Pet Office Peeves

Pet Office Peeves

In a corporate office you are constantly mixing with a wide variety of personalities, with a range of intelligence and tech knowledge different from your own so perhaps it’s only natural that some things people do will be frustrating or annoying. So today maybe I am in a mood but thought it would be fun to list them out. Sure, many times people will have valid reasons for doing these, but it doesn’t stop them from annoying me, especially before my morning coffee!

Seems on re-reading these that I don’t like meetings 😉

• Meetings!
  • that people book outside of normal working hours and expecting you to attend without asking.
  • that people book on top of other meetings at the same time, and expecting you to cancel or move the original one.
  • that overrun – which sadly is most of them. And then the meeting owner just keeps going without asking if you have another call.
  • at 9am Monday morning or after 4pm Fridays. I like to plan and wrap up my week in those times. In fact any day before 9am isn’t great, I need time to prep and read the 100 emails that came in overnight before I get on a call with you and you say “did you read my email”.
  • that should have been an email instead.
  • that people don’t accept until the morning of the meeting (or not accepting them at all then just showing up anyway. One guy said “I don’t want to clutter your mailbox with responses”. I almost cancelled the call because I thought he wasn’t coming… sigh.
  • at 9am Monday morning or after 4pm Fridays. I like to plan and wrap up my week in those times. In fact any day before 9am isn’t great, I need time to prep and read the 100 emails that came in overnight before I get on a call with you and you say “did you read my email”.
  • that expand to fit the allotted time (ALL OF THEM!) And always overrun if the meeting owner says “this call wont take the full hour” at the start. Jinx!
  • with lots of attendees in which there is 2 minutes relevant to you, if anything. Maybe this is convenient to the meeting owner but not the attendees. You could just have sent me an email.
• Thanks email – please don’t fill my inbox with simple one word thanks emails, especially if its not something special and routine thing I did.
• Instant messages when I am marked “do not disturb” “in a meeting” or “busy”. I mean come on guys, there is a reason for the status setting.
• People commenting on me being late for a call when I show up 2 minutes after the start, and then their meeting overruns by 10.
• People who don’t know how to use technology and blame you for not doing something. “You never sent me that file”, “you aren’t sharing your screen”, “I never got that email”. Which then results in me getting ready to re-resend the message while they rummage through their mailbox and then go “oh here it is” – no apology.
• The interrupter – you present a slide, ask if questions, pause and move to the next slide. Start presenting the next slide and the interrupter says “can we go back…” and its back to the last slide. I have one colleague who does this on every single slide no matter how long I wait for her to digest the slide.
• The kid excuse. I don’t have kids but I find this wearing on my patience. I have a few colleagues who literally every day have something to do that means they have to step out of calls, be late for calls or even miss them due to something their kid is doing. And it’s being going on for years, way before COVID.
• The talker – please don’t get me on a call then talk at me for an hour. Do you even know I am there? I have you on mute and am doing something else, sometimes I may chip in with a very generic “uhuh” but I don’t think you noticed.

Do you have any pet peeves I can add to this?