A rant? Venting? What grinds my gears? Yeah, I got one.
People who don't know what the hell they are doing trying to tell you how to do it.
I've been at my job for 8 years now, and not to toot my own horn too loudly I am pretty good at it. Not long ago, I had to take some time off for personal reasons, and when I returned things had backed up a good bit.
I work on the swing shift. This is by choice as I prefer to work alone, as the person on swing shift usually does, and get more done that way. Well, things were backed up enough that the powers that be decided I needed help for a couple of days, so they stuck me with two "helpers". One, I had trained and worked with before, so I ahd no problems with him. The other was a different story.
Every comment he made was something about how I wasn't doing it right.
"No, you can't do it that way. Do it like this."
"Why do you do that? This way is better."
"Don't tell me you do it that way! That way never works!"
This was usually followed by, or at least included, the phrase, "I know because I worked in this area for two months...on
first shift." This, of course, raised the ugly head of the Shift Beast, the one that says first shift knows all and second shift is a bunch of morons that don't know what they are doing.
I was pretty stressed out by the experience that put me away from work for so long, so I was doing my best to let all this roll off my back. I would calmly explain that this was how I did things and it worked fine. Finally, the last straw fell.
After he spent nearly an hour checking a procedure manual looking up something that I told him three times in ten seconds, he smugly put the book in my face and pointed out that I was "wrong". Which I wasn't. After taking 60 minutes to look up something that would have taken me 2 minutes to finish, he was looking in the wrong book. What we were doing had little to do what what he looked up. In a sense, what he had dug up was only half the story.
After presenting this to me, he again said, "See, I worked on
first shift, so I was trained doing this."
"With all that training...on
first shift...you'd think they would have taught you how to read", I said, pointing out the fact that he was looking in the wrong book. I told him, "I understand you did this for two months, and I'm sure you're very impressed by that. I've been doing this for eight f***ing years, and I spend as much time fixing what
first shift f***ed up as I do finishing my own work. If this is the way you were trained to do this, I now know why they can't get anything right. Now, you can do this one of two ways. You're way and get it wrong, or my way and get it right. My way and it's over with. You're way, and it comes back and I'll come and get you and you can do it again."
Even then, he went about doing it the right way as if he were being forced to do something wrong. I don't know what happened to him after that night, but I think my supervisor recognized that if he wanted to keep me around, he didn't need to send someone I might choke to death to work with anymore.