Earlier in the week I told a story in the comments about a coworker and mentioned that I had a whole big saga about her I could write in the open thread. Here’s the story (dun dun).
About a year ago we got a sort of new employee I’ll call Alice. She worked for our group years ago and came back after rage quitting her past job. She told me it was because they tried to get her to cancel a doctor’s appointment she waited a while for so she sent her motor and walked out.
She was really hyped up by management about how she’d take so much off my plate, my life would be so much easier and better………and none of that happened. When I asked for just help with some of my tasks she said no I’ll just take it over now and then she’d never do the tasks. When we started a big project her snippy comments started.
Well are you sure these are the llamas that need to be groomed? Are they actually, are you really sure? (Yes they were, but I’m not sure why she asked since she ignored my confirmation). We need a strict rotation plan for feeding the llamas (this has never been an issue or a thing, and several people including her forgot their rotation day and the llamas either didn’t get fed or I had to do it last minute. She pitched a fit when our manager said to stop). Lots of “threatening” to go to our bosses too, but she’d never actually do it because I’d encourage it. And when there was legitimate questions that needed the higher ups involved she’d panic and try to stop me from talking to them.
This the escalated to her not completing tasks when she said she would, then at all. Example: she started grooming llamas in one room while I was in the room next store. She’d disappear for a couple hours, get behind, say she’d come on the weekend to make it up. Monday comes, oh yeah sorry I actually couldn’t make it. Now we’re even further behind. Round and round we went, I got management involved, she was unhappy.
I then had to train her on a computer task based on the llama grooming info we collected. She wasn’t getting it at first but people learn at different speeds and, she’s still randomly gone for blocks of time, making a big deal how busy she is. She’s probably too stressed and not putting enough time in. This goes on for FOUR MONTHS. She tries to not do the full training and gets mad when I shut her down. I once again have to get management involved.
She also insisted on being on our emergency on call list for our freezers/fridges with extremely expensive supplies and irreplaceable samples. This is 100% voluntary since it’s typically the middle of the night and is a lot of work. She even suggested she be FIRST ON CALL. Call comes, she doesn’t acknowledge or come in. It ends up being almost an hour before someone does. She fully admits she got the call, then texted our bosses and waited to see if they were coming in. She never showed, but if you asked about it she got super angry and defensive.
Turns out she has a non fatal degenerative disease, and part of the ready she took this job was because she was starting to lose her independence. She has known since 2019! It’s really sad, as there’s no treatments, and no consistent timeline so you’ll just randomly get worse at unpredictable intervals. She hasn’t been able to drive at night and is having more issues driving during the day as well.
She only disclosed this after having a meeting with our bosses saying hey, what is going on you’re not doing multiple things you said you would do/help with. There’s tons of other parts of the job where this wouldn’t be an issue until she’s much more severely impaired, we have plenty of funding so she could get adaptive things like a larger higher resolution screen, change up her duties/times she did things. We had a horribly uncomfortable meeting where our boss made her tell our team, there was crying and it was so awkward. We weren’t allowed to tell anyone else though, so the larger group keeps asking why we’re so behind we can’t say why. She also was told by our boss to buy whatever she needs, but instead she’s now camped out at a shared computer, and will snap at anyone who asks why she’s using it for emails and basic things.
I have more stories of non work things she’s said/done that will make you question your own sanity, I’ll drop them in a comment since this is already a novel.
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