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Workplace nonsense has a specific quality where it’s simultaneously absurd and completely expected. Your boss schedules a meeting about meetings. Someone replies-all to an email asking people to stop replying-all. HR sends a survey about productivity that takes an hour to complete. It’s nonsense but it’s also midweek.
These people are sharing the work nonsense they’re dealing with right now, and it’s all painfully familiar.
1. “My boss doesn’t understand how time works.”
2. “I get an email, then a text two minutes later asking if I saw it, and then a phone call just as the text notification pops up covering everything from both the email and the text.”
3. “I work with a woman who CC’s her boss on every email. She sends a simple request, and five minutes later her boss sends a long, formal follow-up repeating everything she asked, making it way more intense than it needs to be.”
4. “I’m on my two week notice right now so I’m being treated badly and having a bunch of extra work piled on.”
5. “Whenever the mother of one of my students upsets the father (they divorced a few months ago), he sends all three kids to school in mismatched clothes and shirts that say things like ‘I love my Dad’. I’ve never seen the same shirt twice, so I think the mom throws them out and the dad keeps buying new ones.”
6. “I have a vendor who gives me the same answer every time I email him: ‘Let me check and get back to you.’ His furniture shipment is over two months late, and it’s really frustrating. He’s doing the same thing to other people in my office on different projects.”
7. “Management is too cheap to hire another worker, so they pass the responsibility to a different person each night, even though it goes against company policy.”
8. “Our client had 10 months to review a demo site and seemed happy with just a few minor notes. But once it went into staging, they suddenly came up with 50+ issues and are demanding fixes, threatening not to renew the contract.”
9. “Our bar lost the manager and 20% of the staff three months ago, and the owner hasn’t hired anyone. We’re constantly short on supplies, can’t call in sick, and no one knows what’s going on because communication is nonexistent.”
10. “I was asked to collect money for my boss’s birthday flowers while Don baked a cake. Don was sick, so I bought the flowers using the collected money and added some of my own. When he came in, he acted like I’d done something wrong because he hadn’t made the cake, and people started questioning where the money went.”
11. “Some AR clerk can’t match up numbers so they’re threatening to put us on hold until we pay for stuff we already paid for…”
12. “A third party keeps insisting that someone worked for my company, but they didn’t. We’ve searched every possible record using name variations, birthday, and Social Security number, and there’s no trace of them. Despite this, they keep saying: ‘Someone else says he worked there’, which isn’t evidence and doesn’t change the facts.”
13. “My assistant keeps mispronouncing a friend’s name, even after I corrected her multiple times. Yesterday she butchered it worse than ever. I calmly explained that getting the name wrong could seem insulting and asked her to try to get it right. She flipped out and told other staff I’m bad.”
14. “I manage the tools and materials for a small electrical company. After we let one journeyman go, I had to clean out his van and found tens of thousands of small fittings all mixed together with no organization. Most were taken apart and dumped in boxes with random hardware, so now I have to sort everything, reassemble what I can, and squeeze it all back into my already full shop.”
15. “Trying to move this giant 40ft fiberglass ladder on my own since everyone called in.”
16. “I do sound for a cover band at a hotel, and every night I deal with five 60+ year-old musicians who act like they’re as big as a stadium-selling act.”
17. “My girlfriend planned a day off months ago to visit a best friend she hasn’t seen in two years. Now her work is scheduling a ‘mandatory’ meeting that everyone must attend or risk being fired.”
18. “I handed in my notice at work and my boss suddenly stopped talking to me.”
19. “Being scheduled on basically every day I was supposed to have off.”
20. “Jeff cuts his fingernails in his office every single day, I don’t know how they grow so fast. He also scrapes every bit out of his yogurt container, and it’s ridiculously loud for several minutes.”
Nate writes for Pleated-Jeans and enjoys finding the internet’s funniest corners so you don’t have to.
English (US)