Ping thefoxaroo

[theoldwolf]

Oi! I just wanted you to know that you're not alone in your suffering. Apparently the entire nation is filled with the same kinds of people you have to work with. Hang in there.

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Bank
Australia

I work at a Bank as a teller behind the counter, and am also the treasurer responsible for the branches bulk money including damaged notes (called “mutes”) . One of my coworkers frustrates everyone else in the branch because she is a 30 year old woman who will always attempt to shift the blame for anything she does wrong to someone else. She is also amazingly lazy. This coworker is transferring me her lot of mutes so i can add them to those i already have and then clear them out. We have strict guidlines that we cannot accept notes if they are missing more than 20% of it, and we have a graph to help us judge how much theyre missing. If a customer hands us a note thats missing more than that we have to send it away to be valued and that amount will be credited to the customers account instead of the whole value of the note. Im going through the notes the coworker has transferred to me and sure enough……..

Me: (Coworker) , this 50 dollar note you gave me is missing almost half of the note!

Coworker: So?

Me: So? So i cant take it off you, cos it probably isn't worth 50 dollars anymore.

Coworker: Yeah, you do take it and send it off with your mutes.

Me: No, i cant take it. You shouldn't have accepted this. Its quite clearly missing more than 20% of it. Did you not think to check it?

Coworker: *Scrambling for excuse* Uhhh, see I didn't have time to check the notes. Its the customers fault for giving me this.

Me: *laughing* How is it the customers fault? Its your fault for taking it and not checking! And what do you mean you didnt have time?! You should be checking all notes before you accept them! That's your job! Now you'll wear a variance when that note comes back and you find out its not worth fifty dollars anymore.

Coworker: No, you have to take it and send it away-

* I cut her off

Me: No I don't take it! If i take it off you then i wear the variance instead of you when they find that notes missing half of it! No thanks! I'm not paying the price for your laziness and unwillingness to do extra work.

Coworker: No, you have to take it and send it off with your mutes-

Me: No, I don't have to do anything! You send it off to be evaluated, and then when it comes back valued at a lesser dollar value then fifty, you will have to put through a variance cos you took the note in! Its in guidelines and you know this!

Coworker: *almost maniacally yells* ARE YOU CRAZY?

( This makes me very angry)

Me: NO I AM NOT CRAZY! I'm just not lazy like you are, now send it away!

Coworker: No! I don't have to do that and I'm going to ask someone else who knows what the h*ll they're talking about!

(She storms down the front to ask two employees who are more senior than the both of us. I cannot hear the whole conversation through the security screens but I do hear the words 

“What? No, (MY NAME) can't take this! You have to send it away to be valued, unfortunately you will wear the variance for accepting this” 

I can see her face fall and I savour that moment. She storms back behind the counter. I fold my arms and raise my eyebrows, awaiting my apology for insisting that i was crazy and didn't know what i was talking about.

Coworker: Im going on break!!! 

(Source: notalwaysworking.com)

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How the workplace becomes infested with people this defective is truly beyond me.

Comments

[dhlawrence.livejournal.com]

How the workplace becomes infested with people this defective is truly beyond me.

Gravity. They settle there because they can't swim any higher in the pool.

[thefoxaroo.livejournal.com]

I think her sister works in my team... 9_9.

It's not just in my current job that I've encountered people unfit for their role. Having worked as a temp for eight years I met a lot of people. Among the reasons they survive in their roles are the following:

1) They're hired at a time when the team is short staffed, and then they become permanent and the payout becomes too expensive to justify getting rid of them.
2) They'd claim some sort of discrimination if fired
3) They're the relative or close friend of someone important
4) They manage to make themselves popular despite incompetence, and even if they only make themselves popular with the right people it's enough to ensure they stay employed.
5) They make management believe that they're the only person who can handle the job
6) They take the credit for other people's work (my former boss, the "Moron from Mars" did so according to Kim, the work colleague who escaped along with me to where we're working now.
7) And speaking of him, he frequently hired people unfit to work in the jobs he intended for them because:
. a) He was a lousy judge of character
. b) I suspect he hired people less capable than himself so that they would never show him up. This is the sort of thing that was joked about in "Yes, Minister" but it does actually happen.
8) They rig the system so that it's difficult for anyone else to fix it (Exhibit A: Mr Slander).
9) They settle themselves into their niche, become territorial, hoard their working knowledge of the company and prevent anyone else from getting a grip on the role
10) I also know of two situations where managerial staff with hostile attitudes hired people of the same disposition as themselves, apparently believing that they could get the job done. Sometimes there's a little bit of truth in that, but most of the time these people are just jerks.

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

This is a masterful list, which I am saving.

[thefoxaroo.livejournal.com]

Pleased to be of assistnce as always :)

And this was spur of the moment. I stopped when I reached 10 as I felt it was a round number. I could almost certainly expand on the list if I had time to sit down and remember all the places I've worked.

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

I just Googled "wear the variance," and this LJ entry was the first hit. Did the sender at Not Always Working (which clearly lacks a proofreader) write the phrase wrong?

[ccdesan.livejournal.com]

No, the sender is Australian, where they speak an entirely different language than we do. It's a local idiom, and could even be as restricted as within that particular corporation, as happens quite often.