For about six weeks this summer I worked in a Human Resources department as a receptionist-type person, and for the most part I really enjoyed it. My coworkers were thoughtful, accommodating people, and the pay was uh-mazing for temporary work. But all that nice stuff is boring, so here I’m going to focus on the downside of working in HR: the company employees and applicants. Because for every intelligent, polite and well-adjusted person who comes in, we get five ill-mannered, paranoid, or crazy idiots. Several of my friends who work in academic and financial offices also contributed to this list of things we hate.
1. Willfully illiterate people, or, more probably, people who refuse to follow directions. Examples:
- My office has a couple of signs up in the waiting room requesting that people put their phones on vibrate and take/make calls outside the room. You’d think we were shooting a Verizon commercial in here, the way their phones are going off, usually with obnoxious rap tunes that make my ears bleed. There are also people who apparently think this is 1902 or so, and they must shout into their phones to be heard, usually about things I do not wish to know. My favorite was a young guy yelling into his cell that he would take care of his son but he refused to support his “babymomma.”
- There are also signs that say “Please do not leave your children unattended.” My second day of work, a woman who came in to fill out a job application let her kids run around the office like cracked-out, shrieking chihuahuas, which culminated in the little girl peeing all over one of our chairs. My supervisor is a Ph.D. candidate, and that day she got to deal with the Pee Chair. Stay in school, kids!
- People put mind-boggling things on the sign-in sheet. The most common offense is people using the space that says “Appts/mtgs: provide representative’s name” to write “New hire forms” or “insurance questions” or “Regis Philbin.” Freaking read the instructions, y'all.
2. People who come in to apply for jobs, but lack basic abilities and then expect me to spell or type for them. Call me old-fashioned, but I think they should have picked these skills up in school when they were being taught. I also do not care for people who know how to do stuff, but they want me to do it for them because they suffer from an overblown sense of entitlement. The best example of this was a woman who looked like a scary dinosaur and wanted me to fill out her nursing application. I considered telling her that no one would hire a nurse who was too lazy to type on a computer. Also her face would give children nightmares.
3. People who turn in shoddy paperwork. I mean paperwork that looks like you put it through the dryer to wrinkle it up, then wore it on your chest during a World War, then dropped it in your toilet the day after you had asparagus for dinner. Maybe on your way to our office you ran it under the wheels of your car a few times, I don’t know. The salient thing is that now I’m holding it and it smells like a brothel that’s situated in a New York underpass. I also hate it when people mail in paperwork in a tiny envelope that forces them to fold it 64 times and bend up the corners, invoking my wrathful judgment. Didn’t anyone else’s third-grade teacher explain proper mail etiquette?
4. People who think the rules don’t apply to them. Sometimes they come in and demand to see a representative who is busy that day, and get upset when I ask them to make an appointment. Don’t you just wish people would always drop whatever they’re doing to help you?
“Excuse me, doctor, I need some attention right now. I’m not sure which box to check on this insurance form.”
“Sure! I was in the middle of a heart transplant, but what can I do you for?” [Heartless patient flatlines]
See? Imagine how great that would be!
5. People who screw up and then act like I’m the dumb one. For example, I’m trying to track your department’s effectiveness, and since you gave me “greater understanding of world knowledge” as the sole criterion, I’m going to have to give your department a score of negative seventeen. No, we are not holding your students to too high a standard; you just don’t bother to teach them any basic grammar and as a result your department is full of uneducated, entitled tools.
6. That guy who comes to the office at 7:55 am and yanks and bangs on the door, as if the automatic lock will relent before 8 just because he’s a jerk. On a related note, there are other people (or maybe the same people) who look at the sign on the door that says “pull without turning handle” and apparently think to themselves, “Ok! I better yank the handle down and push!” Then they angrily gesture for me when it doesn’t open. How do you manage to put your pants on in the morning?
7. People who go around like bulls in a china shop. Seriously, didn’t we all learn basic etiquette in kindergarten? It’s not the most considerate to slam doors, talk unnecessarily loudly, shout across the hallway or stomp down the corridor. Some of us are actually trying to work and may be on the phone with important people, like say, the dean of the college. Or even if it’s just a secretary, try to have some manners. Don’t make the office louder than it has to be.
8. People who forget things that they should know, and then ask me to find them. Examples include their email addresses, their badge codes, their passwords, and my favorite, the answer to their security questions. “What was my first school?” “Perhaps the Semi-Drunken Academy for Inarticulate Mouth-Breathers?” And then they get mad at me when they have to create a whole new account because they forgot all that information. Frankly I’m surprised no one asked me to dig up his Social Security number.
9. People who think that when I say “Let me find that out for you” and pick up the phone, I actually mean “Keep rambling on in an unhelpful fashion; maybe I’ll suddenly understand your question.”
10. People who violate cubicle etiquette by eating tuna, playing music, talking on speakerphone, crunching through fortune cookies, etc. Don’t sing at your cubicle, especially if you’re tone-deaf. Don’t be so hungry that your stomach growls audibly. And I guess this is more of a personal injunction: don’t sweat all over your keyboard right before your boss comes to show you something (guess who gave me this particular tip?). And while we’re on cubicle etiquette, let’s talk about the bathroom too. If for some reason you aren’t smart enough to aim all your business into the toilet, clean up after yourself. Everyone hates you-- as Dave Barry says, “not as much as I hate, say, Hitler, but more often.”
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