america who was a journalist or lawyer or something like that. Anyhow she did stripping in her spare time. Employers werent happy and so she was fired. Come to think of it there is a lot of escorts who are doing it so they can pay for study in a professional career.

Worst work attitude you've ever witnessed

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