I Love Bitching

Having inspected the stats for this blog, it would seem that visitors love reading posts that mock, insult and belittle my colleagues. Of all the labels I use, Colleague Bitches is, by a long way, the most popular one that people explore.

However, looking back through the posts that I have tagged with this, I've noticed that my bitchiness isn't particularly fierce. Alex, Sandra and Cynthia are the only colleagues of mine that have dedicated blog entries (here, here and here) - and even those aren't as bad as they could be.

So I thought I'd give you an updated low-down on who's annoying me at work and this time I will do my best to make it warts, boils and all. Nothing spared. It's just that it's quite difficult to get passionately angry about somebody unless you've got somebody to share the anger with - why else would bitching be such a popular activity at work? Anyways...

Robert
The new department manager at Food Place continues to rub me up the wrong way. And it's actually getting quite creepy now. Last night, I went out with a few of my friends from Food Place for a quiet drink (well, it was supposed to be quiet!). At about 10:00pm, were sat in a window booth at a bar and Debs looked out of the window to see Robert standing on the opposite side of the street staring right at us.

"Nobody look now," she whispered - God knows why - "but Robert is on the other side of the road staring at us!"

One by one, we glanced from the corner of our eyes and, sure enough, there he was. He wasn't with anybody - totally alone and staring at us - he vanished about five minutes later. And then the text messages started. He texted three different people, bombarding them with questions. Where were we? Was everybody at work invited? When were we going home? The icing on the cake was when he phoned Greg at 12:30am to remind him that he started work at 5:30.

I didn't know how to feel about that. Did I laugh at it or find it outrageous or spooky? At first I was a bit spooked. My mind ran away and starting adding bits to the memories of him standing there. By the time I'd finished blowing it out of proportion, he had red eyes, a death-stare and there was thunder and lightening to set the scene.

But all the same, there's something seriously bloody wrong there. Why didn't he come over and join us if he'd seen us? And what was he doing watching us? And checking up on us? Does he think we belong to him now? He's just a creep and I'm getting more and more uneasy about him all the time.

Sandra
Oh God I hate this woman so much. She never stops moaning about the people "rahnd 'ere". Well sod off back to Slough then! She loves nothing more than picking fights with people and then twisting it round to try and convince Terry that it's all because she's from 'dahn sahf'. She's done it with me more than once and I just laughed in her face. "Yeah, one of my best friends is from Aldershot - I really hate southerners!"

Her despicable tactic of latching onto people she perceives as weak continues. She's all over any new starter like a rash. She tries to convince them she's lovely and everybody else is horrible, loading all the bullets and waiting for her victim to fire them. Yet, whenever she's confronted about things she's said, she denies everything: "I promise you dah'ling I'm not like that. I would never say things behind peoples' backs."

Yeah, and I'm Moira Stuart!

Will
He's one of the department managers. As I've mentioned before, he suffers from mood swings. On Monday he worships Food Place and motivates everybody to think the same. On Tuesday he "can't wait to get out of this shit hole" and drags the morale to the floor. He constantly arrives at work still hung over from his binge-drinking the previous afternoon (he never makes it to the evening!).

Before, I could tolerate him. Now that he's developed a tendency to talk to me like I'm a sack of dirt, I can't stand him. He's forever poking his nose into my department and telling my staff what to do. If I set them off scrubbing the checkouts when it's quiet (a job that needs done at least once a week) he'll drag them away and have them helping somebody else - who doesn't particularly need help.

There was a row over the magazines last week too. Will, in his majesty, went behind the kiosk and pulled out the magazines back-stock box - which contains everything that won't fit onto the shelf, but will be needed later in the week. He pulled out two magazines with last month's date on them and yelled at Lyndsey for not getting them returned. OK, she was careless and we lost credit for them - but bloody hell, the way he went on, you'd think she'd lost us thousands!

Ed
He seriously needs to die (ouch!). Or at the very least, leave Food Place and become permanently unemployed. If that's still too nasty for you, he could go and work in a small shop with Will as his manager and Sandra as his fellow assistant. I cannot abide the bloke. But King Terry seems to love him. Ed gets away with things that nobody else does. He doesn't wear the correct uniform and he takes unofficial breaks all the time - he must smoke about 80 a day judging by how often he's round the side of the building.

He's also a lying little toad. A few weeks ago, he lost one of the small handheld computers we use to do stock counts. It turned up in the cold-room, dead from hypothermia, and he was the last one seen with it. Instead of owning up to his costly mistake, he turned the blame onto Gina, claiming she'd left it there. She must have been the first person he laid eyes on when trying to formulate his excuse, because there is no fathomable explanation as to why Gina would have had the thing or what she was doing in the cold room.

It would seem I'm not as bitchy as I think. Those are the only people I can think of anything nasty to say about. I don't even have much to say about Alex at the moment - he's actually been quite pally with me of late and he hasn't done anything especially offensive. He's still a tart though. And so the claws come out once more...