Characters at Your Work - Part II

We've all had those characters at work that exist regardless of the environment you work in. You work with these people...

Employee That You Don't Know What Their Job Is

“Blaspheme”, you say (hey, I spelled that right the first time, go me), “An HR professional should know what EVERY employee does in your company.” True. But still, every company has this one person that you don’t really know what they do. The employee is perpetually in a hustle, and looks really busy – or they sit in the office and only seem to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, it’s either one of the other. But still, you don’t know what they do.

The Forever Employee

You know this person. They spend their days at work walking around, not doing much. They look for someone, anymore, to talk to and tell the stories that they have told umpteen billion times before. “Did I tell you about the time that we…” Yes, they did – forty times before. But that is what they are doing right now. AGAIN! Meanwhile, you had a project due to the boss by the end of the day. This is what I think Chris Berman has to be like at ESPN.

Did I ever tell you about the time the Rams gave me a jersey? Oh, I did? Well, the Rams invited me to practice, and they have a jersey...

The Guy with a Lousy Home Life

This is person that works late hours (make that unnecessary late hours) for no good reason other than they don’t want to go home. They go to every happy hour. They go to every event. They volunteer to stay late. They come in early. They never seem to leave. Why?

Yeah, they need me at the office.

The person who is itching to find your mistakes

This person probably thinks that they could do virtually any job in the company if given the chance. They’ve probably gotten screwed out of a job that they wanted, or they think that they are the official watchdog for the company – usually both. And they read every email, policy, set of instructions and announcement as if they must find every flawed spelling, grammatical error, and piece of logic and tell you about it. And as a kicker, they’ll copy your boss too. Y’know, just so someone else knows about it. They are perfect, by the way. When you try to nail them on something, they respond with a nuclear grade of venom.