Everything Also Complain

From ‘S’pore No. 2 in peeves tally’, 30 Sept 2011, article by Jennani Durai, ST

…Singapore has come in second in a survey of 16 countries tallying the number of pet peeves in the office. In the No. 1 spot was India, according to the findings released yesterday by professional networking site LinkedIn.

The 17,000 survey participants – nearly 1,000 were from Singapore – were given a list of 38 possible pet peeves in the office and told to select all that applied to them. Only one peeve listed – overachievers pandering to the boss – had to do with management.

The peeves ranged from the general, such as loud typing and office pranks, to the specific, from hitting ‘reply all’ on mass office e-mail messages to not reloading a printer when it ran out of paper. Singaporeans’ top annoyance: people not taking ownership for their actions. It was also the No. 1 annoyance picked by 78 per cent of the 17,000 respondents.

Rounding up Singaporeans’ top three gripes were dirty common areas – such as shared microwave ovens or refrigerators – and constant complainers.

…There were also gender differences in the findings. For example, 57 per cent of Singaporean women were bothered by ‘clothing that’s too revealing for the workplace’. But only 29 per cent of Singaporean men surveyed found that to be a problem.

Japanese offices don't celebrate April Fool's

Despite the ubiquitousness of office nuisances, a few interesting  cross-cultural observations can be inferred here: Swedish males have the best office jobs in the world, Americans really make themselves at home in office pantries, Indian workers don’t set their mobile phones on silent mode and you can get demoted in Japan for so much as spamming your boss with email jokes.

‘Taking ownership’ is a relatively recent form of corporate-speak which, in the local context at least, usually refers to the act of taking charge of a certain project or task, people who are the ‘go-to’ guys, or in local parlance ‘champions’, for a specific set of skills or experience, but constantly fail to live up to the position entrusted upon them, either shirking responsibility, delegating others to perform odious tasks, or making excuses to dilly-dally. This, to me, isn’t merely a PEEVE, rather a PESTILENCE. These are toxic colleagues who bring down the morale of the whole team, and are often a hot topic of discussion among culprits of the no 2. pet peeve: Constant complainers. Lazy or irresponsible workers/leaders are a social and occupational hazard in any office, not a trifling annoyance along the line of loud typers or mothers who mollycoddle their kids over the phone. The worst sort of colleagues are really those who are an insufferable combination of the two major peeves of ‘laziness’ and ‘sycophant i.e bosses’ favourite’.

Here’s my own list of office peeves:

1. People who print hundreds of copies of documents while you’re waiting in queue just to print one.

2. People who short-form Best Regards to BR in email

3. Complicated phone handling instructions (call forwarding, recording voice message, retrieving voice mail)

4. Having to change passwords every 60 days

5. Having to correct your bosses’ horrible grammar

6. People who interrupt when you’re having a face to face conversation

7. Track changes in Word documents

8. People who use FYAP, FYIA, or any ‘For Your’ acronyms extending beyond four letters. FYIWTFS (FYI, WTF, seriously)

9. People who ask you to resend them emails because they can’t be bothered to archive their inbox or even think of  search tags

10. Horrible laughter

11. Email trails longer than a script for a short film.

12. A birthday card from the CEO with your name spelled wrong

A similar survey was conducted 4 years ago by Mediacorp’s Media Research Consultants in 2007.

The street poll, conducted at office hotspots Raffles Place, Suntec City and the Orchard Road belt, netted responses from 306 people: 150 comprised males, 113 were below 30 years old and 156 were aged 30 to 49.

Apart from loud talkers, another two top pet peeves were gossiping and people trying to avoid work. In fourth and fifth positions were people peering over one’s shoulder to read what was on one’s monitor, and public reprimands at work, respectively.

Perhaps the advent of instant messaging led to the decline of loud talking or gossiping as pet peeves, with most bitching happening online, though at the risk of not just background surveillance, but people ‘peering over your shoulder’. Such busybody-ness was common even in the desktop-less late eighties when people actually WROTE. Using a PEN. On PAPER.  And people faxed proper acknowledgment forms, signed and dated instead of replying ‘OK’ or ‘Approved’ through email. Lazy workers or bosses rank among the top scourges till this day,  a bane of any results-driven office culture, and HR departments everywhere need to take a long hard look at the survey results because of the number of genuine workers suffering under endorsed incompetence. Someone also needs to conduct a study on how sexy clothing affects work productivity (in particular absentee rate among men) before being judged by envious women as a peeve when it’s really, in light of all other disruptive peeves and provided it’s done in a tasteful manner, more of a pleasant distraction, some might even say motivation, than anything else.

Filed under: 1980s, 2000s, 2011, Complaining, Corporations, Dress sense Tagged: | complaining, corporations, dress sense, indian, Noise, Sex, sexism, Ugly Singaporeans