What’s Your “Get Off My Lawn” Gripe About Work?
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We’ve talked a lot over the years about the ways work has changed — remote work, extreme business casual, the decline of the five-day office week, and so on. But today let’s talk about our workplace gripes — reasonable or not. What annoys you about your workplace, your coworkers, or work in general? Are you comparing it to another workplace, to some time in the past, or just your own sense of how things should be?
We had a fun discussion a while back on millennial complaints, and I thought this could be similar. So: What is your “get off my lawn” gripe with regard to work?
I’ve seen readers discuss disappearing support staff, people “inheriting” laid-off coworkers’ work (but without an attendant title or salary boost), and the increasing amount of administrative work that seems to fall on everyone even as other parts of the job get outsourced or automated. And, of course, we’ve had a lot of discussions about artificial intelligence, the way the kids just can’t write, and more.
Maybe your gripe is about something big: training, mentorship, benefits, raises and bonuses, staffing levels, or advancement opportunities. Or maybe it’s something gloriously petty: email or voicemail etiquette! Zoom backgrounds! Business casual that has become too casual! People who schedule a meeting when a two-sentence email would have sufficed!
Maybe you have a rock-solid argument for why your way is better. Maybe you recognize that this is purely a you problem and the rest of the world has sensibly moved on. We want to hear it anyway.
So, readers: What’s your workplace “get off my lawn” gripe? What’s the thing that makes you think, “No. This is not how we should be doing things”?
People who complain about working in person and then, if you do something by zoom, who complain about having to turn on their cameras and give you their undivided attention.
Yep. Turn the camera on!
Hard disagree. Zoom is so exhausting.
+1. I contribute SO much better when video is off.
I think nonverbal cues are important for good communication, but I genuinely want to understand that comment. Can you explain?
I vastly prefer either meeting IRL or just by conference call. Remember pre-pandemic when most calls were just by regular old office phone or people gathered around a hub speaker in a conference room? You could read people’s reactions without seeing their faces.
The issue with zoom is there is a very tiny delay that actually makes your brain confused because there’s a micro delay in sending those non verbal cues. The zoom fatigue is real and researchers have been probing as to whether the delay is the reason.
Those people are so annoying—you need to see my face to give me an instruction? Give me a break. Better yet, just send an email.
I just tell people my camera is broken. My boss sees my face every day in the office and I’m not compelled to have anyone else tell me they need my face on camera. I find it very odd to get comments from people trying to dance around it “awww! I can’t see your face” nope. You don’t get that.
Wow, you would be the odd duck out at my company.
I understand the sentiment, but it is a known thing in my office that the one person most vocal about being camera-off was loud about it because she wanted to do activities incompatible with work while WFH. For instance, when our boss insisted she turn the camera on at least for the initial introductions to a team she was supposed to be a key point of contact for, we could hear her fumbling around and the suddenly realized she had a roller propped against the wall behind her, brush in hand, overalls on, and paint in her hair. She was trying to paint her ceiling during the workday.
Lol. I have a friend who mows the lawn wearing headphones during conference calls. She also drives 30 minutes to pick up her child from school in a distant community. She works for a well-known blue-chip company.
So my old non-profit job used to have a once a week meeting, 2 hours, where we talked about our strategy and went around the room to blah blah blah. I rarely had to give updates. Meetings like this are totally fine to take from your car or while running errands or doing chores.
I think it’s fine to do busy work while listening in if that’s the only role you have on the call, but having to yell out “Bueller? Bueller?” to get her attention means something isn’t working (including her).
You are just rude.
Could be—but I’m still not turning on my camera for you unless you have the authority to make me.
I love you so much for this, stay ungovernable queen.
I am so thankful my office is a “cameras off” culture.
AI being pushed down everyone’s throats. I actually use AI every day and find it helpful, but it’s also way overhyped in its current form, and I would appreciate a more rational discussion of its pros and cons for various uses. Every single leadership townhall-type meeting is not complete without glorifying AI in 50 different ways.
Agree completely. One of our higher ups is annoyed that people won’t just love her AI idea, but pushing ideas down peoples throat has never led to them actually loving it. A little disagreement and discussion is normal and should be accepted.
+1. I’ve posted about my Claude-obsessed coworker before and one thing that makes it extra annoying is that he cannot/will not grasp that other people dissent.
This is also mine. It definitely has it’s uses, but it’s not the cure-all people try to make it. It’s being used to substitute for actual thought and a lot of people do not sufficiently check results. I hate it. My husband made the observation that the people most excited about AI are the ones that are the least technologically competent and do not understand its potential pitfalls, and I think he’s correct.
+100
So true.
Relatedly–the pervasiveness of AI slop. AI Slop can turn a marginally intelligent person into a person who sounds authoritative or informed, even though they barely read what they “wrote.” My tech company is so gung-ho about AI that no one ever reads anything critically (except, apparently the legal team, because we have critical reading skills). We’re seeing white papers, summaries, policies, corporate comms–all of them have internal inconsistencies in next steps, logic, ideas, etc. and no one else is saying, “You recommend X here, but you also caution strongly against it two paragraphs later. What are you actually saying?!?”
I hate it here.
I really never want to be the first person to read something including the person who “wrote” it.
My company was called out in the media for publishing AI slop. It’s a problem that will not go under the radar forever.
OMG, this. So much this.
Yup, or people who write everything using AI including emails, then can’t keep it all straight.
100%. And AI meeting summaries are a) garbage b) too long c) show laziness and d) warn me that people probably didn’t take their own notes and are unlikely to have retained anything.
Between Covid brain damage and (probably related) outsourcing thinking to AI, it’s getting harder and harder for me to stick it out for these last <18 months until I retire.
People who complain about small tech changes (noooooo google calendar is sooooo much harder than outlook calendar, I can’t swiiiiiiiitch). Like, are you not embarrassed to admit that?
That’s funny.
Once I no longer have outlook via work I’m going back to a paper planner. I have no intention of learning Google Calendar.
What is there to “learn” though? Is it really that different?
As someone whose company went Microsoft to Google and back again within 5 years, yes. Google is really that different. Not in big ways, but in a million small ones. It’s more like a dialect than a different language, but there’s a learning curve.
I may get slammed for this but parents who are not upfront that they are consistently providing childcare during working hours or offline regularly for pick ups. I’m not talking about occasional emergencies which we all have but routine disappearances that coworkers are not upfront about or don’t proactively manage ahead of time. So the rest of us are left wondering if they will be back online today, saw our slack message, can answer our question so we can proceed with our duties or can get to the task etc.
Of course this is a society wide responsibility and we need adequate childcare services or more formalized flexible work/job sharing/real 30 hour a week jobs. But the childless workers get more work and if junior, less support and guidance. Abusing the flexibility of remote work also hurts all of us.
My pet peeve is the double standard applied to parents. Where I’ve worked, childless people routinely waltz into work late or leave early or take long lunches for sports or personal obligations and somehow manage to take multi-week vacations even when they officially only have 10 days a year of PTO. Meanwhile, parents are closely observed to make sure they are the first to get into the office and the last to leave, are strictly monitored on PTO usage, and get frequent snide comments about how they are not dedicated to the work.
Yes, I have a problem with double standards. It has never yet made a difference to my work why a coworker was underperforming or letting me down. Letting weird biases and stigmas into how people’s performance is perceived just seems like a mistake. (Not talking about actual accommodations, but managers who think that a hangover is a cool and good reason to be underperforming vs. in-laws in town which is lame and less acceptable, or vice versa, and things like that.)
FYI childless means you want children but don’t have them, thus the suffix less, because it’s something ‘missing’. Childfree people don’t want children and have made a choice.
Huh. So a painless root canal means….
I think this is reasonable, and I say this as a mom myself. There will be emergencies, but that’s different from regularly dropping the ball and negatively impacting your coworkers. I see so many posts on social media in my city with women asking about remote work opportunities because they want to stay home with their kids. But I’m like, ummm, you know you have to work all day if you have a remote job, right? Just because you’re at home doesn’t mean you can forgo child care, especially if you have young kids.
Totally agree as a fellow mom. Remote work means you need less childcare (don’t also have to cover commuting time), not no childcare.
People who don’t have childcare also make employers more suspicious of and hostile towards the rest of us who do have childcare.
Yes- although I sympathize that I think some of the not upfrontness is probably because some managers demanded buts in seats at all times. I have a male direct report who asked to leave at 3 everyday and be back on by 430. It’s consistent, it’s upfront, and it’s clear he is back fully on at 430. No issues from me. I suspect some women may worry (which may be true) that they would pay a harsher price for that ask.
Yes, this
I think it’s fine to sneak in a trip to pick up your kids if it doesn’t impact anyone. Some people’s days are quiet by 3:00pm. And I do think you don’t want to broadcast your need for flexibility if you don’t have to. The problem is when your company actually requires immediate responses and it gets noticed.
Genuinely—who cares? People should be allowed to pick up their kids. They can call your cell if it’s so urgent.
I agree that as long as employers refuse to pay experienced professionals enough to support a family on a single income, they need to deal with the fact that people will need to disappear for short periods to deal with home and family responsibilities.
This is where I land. I’m actively looking for a better paying job but there seems to be a chasm between reasonable, flexible hours and low pay and unreasonable work hours and high pay. If I could afford more childcare on my 9-5 I’d be much happier. But it’s a paltry salary and a dead end job so I’m in the pickup line at 3. I don’t feel great about it.
People who will do anything to avoid picking up the phone. So many unnecessary emails and teams/slack messages going back and forth on something that would have been solved in a 2 minute phone call. Or worse when they require scheduling the 2 minute phone call! Just call the person. If they don’t pick up they may call you back.
I blame the rise of cell phones for this. Who knew that having to talk to your friends mom/dad/brother/sister/random person who answered their house phone was actually teaching a valuable but lost life skill.
I think its related to “this meeting could have been an email”. Well, sometimes that chain of emails or Slack messages could have been a quick conversation!
Definitely! And I am also convinced some of those meetings are scheduled because 2 people couldn’t manage to pick up the phone and talk to each other and then email the broader group.
I’ve responded “No one responded to the email, so now it’s a meeting.” Got my point across.
Ooh, I like this and am borrowing
Conversely, sometimes the issue is the person who can’t grasp the email would turn the 2 minute meeting into a 2 hour meeting because they’re so hopeless. Or, it’s someone who turns everything into a half hour meeting by repeating the same point everyone agrees on again and again.
I’d pick up the phone if I didn’t have to provide my personal cell as my work phone number. I really dislike using my personal phone for work. I’m in office, so I wish we just used VOIP numbers that could go to your laptop or a desk phone. Or just come talk to me IRL!!!
My legal assistant is an older woman and she won’t pick up the phone for any reason. So, an email will go unanswered despite follow ups only to then learn that if she had called, she would know that there’s a new person in the company taking responsiblity for X. Or the person is out sick.
Executives’ being compensated in the form of stock or stock options, or based on stock performance. A lot of the business decisions that are calculated to drive up stock prices in the short run seem to be contrary to what is needed to build sustainable value.
Yes, duty to shareholders… taken to the extreme. What about duty to employees, to building a long term value, and also not something that may be actively bad for humanity
Dodge v Ford Motor Companies in 1919 decided that duty to shareholders was more important than investing in employees.
And duty to customers!
It’s such a shame, seeing companies slowly driven to ruin. And the workers suffer needlessly from short-sighted business decisions.
I’m a “this meeting could have been an email” person in a culture of people who do not read emails until during the meeting itself. Too many meetings means no one has time to read the emails, and thus we are stuck in endless back to back meetings.
Meetings where no one reads emails before the meeting, and no one keeps or reads a conference summary after the meeting (except maybe an AI?), so even a really productive meeting that led to some decision making and commitments becomes forgotten ephemera.
It’s like we’re losing the advantages of “literacy” without regaining the memory practices of an oral culture.
Sigh. Here’s a gripe. I handle murder appeals as assigned appointed counsel. For once, I have a great issue. The state Supreme Court would have to really wrestle with it. I have a real chance, which means the client has a real chance. And yet my dumb client wants to go in a totally different direction that has no chance at all. I’m not doing it. It’s not legally viable. I am withdrawing from the case. He can wait another year for a new assigned attorney. The state has already paid me $63K for my work on his case, and for what? My time, sure, but nothing else. It’s very demoralizing when my 21 yrs of post-conviction experience is up against someone’s “gut feeling.” Which has clearly served him so well so far. I know every lawyer knows what it’s like when a client rejects the proper advice, but as someone who is paid by taxpayer money (mine included!) this makes me ragey. I believe in the 6th Amendment. Obviously. But you have the right to one attorney, not a dozen of attorneys who will tell you the same thing.
Similar for pro bono cases. Some of the best trained and most experienced attorneys advising on a case and the client wants to go in a dumb direction, in part I suspect, because they just want to insist on their right to do things their way.
Oh my. I’m on the other side, prosecution, so I don’t exactly feel your pain but I do have a front row seat. Some people just cannot get out of their own way.
I do understand your pain and I think it’s sad the client is self-sabotaging in this way. But this concerns their life, so their agency matters. Even if that means making bad decisions.
I think someone who is appealing a murder conviction should probably have the humility to recognize that “their agency” sucks.
Scrubs as professional wear for doctors. Get. Dressed. You are wearing pajamas to see patients in clinic.
Back in my day (which was not that long ago) nurses would take pictures of you and send them to the leadership if the caught you in scrubs outside the hospital. Now? I have residents showing up for OUT PATIENT CLINIC where they likely will not even do a GU exam let alone a procedure in scrubs and crocs.
Kids these days!!!
Ew no. I want my doctor in scrubs that are hopefully washed in hot water at the end of every work day. Not clothes that might have multiple wears between dry cleaning.
+1
+2
In my second year of family medicine residency somewhere between having pus from a incised abscess shoot into my eye, a hypertrophic toenail clipping land on my blouse and stick into the wool, and 1,000 covid positive patients cough in my direction, I decided to never wear professional attire to clinic again. Gross things happen in clinics too. I strip out of my scrubs the second I walk in my door and throw them in a specific laundry bin.
I have my own get-off-my-lawn moments in medicine though! You are entitled to your opinions. There is something refreshing about seeing docs in professional attire. It’s growing more and more uncommon.
My husband works in home health. He wears scrubs every day and also takes them off before he even enters our home (his choice). I have a friend who worked as a home health nurse, and she got lice from her job… so I get wanting to change immediately and to only wear scrubs.
My friend is a home health nurse. She is a big hugger who wants to hug you every time she greets you, which skeeves me out when she is still wearing her scrubs after work.
Oh I get it …. When I worked as a preschool teacher, I’d immediately remove my clothing when arriving at home. Loved those kids, but they could be little petri dishes.
Wow, I’m in my 40s and all I’ve ever known is doctors in scrubs. Isn’t it their uniform?
LOL. I don’t care what the doctor is wearing as long as they help me. Crocs at work though… that’s just not right.
Eh, you can hose them off or spray them with Lysol – I’m cool with crocs on medical professionals.
Eh, this is the wrong fight, because the double-standard goes the opposite way in my workplace. Childless people cover parental leaves with little or no additional compensation or recognition, meetings can’t happen with certain people due to childcare, it’s fine to block your calendar for Suzy’s ballet recital, but definite side-eye for a personal marathon, etc., not to mention the lopsided health insurance benefits for prospective/parents.
We need better support for parents as a society, and it shouldn’t matter why someone is out, as long as they get their work done, respond in a timely manner so it doesn’t block everyone else for hours on end, etc.
But pitting individual parents against individual childless employees doesn’t help any of us, and plenty of workplaces favor parents.
The lopsided healthcare benefits thing is a little harsh to complain about. Do you side-eye people with cancer or diabetes? Society needs to support families to have future generations. Maybe not everything is equal for each individual, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
I find spring break obnoxious as a childfree person. You do not need to take a whole week off of work just because your kid is on break. Figure it out. Plus I live in a region with multiple school calendars so a whole month is basically too stupid to contemplate from a work perspective. My parents left me with friends, or when we were old enough, at home with a chore list and a television. Honestly it was fine.
I work for a global company and people in Europe take all of August off, which slows what happens at the rest of the company. This isn’t just a parent problem. Some people value vacations.
Me too, but it’s ridiculous for all of the with-child people to take them at the same time. I’d love a culture where we can all take a month off and come back refreshed. But that’s not what we have and the rest of us bear the brunt.
They do figure it out, by saving up their PTO to take time off either to spend with their kids or to go on vacation because school breaks are the only time they can take a vacation. You can figure out how to deal.
I do—it’s still obnoxious.
Taking a week off of work to travel as a family is obnoxious? I respectfully disagree.
Sure hope you never take a full week off, then!
A lot of communities don’t have good childcare options the week of spring break, or they have giant waitlists.
Your parents’ decisions weren’t fine, because look how you turned out.
Go take a week off work yourself. You obviously need one.
Winning comment!
Who is side eying you for blocking your calendar for a marathon? The only weekday marathon is Boston, and if you qualified for Boston, literally everyone I know is going to hype you up for weeks on either side.
That one coworker who intentionally schedules hair appointments, personal training, manicures, etc. for 11 am or 1pm and then turns it into a half day of PTO because it “isn’t worth the trip” to come back to the office. We have plenty of actual PTO, like 7 weeks of it.
Oh? I do this. What’s annoying about it as long as I’m taking leave?
She’s not actually taking leave, and brags about it.
That there is no way in Teams (unless one of you brilliant people know!) to have the new message notification icon be different if someone is actually messaging you, or if someone has posted to everyone in a channel. I’m presenting on a lot of Teams calls, and I have no idea if the message is something I need to know (a colleague had to drop off the call, my blouse popped a button and I’m showing my bra to everyone) or a general post (donuts in the breakroom).
It also drives me crazy that people ignore when your status shows you’re presenting and they send you a non-urgent message.
People who pretend that hot-desking is a good idea for long-term developement knowledge based positions.
My “get off my lawn” gripe: being treated like a flight risk or a relic the second you’ve been somewhere 15+ years, instead of the person who actually knows where the bodies are buried. I’ve watched genuinely great institutional knowledge walk out the door because nobody thought to ask “why would she want to stay” until it was too late. If your retention strategy for senior women is “hope she doesn’t leave,” that’s not a strategy.