“Being in the office means listening to LaQuisha and Takwanda squawking on the phone three cubicles away.”
Infuriating. We had a receptionist in our office who jibber-jabbered and clicked in Tagalog. She was on the phone all day with other Filipino/a people, and verbally abusing her poor husband (the “tone” was the tell).
I was technically her supervisor, but when I asked her to speak English when others were around... Oh yeah ... And DO HER JOB ... I got into trouble! She’s protected, don’tcha know.
Working from home would’ve been Heavenly.
I worked in an office were my office was on the far side of an open space area full of cubicles. I was in payroll and hence for confidentiality had an office with a door and cubicle land was occupied by the accounts payable staff. On the other side of cubicle land was the suite of HR offices.
Anyway, one of woman in AP, I’ll call her “Lisa”, was a white woman in her mid to late 30’s BTW, who talked constantly, and I mean constantly and very loudly and most times not even to anyone but to herself, to anyone in earshot but to no one in particular.
It was as if every random thought that came into her head, she had to verbalize, it could be work related, but most wasn’t and most of it didn’t even many any sense. And it was obvious she spent a lot of her time surfing the Web as she’d read news articles from Google News and other sources and FB posts she came across out loud. She was so G-D annoying.
Then around Christmas Lisa started playing Christmas music on her phone or on her computer in her cubicle and very loudly. Don’t get me wrong, I like Christmas music for the most part but if you can think of all the most annoying Christmas songs ever recorded, this is what she was playing.
Then she started singing along, very loudly AND OFF KEY. I had been playing my own Christmas music on my phone, mostly traditional, classical and jazz Christmas music, but at a very low volume, so low that I was the only one that could hear it unless you were in my office standing right next to my desk and even then it was still not so loud that you couldn’t carry on a conversation with me or if I was on a phone call, that the person on the other side of the call could hear it.
One afternoon when Lisa was singing/screeching, I got up from my desk and shut my office door. I didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at her or slam the door, I just quietly got up and shut my door to try to get some peace to get my work done as I was working on a report and very complex spreadsheet analysis with an urgent deadline that required my complete attention and not listening to Lisa singing her off key versions of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” or “The Christmas Shoes”.
The next morning when I went to the coffee station located on the other side of cubicle land that necessitated me to walk by Lisa’s cube, and Lisa started to talk (loudly of course) to her cubicle neighbor, (I’ll call her Karen) about how much she absolutely hated people who didn’t like Christmas music, that they were probably Communists and Atheists and it was obvious from other things she said that she was talking about me. And she egged Karen on to join in about how much she also hated people who hated Christmas music and who also drank too much coffee. It was like I was back in HS with the Mean Girl’s Club.
There was another time our PR processor Ceridan had an issue were suddenly a few people like Lisa who lived in MD but worked in PA were not having the right amount of MD tax withheld (Ceridian suddenly stopped withholding the county portion of the MD withholding).
I sat down with her in person to explain the problem to her and what I was doing to resolve the issue with Ceridian and what I was doing to make her whole as far as the one PR were she was under withheld and ensured her it would be corrected. And she seemed good with this.
Then the next day, my boss at the time, the Finance Manager sent me a scathing email about how Lisa came to him in tears at the end of the workday the day before about this tax issue and how I wasn’t doing anything about it or to help her or explain it (and this conversation she had with him happened AFTER I had spoken with her).
I was livid and set up a meeting with him to explain. But to be honest, he was a bit of an idiot himself, and FWIW not a Diversity hire but a white guy so white you had to wear sunglasses to be in the same room as him. (I’m joking a bit of course but TBH, I don’t know how this guy ever got this job except for the fact he was “friends” with one of the executives of the private equity firm that acquired the company just after I started).
He knew nothing about PR or PR taxes and didn’t even know how the system we used for posting journal entries worked as was obvious when I had a problem one time posting the PR to the GL and he was no help at all and didn’t even seem to understand how PR entries hit the GL.
I’d had enough from Lisa by then and went to our HR manager to complain about the verbal abuse and the petty things Lisa and Karen started doing like moving the office Keurig to Lisa’s cubicle so I couldn’t use it. But she was of no help.
Just before COVID hit, the company via the private equity firm acquired two more companies. I was already working over 60 hours a week and when I questioned the new PR manager (who was hired over me despite my having filled the role for almost a year and having more experience than her and who took credit for work I did and pushed blame about one of her major screw ups on me) about work load and needing additional staff, and my concerns, I was then fired, told I was no longer a good fit”.
I was never so happy to be fired from a job.