Peter
New(ish) guy in our office at work. He's just turned 60 and has been in the trade for most of his working life - the boss hired him into a sales job so he'd be able to milk his extensive contacts book.

Except he's got no self-awareness. So, he spends his working day coughing and sneezing and sniffing and generally sounding like he's about to keel over shortly after giving the rest of us a dose of flu. He loudly and regularly congratulates himself on completing each part of the particular task he's working on, then proceeds to talk us all through exactly what he thinks he needs to do next. Of course, he's really just summarising it for himself so he can get to grips with it, though the rest of the business manage to do that without opening their mouths.

He grunts and groans and moans in those old-man-type ways every time he moves. He's even leaned over onto one buttock, while sat at his desk, the easier to fart, loudly. He didn't even make a joke of it, and betrayed no indication that he was consciously aware of what he'd just done, he just carried on tapping away at his keyboard.

If we were all boys together it might have some kind of locker-room humour value - he's a lot funnier to think about than he is to work with, however, and the rest of the office staff ('cept me) are women, who for some unaccountable reason find him personally quite disgusting.

On the plus side, he's totally useless at his job* and is actively damaging to the business every day he turns up here, so - assuming he doesn't manage to alienate every prospective customer and supplier - won't be around to inflict himself on us for much longer.

*That's another thing he's completely unaware of. In his own mind - which he speaks freely all the time, as I've mentioned - he is the pinnacle of competence and is beset by poor management, bad systems, slow computers, etc. Nothing that goes wrong is ever his fault, nobody knows how to do anything better than he does, etc.

He's an amazing example of human self-delusion and I wish he'd just go away.
( shinyshinyscalp less a man, more a way of life, Fri 30 Nov 2012, 14:44, Reply)