Your Superhero Co-workers

The Riddler: You never really understand this type of co-worker. Sometimes he’s nice, sometimes unfriendly, sometimes knowledgeable, and sometimes dumb. The Riddler smokes and drinks and eats, but so irregularly that you wonder if he’s a smoker, or a drinker (or an eater).

Invisible Woman: The Invisible Woman (pictured below) is largely unnoticed in your office. She’s on the payroll, so everyone understands she’s somehow doing a good job, though no one understands exactly what this job is. Invisible Woman will avoid all after-work socialization, quietly leaving when work is done. The Invisible Woman doesn’t need to call in sick as no one will notice her missing anyway.

The Punisher: The Punisher is usually higher up in the hierarchy as he likes to bully people. When you did something wrong, The Punisher arrives on the scene to make you feel it by use of excessive force. Sometimes, when there’s two Punishers in one office, a no holds barred battle is going to erupt.

Stupid CoWorkers

New Sales Guy: “So, what’s the difference between JPEG and PHP?”

Me: “Are you serious?”

New Sales Guy: “Yeah! I mean, if I’m going to sell this stuff I need to understand it, right?”

Me: “Ok. Could you make some time for me to give you some basic lessons?”

New Sales Guy: “No. I’m pretty busy. Could you just email it to me?”

I sent him a link to Google and wished him luck.

He quit a week later.

Stupid Customers – When working as a computer consultant…

When working as a computer consultant in college, a co-worker and I were playing around with the NETSEND command in Windows NT. At one point he accidentally sent a message to all the NTs in the lab that said, “Can you see me?” Shortly thereafter, a girl came to our station looking perturbed.

Girl: “Um, my computer is talking to me. It’s asking if I can see it.”

Co-Worker: “Can you see it?”

Girl: “Yes.”

Co-Worker: “Click OK.”

We laughed for a good fifteen minutes after that.

Stupid Customers

I worked on my manager’s computer a while back. While waiting for an operation to complete, I was idly spinning the cursor around the screen, as many do. My manager asked why techs often seem to do that.

“Oh,” I said, “sometimes you have to spin the mouse around in a clockwise direction to wind it up. You don’t have to do it very often, but we usually do it while we’re working on other things to save time.”

The manager swallowed the story, and my co-workers and I had a good chuckle about it later.

A few days later, another of our guys was working on the same machine. The manager caught him moving the cursor around while he was waiting on the computer to finish something.

“Why are you spinning the cursor counterclockwise?” the manager asked.

Without missing a beat, he replied, “Every so often, they get wound up too tight, and you have to unwind them.”