The Interrupter: This person doesn’t have the time and patience to listen to you limp and stutter your way to the wrong answer. Like an experienced algebra teacher, they saw that you screwed up the equation on line 2 and they don’t care to see the rest of your “math” – you IDIOT! Interrupters are typically high up in the company hierarchy. More importantly, they are part of a very select group of your colleagues that actually know what they’re talking about so shut the fuck up and take notes.
The Sigher: This is the person that exhales deeply and loudly before every sentence they utter and sometimes at the end too. This person loathes you and everyone else in the office. Those sighs are restrained rage; a coping mechanism that the sigher has practiced extensively with their therapist to avoid beating their boss to death with a keyboard or going on a Bobby Knight style profanity-laced tirade. “I’m sick, and tired, of losing to fucking Purdue!” If you’re one of those people who enjoys watching a high-impact train-wreck (and let’s face it, you degenerates are) watching the sigher’s mental stability slip away can be somewhat entertaining. “Serenity Now!”
The Stonewaller. This person does nothing. Nothing! They don’t respond to emails and during work calls they’ll always punt to someone else. Without fail, their weekly status update is: “It will be ready in the next few weeks” but then months pass. The stonewaller is that piece of shit that’s the primary recipient of an email inquiry but will wait for days until someone in the CC-line feels awkward enough to respond. I hate stonewallers because they make life harder, but I also secretly respect them for their shamelessness and dogged determination to do jack shit.
The Happy Go Lucky: This person’s motto is: “I can’t believe they’re paying me.” This person is typically mildly knowledgeable and somewhat competent, but they know that their job is completely useless and that every work product they generate will result in absolutely nothing regardless of its quality. Thus, they put in roughly 3 hours a day of mediocre work and skate by for the remainder. Beware though, by the time The Happy Go Lucky gets into their late 40s they’ve become punch-drunk from three decades of boondoggles and they can no longer produce a remotely coherent work product. At that point, it’s best to just knock them out.
Captain KoolAid: This impressionable imbecile is often the only person who can recite the company’s “mission” statement. He thinks the company is awesome and what he does day to day really makes an impact despite a seemingly infinite amount of evidence to the contrary. He’ll utter bewildering statements like “we need to do X in order to adhere to our company values.”…. Values!? Values? The only “value” here is to make money in the short term so that the shares go up and the COO can buy his third vacation home and a Porsche Cayenne for his brat kid’s 16th birthday. Have fun working your 80-hour weeks for an occasional kind word and meager spot-bonus while the C-suite drinks thirty-year-old Scotch on private planes and talks shit about what a gullible fool you are.
The Bro: Typically a young man, this guy thinks that because he was considered somewhat “cool” in college, that he can join the in-crowd at work and coast his way to big bucks and multiple promotions. This prick talks to you like you’ve been boys for years and acts like there are a giant group of dweebs willing to do his work for him because he is just that slick. Newsflash, chief: Just because you and I both drank Keystone Light out of red plastic cups during our respective college tenures (and occasionally threw dirty ping pong balls into them) does NOT make us brothers. This ain’t a fraternity, bro. And if it were, you’re the pledge so shut the fuck up and do some corporate “bows and toes”.
THE Guy: This is the smartest and most competent person at the company. Due to his IQ that’s comfortably north of 150 and his extensive industry experience, half an hour with this guy is worth 500 hours of anyone else’s time. At the end of the day, if you field a fleet of 500 Ford Festivas in a race against a Lamborghini – the Lamborghini is gonna win that race every time and win it by a lot. This guy, appropriately so, rockets up the organization. He is the guy that brings in half of the company revenue and also tricks folks into joining the firm. You sit and interview with him and are just blown away. You think to yourself that the company must be full of guys like this and that it would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be surrounded by such high-caliber colleagues. Then you enter the workforce and quickly realize that 95% of your colleagues are total duds and “the guy” is the sole giant among men.
Eeyore: This person has a lot of problems. At first you sympathize with them and their tales of woe. Their car got towed, their mom is sick, they sprained their back, their work travel was a nightmare…. On and on and on it goes until about 2-3 months in when you realize that this clown puts in all of 3 hours a week and you want to strangle him. If you have the misfortune of being his manager, there are two solutions to your Eeyore problem: (1) Hound him to take PTO until, magically, he gets his life in order (2) Partner him up with a ruthless immigrant that comes from one of those countries where they study 16 hours a day and have no people skills and wait until, inevitably, said immigrant rips Eeyore a new asshole.
I’ll shred the rest of the peasant stock you work with at a later date. Happy Friday you jamokes.
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