Colleagues who are just fucking stupid

[Jockice]

I wonder if he accidentally designed a motel.

A Notel more like!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


New page I can't think of anything else.

[the]

My boss has frequent tragic problems with IT. eg His method for producing a letter is to print out a piece of headed paper from the Word document we have with our letter head on it, then write his letter in Word, before printing it onto the piece of headed paper he's just made. He then signs it, and scans the result to make a pdf so he can email it.

Award-winningly excruciating.

From my own experiences, I'm fairly certain that about 40% of all office work happening at any time is 'printing electronic documents out, writing on them, and then scanning them in again'.

Either that or 'printing e-mails out and putting them in a filing cabinet'.

[Dex Sawash]

His method for producing a letter is to print out a piece of headed paper from the Word document we have with our letter head on it, then write his letter in Word, before printing it onto the piece of headed paper he's just made. He then signs it, and scans the result to make a pdf so he can email it.

Pretty sure I would not be able to do that his way without help

[Captain Z]

My boss has frequent tragic problems with IT. eg His method for producing a letter is to print out a piece of headed paper from the Word document we have with our letter head on it, then write his letter in Word, before printing it onto the piece of headed paper he's just made. He then signs it, and scans the result to make a pdf so he can email it.

[Mr Farenheit]

I work in architecture too, and would like to second the request for a plan of this layout.

My boss has frequent tragic problems with IT. eg His method for producing a letter is to print out a piece of headed paper from the Word document we have with our letter head on it, then write his letter in Word, before printing it onto the piece of headed paper he's just made. He then signs it, and scans the result to make a pdf so he can email it.

He is nearly 80 though - so no-one can really say anything.

Hạ! I wish I had a copy, this was 15 years ago now. The hotel guestrooms were basically completely isolated and walled off so there was no way to access them. He would always draw incredibly complicated layouts and they were such a mess whilst being designed you couldn't tell what was even going on until it was finished.

Your boss' letter writing stressed me right out trying to imagine it. I had one boss myself who was IT inept (in 2001 so he's maybe better by now). He never got the concept of scrolling, if there was a list of files he would just click the down arrow to go through them one by one. But he'd take a second between clicks, so imagine him looking for something that starts with the letter U in a folder with a few hundred files... He'd start at A and click pause click pause click pause his way through the whole list.

[Icehaven]

Either that or 'printing e-mails out and putting them in a filing cabinet'.

We're having a big clearout at work at the mo and yesterday I had to go through two huge filing cabinets and get rid of anything we didn't need anymore. I'd say at least 50% was exactly this, printed emails or other documents that could be, and probably are, saved on a shared drived on the PCs. Lots of confidential stuff too, carefully password protected electronically, then printed out and left in an unlocked filing cabinet for anyone to peruse. GDPR nightmare. I only took over as manager a year and a bit ago and most of it predates me working here at all, but I suppose I should have been a bit more curious about what was in the cabinet, I just presumed they were mostly empty seeing as I've never had cause to open almost all of the drawers so there's nothing important in there.

[DrGreggles]

I definitely have a colleague who is fucking stupid.
Unfortunately I don't know who they are.
I got to my desk this morning and there was a post-it note on my screen that just read "MY COMPUTER* DOESNT WORK!".
No idea who it's from, and we have around 10,000 users and computers here.

[Kalabi]

There's a young lad that works at our place who comes out with some pretty dim stuff.
We had to explain to him where the prize money from the national lottery came from. He thought it was from taxes.

[the]

We're having a big clearout at work at the mo and yesterday I had to go through two huge filing cabinets and get rid of anything we didn't need anymore. I'd say at least 50% was exactly this, printed emails or other documents that could be, and probably are, saved on a shared drived on the PCs.

A lot of these pointless electronic -> paper operations are carried out by well meaning people who've either 'always done it that way' (old guard), or been previously taught to always do it that way and never questioned it.

Which does highlight the difference between workers with an inquisitive mind who ponder on whether there's a more direct/efficient/usable way of doing things, versus workers who carry out learned tasks in perpetuity.


The one that gives me nightmares:

Where I worked there was a ~1000 page technical document that needed to be revised. We had an electronic copy on this ancient typesetting machine (which should have been superseded 25 years earlier than it was, due to organisational incompetence).

So the customer would print out their copy of the document, mark up the changes in pen (often illegibly), and then post it to us. We would have to go through the whole frigging pile of paper, then instruct the typesetter to make the necessary changes. The typesetter would then produce a PDF and a printout. This would get supplied back to the customer. Then a month later another envelope arrives with more changes (that they hadn't decided were necessary before), all handwritten on a printout. Repeat. This went round for over a year.

What should've happened, if anyone in the chain had their head screwed on:

We extract the text from our current version and send it to them as a Word document. They edit the content until they're happy it's correct. They send it back to us, we typeset it ONCE and supply. Job done.

...

I keep thinking about this, it's like an exquisite Sisyphean nightmare:

My boss has frequent tragic problems with IT. eg His method for producing a letter is to print out a piece of headed paper from the Word document we have with our letter head on it, then write his letter in Word, before printing it onto the piece of headed paper he's just made. He then signs it, and scans the result to make a pdf so he can email it.

Aside from anything else, was a letter even necessary? Could the typed contents not just be sent as a normal e-mail?

The fact that the guy was nearly 80 adds an acute element of risk. You should not be wasting this much time at that age.

[ToneLa]

(An email goes out to everyone in the entire fucking company)

Thick Employee: what's this? I hate emails going to all! I will reply all to this email for all replying not to reply.

Thick Employee 2: I concur but upon receipt of your replied-all reply I will reply all replying I hate reply alls

It's happening somewhere right now. Possibly in those exact terms

[KennyMonster]

All these bits have reminded me of the woman at work who reassured us all that her dog was safely locked in the kitchen that particular day with the blinds drawn down so that when the solar eclipse took place the dog would not blind itself by staring directly at the sun.

What a numpty, everyone knows that dogs can't look up.

[gilbertharding]

Oh yes. Emails 'to all' are a nightmare - but I haven't seen any for ages. I don't work at that kind of place anymore.

I worked for Kent County Council architects department for a while, when email was a novelty (1997 - when if I recall correctly, the fact we could send emails to people who didn't work for KCC was something like a closely guarded secret) - and someone from our department thought it would be a good idea to send a Christmas Card as an attachment to everyone else at the council. He managed to crash the entire system.

Later we were outsourced to a firm called Mouchel (formerly a respected civil engineering firm, but last known by the epithet 'troubled outsourcing giant...') which had branches all around the world. I remember the familiar sound of all the computers on our floor going 'ding!' one by one, followed by the sound of the user exhaling loudly as the signal I was about to receive an email announcing that it was someone's birthday and there was cake available in the kitchenette in... Liverpool. Or else someone in Bracknell had parked their car and left the lights on.

[momatt]

(An email goes out to everyone in the entire fucking company)
Thick Employee: what's this? I hate emails going to all! I will reply all to this email for all replying not to reply.

We had an amazing one of these a few weeks ago.  About 30 employees all arguing and emailing the whole company (~10,000 people) to complain about all the emails that had been sent which were complaining about all the emails that...

Self-righteous thicko cunts.
But I did really want to join in, in an ironic way.  But resisted.

[Sebastian Cobb]

it's all just useless dickheads posturing.

'i am far too busy to ignore this'

[gilbertharding]

Aside from anything else, was a letter even necessary? Could the typed contents not just be sent as a normal e-mail?

The fact that the guy was nearly 80 adds an acute element of risk. You should not be wasting this much time at that age.

Sometimes a signed letter, on headed notepaper, is exactly what's necessary. Fee proposals, contractual certificates, etc.

Of course, when we normal people do it, the letter might never exist as a paper document, and the signature is an electronic facsimile... perhaps one day this too will die.

He's one of the founding directors, by the way, and will retire to a 'consulting' role at the end of the month. He has a lot of other strengths to be sure, but operating complicated machinery is NOT one of them... as far as I know I have the honour of being the only employee to have been in the car with him and been in an *actual* car crash, as opposed to a near miss.

[Blue Jam]

I work in architecture too, and would like to second the request for a plan of this layout.

My boss has frequent tragic problems with IT. eg His method for producing a letter is to print out a piece of headed paper from the Word document we have with our letter head on it, then write his letter in Word, before printing it onto the piece of headed paper he's just made. He then signs it, and scans the result to make a pdf so he can email it.

He is nearly 80 though - so no-one can really say anything.

In academia there are quite a lot of elderly professors who are like this- they're very bright and very good at their research work, but ask them for an electronic signature and they're completely stumped. I am reliably informed that Richard Dawkins can't work a photocopier, and after attending a great lecture by a certain professor who is renowned for his entertaining lectures I was informed that he's a devotee of the overhead projector and would still use one for lectures if he could get away with it because he can't work PowerPoint at all- and he employs an assistant to put those great lectures together for him.

Maybe they just get to a point where they think "fuck it, I can't be arsed to learn all this new-fangled technology, I'll be retiring soon".

[Icehaven]

(An email goes out to everyone in the entire fucking company)

Thick Employee: what's this? I hate emails going to all! I will reply all to this email for all replying not to reply.

Thick Employee 2: I concur but upon receipt of your replied-all reply I will reply all replying I hate reply alls

It's happening somewhere right now. Possibly in those exact terms

The company that runs my workplace is a huge international company with hundreds of thousands of employees across the world, and just in the time I've worked here we've had this happen at least twice. Even though I doubt every single employee of the company across the globe gets them it's still a lot of people, and it only needs a few percent of them to be stupid enough to reply to all (usually saying something like ''I don't think this was intended for me' or 'please take me off this mailing list') for it to generate about a hundred emails for everyone.

We had an amazing one of these a few weeks ago.  About 30 employees all arguing and emailing the whole company (~10,000 people) to complain about all the emails that had been sent complaining about the emails that...

Self-righteous thicko cunts.

Quite. The haughty tone of someone who would never be stupid enough to send mass emails to recipients that don't need or want to see them. Apart from this one.

I'm sure I'm also not the only person who's been joined in to ongoing email exchanges, scrolled down though previous messages and found something which wasn't intended for me to read? I had a good one a few years ago when my then boss had just been suspended the previous day (theoretically just for 2 weeks) so I was having to do some of his jobs, and I had an email exchange forwarded to me that began with an enquiry about which person could do a particular task, to which the first recipient had said ''that would be (my boss) but he doesn't work here anymore so I'll forward your email to (our head of department).'', who then forwarded it to me. I didn't even know who this person who was seemingly so confident my boss wouldn't be returning was, he was nothing to do with our department or area, yet here he was apparently far more aware of what was happening than me (in the event it turned out he was right too.) I replied to the Head of Department asking why this person was saying this, and he immediately rang me, apologised and said he'd speak to them but needless to say I never heard any more about the random with psychic powers (and a good link in the gossip chain.)

[Sebastian Cobb]

In academia there are quite a lot of elderly professors who are like this- they're very bright and very good at their research work, but ask them for an electronic signature and they're completely stumped. I am reliably informed that Richard Dawkins can't work a photocopier, and after attending a great lecture by a certain professor who is renowned for his entertaining lectures I was informed that he's a devotee of the overhead projector and would still use one for lectures if he could get away with it because he can't work PowerPoint at all- and he employs an assistant to put those great lectures together for him.

Maybe they just get to a point where they think "fuck it, I can't be arsed to learn all this new-fangled technology, I'll be retiring soon".

To be fair most modern photocopiers are needlessly complicated.

[momatt]

Quite. The haughty tone of someone who would never be stupid enough to send mass emails to recipients that don't need or want to see them. Apart from this one.

The last person to Reply all was our Executive Director of IT, in response to a new survey.

"Very nice, thank you"

Dozy nobhead.

[McFlymo]

Got to see a juicy email exchange between my boss and an act that were due to perform at the venue. I should have got the bit where he introduced me to them, but instead I got that, and a long back and forth between them all about fees, flights, ticket sales, promotion. All of it quite frosty with threats of cancellation at various points etc.

[a duncandisorderly]

I just deleted a file from a server while the file (a tv show) was on air. feeling pretty fucking stupid right now.
easy mistake, given the complexity of the system here & the naming conventions of the servers & the resolution of the UI, but the reaction of the Ops team who have to write it up makes me feel like going straight home.  no-one would've been watching anyway, but that's not the point.

[McFlymo]

I just deleted a file from a server while the file (a tv show) was on air. feeling pretty fucking stupid right now.
easy mistake, given the complexity of the system here & the naming conventions of the servers & the resolution of the UI, but the reaction of the Ops team who have to write it up makes me feel like going straight home.  no-one would've been watching anyway, but that's not the point.

Hey, on the plus side, I still romantically reminisce on the days were things would fuck up on broadcast TV, like a narrator being late with their voice over or a title screen not appearing etc.

Maybe that doesn't help much, but when I make mistakes at work it does cause quite a noticeable disturbance in the flow of the show, and sometimes (not always of course) those mistakes give people the chance to break the 4th wall and grab the audience again.

And well all that fails, blame the technology. :D

[a duncandisorderly]

Hey, on the plus side, I still romantically reminisce on the days were things would fuck up on broadcast TV, like a narrator being late with their voice over or a title screen not appearing etc.

Maybe that doesn't help much, but when I make mistakes at work it does cause quite a noticeable disturbance in the flow of the show, and sometimes (not always of course) those mistakes give people the chance to break the 4th wall and grab the audience again.

And well all that fails, blame the technology. :D

yeah, but I really feel bad for the five scattered-across-europe people who got up early to watch whatever the show was ("you have been warned" the discrep tells me) to have it cheshire cat on them & be replaced by whatever was the emergency material today. there's no +1, though, not that it would've helped, so I'm only guilty once. the +1 services have to be an uninterfered with delay of the primary service, because OfCom. so anyway it'll be on again soon. shit happens.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The IT department managed to disconnect the live side of the building's UPS a while back. I was on call for that one.

[flotemysost]

I am reliably informed that Richard Dawkins can't work a photocopier

I once had to explain a vaguely computer-related process to him (not photocopying). I'll admit I was a bit scared.

When I worked for a lettings agent, we had an Italian tenant who gave their original home address with the first line 56 Via Giovanni or something like that. My manager asked why I had let their application through because 'it wasn't a proper address, it needs to be their address, not via someone else'.

Never been to Italy but I know 'via' means 'road', but I kept my mouth shut because I didn't want to sound like a smug little know-it-all cunt. It wasn't the fact they didn't know this though, it was just the absolute knee-jerk insistence that the tenant must have been up to something dodgy, rather than stopping to think about it for a second.

[PlanktonSideburns]

I once had to explain a vaguely computer-related process to him (not photocopying). I'll admit I was a bit scared.

When I worked for a lettings agent, we had an Italian tenant who gave their original home address with the first line 56 Via Giovanni or something like that. My manager asked why I had let their application through because 'it wasn't a proper address, it needs to be their address, not via someone else'.

Never been to Italy but I know 'via' means 'road', but I kept my mouth shut because I didn't want to sound like a smug little know-it-all cunt.

Until now

[flotemysost]

Until now

Ha, yes I realise that does make me sound like a bit of a pretentious wanker.

I couldn't give a toss whether someone knows a particular foreign word or not though, that wasn't the point - it was more just something about the management culture there, I felt like I was in the wrong whatever I did, and they were so obsessive in adhering to a particular way of doing things (with the aim of getting as many deals through as quickly as possible) that I'm sure mistakes did slip through and cause delays, ironically, because no one ever stopped to question anything.

[Icehaven]

I couldn't give a toss whether someone knows a particular foreign word or not though, that wasn't the point - it was more just something about the management culture there, I felt like I was in the wrong whatever I did, and they were so obsessive in adhering to a particular way of doing things (with the aim of getting as many deals through as quickly as possible) that I'm sure mistakes did slip through and cause delays, ironically, because no one ever stopped to question anything.

I just like the idea that your boss thought that not only did a prospective tenant think it was OK to give his details as being 'via someone else', but also that you would have blithely accepted it. That's an assumption that two people have independently done something utterly ridiculous without even considering that they were just looking at it wrong.

[gilbertharding]

When I worked for a lettings agent, we had an Italian tenant who gave their original home address with the first line 56 Via Giovanni or something like that. My manager asked why I had let their application through because 'it wasn't a proper address, it needs to be their address, not via someone else'.

"...Rue Garibaldi, Lyon"
"Why would I care if he regrets a biscuit? What's his address? And why did you call me Leon? My name's Ian."

[monkfromhavana]

I once worked with a man who asked me if the sun was bigger than a house. He wasn't joking either.