I made a post about this a while back, but I deleted it out of fear, as I had never before expressed my frustrations on this topic online. Now my patience is wearing thin. I won’t specify what my job is, but I’ll just say it involves life safety. About a year ago, we got a new hire from out of state. Very easy Guy to get a long with, in fact, I feel kind of guilty that I’m making him the subject of this post since he is pretty decent when you take work ethic out of the picture. I will call him Bob.
Anyways, not too long after, we got a new Manager who happened to be from the same state as Bob. I will call this Manager Jane. Everything stayed relatively the same, but other coworkers and I started to notice that Bob had a lot of issues with the company and the methods we all used to properly carry out our assignments. Of course, all the arguments he made were only based on his own standards and lack of understanding, and I’ll come back to that. Fast forward a month and Bob drops a bombshell on all of us: him and Jane have been living together for quite a while, and they both traveled over to our state together. To make this whole situation fair, (In their eyes) Bob would start reporting to Jane’s superior, while we would all continue reporting to Jane. On a side note, I stay away from Jane’s superior because he is just like William Lumbergh from Office Space.
While I thought this whole situation was odd, it didn’t affect me too much. I did notice however that Bob would get all new tools, an all new work vehicle, and his certification in just a few months. Despite what Jane and her superiors would say, we all knew that Bob was definitely getting better treatment than the rest of us. I couldn’t help but make comparisons since I was having a lot of trouble getting the tools I needed at the time. It also took me over a year to get my certification.
Fast forward again, and my helper quits. Bob’s helper quit as well. This forced Bob and I to work together as a team. This is when my morale really started to decline. I was trained by a respected member of this company. He has been doing this job for over 20 years and he makes sure that the job is done properly and thoroughly. Bob disagrees with almost everything I was taught. He thinks everyone else is “stupid” and that they are wasting their time. He goes out of his way to make things easier for himself, but he ultimately makes things complicated and wastes more time than he would have, had he just done things the right way. Since he is over 20 years older than me, he automatically assumes the lead position for our team. I am fine with this, but he forgets that I once lead my own team. So he tries to create opportunities to teach me different things (his way). I am not trying to be arrogant, but I’m better versed in our code book than he is. Whenever he has a question, he calls Jane instead of simply referring to his code book, which we always have on hand. I also want to add that he think the code book does not make an sense. This is part of a big issue. If he does not understand something, he concludes that it is “stupid.” So everyday, I have to listen to the same complaints about how our methods are stupid and how much of an innovator he actually is. All of our work reports that previous employees worked on are being tampered by Bob. We are allowed to do this, but he doesn’t agree with the way in which they put some of these reports together. I am tired, and I am very tempted to put in my two weeks
TLDR; my coworker is married to my manager. He thinks he’s being a game changer by changing all our digital reports, and he trash talks the guys that do their job well because that means they set the bar too high in his opinion, and he’s too lazy to just do things the right way. I’m stuck with him and management is having trouble hiring me a new helper. I want to quit.