25 Employees who are driving their coworkers to madness: 'She is manually deleting... 180,000 emails'

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Feb 27, 2025 5:00 PM EST

No matter how great the workplace environment is, a single irritating employee can ruin it for everyone. Just think about it. Have you ever come into the office and plopped down in your desk, only to be followed by a colleague who has a question for you first thing in the morning. They're wondering why they can't get into their email. Well. Okay. Instead of doing your actual job, you now have to help this guy figure out his email situation. 

So you start looking at his laptop and see that he's logged out of his email for some bizarre reason. You ask him his password, and he pulls out one of those little notebooks where you write in your passwords by hand. Then he flips through it for ages while you stand there, bored out of your mind. 

These people also have coworkers who are just so inept, so technologically illiterate, or so frightfully dim that everyone around them is pulling out their hair. If there's someone in your office who prints out their emails, they belong on this list. One person mentioned that they know someone who only writes in Excel, instead of Word, because that's the program they're most familiar with. Whatever works, I suppose, but in the end, they're just wasting company time and burning through the patience of everyone around them. 

Next, read about this woman who threw a party with one rule: no children allowed, please. Guess which friend showed up with a 3-year-old in tow anyway and "used her child to get her way?" 

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  • 01
    S031 Method R Read Question Sunny +
    via Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 02
    what is the most painful way you have seen your co-worker accomplish something very simple? My office mate is 62 and overdue to retire. If she has a website address, this is how she gets there: Opens XP Internet Explorer, inhabited by so many toolbars that the actual display window resembles the eye slit on a hunting blind.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 03
    Uses Yahoo! toolbar to search for www.Yahoo.com. Selects Yahoo! search engine from top of search results. Types URL she has been given in full into Yahoo! search. Selects random results on front page, and if they do not open desired website, closes IE and starts again from step 1.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 04
    whtrbt I occasionally come back to my desk to see a post-it- note left by a team leader from elsewhere in the business. • The post-it-note says "See me please.", and is attached to a sheet of paper. • The sheet of paper is a print out of a Word document.
    via u/whtrbt
  • 05
    • The Word document contains a screenshot of Outlook. • The screenshot of Outlook is showing an email I sent to the team leader. • More precisely, it's a screenshot of her REPLY to my email that she has decided to screen-shot, paste, print, hand-deliver (from a different floor)
    via u/whtrbt
  • 06
    and add an explanatory post-it-note to me instead of pressing Send... • The reply reads "I am not sure what you mean here." The phone rings before I can email the team leader, "Hi, did you see my note? I am not sure what you meant in your email..." WHAT.
    via u/whtrbt
  • 07
    stokech1 I organize things at my job. I had someone give me a pile of napkins, ripped corners of paper, business cards, and non-rolodex attached rolodex papers etc. with various contacts on them, they ranged in information from half phone numbers, to full business cards. He wanted me to rewrite all that information on colored index cards, and then
    via u/stokech1
  • 08
    alphabetically organize them by last name (some of them didn't have names, just numbers) I put them in excel, and gave it too him on a flash drive. He thought I was some kind of magician, bought me a fruit basket.
    via u/stokech1
  • 09
    remarkless we switched our photography database to flickr several months back. My boss gave the job of uploading the files to a co- worker who subsequently uploaded 500 files, one at a time until I caught her and showed her that the other 2500 images can be selected at once.
    via u/remarkless
  • 10
    philodendrin I have a volunteer that seeks me out because I help her with every problem she has that is computer-related. Last week she said her monitor was out, again. Her monitor was fine, the computer was turned off. She says that isn't it, because she turned it on. I asked her how and she pushes on the big DELL silver badge that is located
    via u/philodendrin
  • 11
    on the front of the computer, so its on. Another time she handed me a page of music she needed formatted into a program for printing and had a few changes. She shows me what she needs changed so I ask for the original, she says that the paper is the original, I ask for the file that she typed this so I didn't have to retype it all. She says that this is the original
    via u/philodendrin
  • 12
    and that should be good enough. I try to explain that I want the digital file and what that is and why it would be better to have that than to retype it all over again. She says that if I can't do this then she will find someone else, it shouldn't be that big of a problem. So I ask how she got the original page of music and she says it was emailed to her. I ask her to forward that email to me.
    via u/philodendrin
  • 13
    She has never forwarded anything before, so I show her this new feature of email. She is delighted, I am delighted. Everyone was delighted. She is very old and does not trust computers, each time they giver her trouble, the "computer is broken again". She sees them as fancy typewriters. I keep waiting
    via u/philodendrin
  • 14
    for her to retire but I fear that this volunteer "job" is one of her only links to seeing people and would rob her of the joy of seeing people. I am her IT b
    via u/philodendrin
  • 15
    jwhardcastle Click a link that opens in a new tab. Close the window instead of the tab. Open browser and repeat. Print out an e-mail and send it via inter-office mail, then send an e-mail saying "I've sent you X." Write down a web address sent in an e-mail, switch to a browser, type the web address in the search box.
    via u/jwhardcastle
  • 16
    iowan I spent a summer working on boats. I looked over and my (now) wife was sanding a hatch on an old wooden boat using a power sander with no sanding disc. She ended up sanding the entire thing with the velcro that one is supposed to stick the sandpaper to.
    via u/iowan
  • 17
    That_Guy_FTW My boss once gave me an Excel spreadsheet that had something like 10,000 contacts on it, told me he wanted me to scroll through and eliminate duplicates. He came out of his office fifteen minutes later, saw me scripting a VBScript, asked how many duplicates I had eliminated. I said, "None, I'm going to get them all in one
    via u/That_Guy_FTW
  • 18
    go." He told me to stop. wasting company time. fooling around with code and just do it his way, the scroll-through-and-check way. So I bet him three paid hours I could have it done in the next fifteen minutes - I would spend three hours off the clock organizing his contacts, or he would send me home as soon as I was
    via u/That_Guy_FTW
  • 19
    done and I'd get to stay on the clock the rest of the day. Five minutes later I e-mailed him the file with 7,892 unique contacts and peaced out.
    via u/That_Guy_FTW
  • 20
    [deleted] More of a company issue than anything else... but my old company had a REALLY outdated website (think from the mid 90s) and it was overdue for an overhaul. So it took 18 months to get approval for a budget of a few thousand dollars to build a new website (and much infighting over why a website should cost thousands of dollars). Keep
    via u/[deleted]
  • 21
    in mind... this is a mega million dollar corporation that was posting multi million dollar profits year after year. So they finally get funding, I volunteer to be on the site committee because | actually have some background in web design, we contract with a local firm and in about 8 weeks they knock the assignment out of the park. I mean we had a
    via u/[deleted]
  • 22
    FANTASTIC site ready to go at the push of a button. But no... that didn't work. We held a meeting where the shareholders saw the new design with the designers in the room and immediately they launched into a 2 hour fight over "I think this button should be red, I think this needs more pop, can you make our logo sparkle". One shareholder in his 70s actually asked "Can
    via u/[deleted]
  • 23
    you make this integrate with the google machine?" During the meeting I locked eyes with the head designer (as I was the only person under 30 in the room) and gave him my best "I'm so sorry... this is killing me too" look and he nodded, I think he understood.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 24
    It ended up taking a total of 3 years and 6 redesigns before we ended up with a site that looked "ok" but it was nothing like the original design and it took dozens of meetings just as painful as the first to finish something that we should have just paid for and gone live with immediately.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 25
    tl;dr Company took over 4 - and a half years to fix a website and one old guy asked if they could integrate it with the google machine.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 26
    AverageMuslim clicking the first part of an excel spreadsheet, dragging all the way down 2+ pages, letting go right before the last row, and having to start over again. me: just click ctrl+a supervisor: aaaand that is why we hired you. thanks.
    via u/AverageMuslim
  • 27
    flargenhargen not a coworker, but my dad types letters in excel because he knows how to use excel and not word.
    via u/flargenhargen
  • 28
    IHaveChronicDogs This is the routine I got to live with for almost three years: 1. ask me how to do something, which pertains to their job, not mine, but the skills overlap (such as "Select All, Copy, Switch Program, Paste). I show with key functions, we were
    via u/IHaveChronicDogs
  • 29
    running macs so Command A, Command C etc...) 2. I explain verbally. They don't get it. 3. I come over to their computer to show them while they are 'at the wheel' 4. Ask co-worker to come over to my desk and watch over my shoulder while I do it, showing/explaining
    via u/IHaveChronicDogs
  • 30
    how. 5. Co-worker questions me at least five times, why, in a disbelieving tone, I am doing it that way, EXPLAIN. 6. Go back to their computer and say, "Can you come over here and show me again? Every. Day.
    via u/IHaveChronicDogs
  • 31
    Cheezburger Image 10473589248
    via Getty Images For Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 32
    [deleted] I had a coworker who I suggested using google maps to. So she goes to Bing, types in google, finds. google and goes there. Then she types "maps" into the google search. So painful.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 33
    PrestonBroadus At my first job I had to speak to a procurement guy. He told me to wait while he finished typing up an email. He got to the end of the message and then started typing his email signature, which he copied from print out of another email he kept on his desk. He hunt and
    via u/PrestonBroadus
  • 34
    pecked out every letter, one-by-one, including the company phone and fax numbers. In his job he would need to send at least a dozen emails a day.
    via u/PrestonBroadus
  • 35
    scruffles13 I was working one summer for a hockey tournament, calling and booking teams to play in said tournament. One of my co-workers was tasked with making the program with the full rosters of the kids, which is fairly common practice here. So she has emails with lists of all of the kids names and numbers, problem is the numbers are not always in
    via u/scruffles13
  • 36
    numerical order, some teams are organized alphabetically. So instead of using word to fix this in a matter of seconds, she chose a much more interesting route. I came into her office to find her on the floor, surrounded by pieces.
    via u/scruffles13
  • 37
    of paper, cutting up the names and using a glue stick to make them in the proper order. I was totally speechless, just turned and walked out of the room, she was fired about 20 minutes later when someone of power came in and saw what she was doing
    via u/scruffles13
  • 38
    Fresno Rog I was remodeling someone's room a couple of years ago and was in the midst of installing the sheetrock with a fellow that had the best of intentions but a questionable degree of experience. We had just worked ourselves to a point where I needed a smaller piece of drywall to cover the gap at the end of the wall, so I asked him to cut a piece
    via u/Fresno Rog
  • 39
    off of one of the many that were stacked outside while I finished installing the one that we had just brought in. If you have worked with sheetrock before, this is an exceedingly simple task. Measure the size needed, use a knife to score the paper at the first measurement and bend the board until it breaks. Cut the paper on the other side; rinse and repeat for the
    via u/Fresno Rog
  • 40
    second measurement. It takes all of two minutes for a novice familiar with the process. My good friend disappeared as I continued to screw the current sheet into the wall. I finished up and thought to myself, 'he must have gone. to take a ,' until I heard
    via u/Fresno Rog
  • 41
    the circular saw wind up. I glanced out the window at that moment and saw a huge plume of white dust s into the air as the saw dug into the sheet. Thinking back, I was glad to see that he had scrounged up a dust mask in the process of retrieving the saw.
    via u/Fresno Rog
  • 42
    depthdefying Open. Print. Fax. Scan. Email. I see it every day.
    via u/depthdefying
  • 43
    Kopfstandnode 800 000 SQ31 Method Re Survey + Read Question Eboration
    via Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash+

    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

  • 44
    flargenhargen This stupid guy called IT one morning to complain that his monitor was all blurry and he needed a new one immediately before he could start work. IT came to his office and took away his old monitor, and gave him a nice shiny new monitor.
    via u/flargenhargen
  • 45
    The guy looked at the new monitor, and complained that it was also too blurry to use. Oh wait, ...rubs eyes... nevermind, it's fine. DISCLAIMER: I was that stupid man. (it was monday morning)
    via u/flargenhargen
  • 46
    theedqueen Whenever my boss is in another office and wants something from one of our computers in the office I'm in, he always tells me to print and fax it to him. Usually I just ignore that and pdf the darn thing and email it to him. I'm sure a lot of trees will thank me.
    via u/theedqueen
  • 47
    HumbleBeeTuna Coworker of mine didn't understand that when she turned email alerts back on, after being told to leave them off, that it would overload the mail server (for whatever reason it was sending quite a few, per second, to a distribution list....)
    via u/HumbleBeeTuna
  • 48
    I am just sitting there, laughing about the event from the sidelines (working on my own stuff), just watching things unfold. Sure enough a few hours later it brings the entire mail server down. Everyone is deleting emails, etc. I show a few people how to setup outlook rules and just trash the mails automatically, and then I
    via u/HumbleBeeTuna
  • 49
    look over at what she is doing; manually deleting a page of emails at a time (10 or so) in Outlook Web Access..... There was 180,000 emails.
    via u/HumbleBeeTuna
  • 50
    TheAma1 Manually entering line by line a 5000 entry-long Excel file onto SharePoint instead of uploading the file.
    via u/TheAma1
  • 51
    poubelle Doing budget reports in Microsoft Word, and calculating all the totals with a desk calculator. Then asking me to double-check all her figures.
    via u/poubelle
  • 52
    BasharAtreus When i started working at an office I had this co-worker who sat in the cubical behind me (she was young but just not very computer literate). One day she asks me to fill out a service ticket because her computer is broken. I ask her whats wrong with it and she said its broken and said to just fill the ticket in a very bitchy voice. I fill the ticket for her
    via u/BasharAtreus
  • 53
    and one of our techs walks over with the meanest looks on his face and presses the power button on her monitor, he then walks away without saying a word to anyone. I was on the phone with a customer, but afterwards i laughed so hard
    via u/BasharAtreus
  • 54
    i drooled on myself and she got ped. Months later the tech said she was a repeat offender of the same crime.
    via u/BasharAtreus
  • 55
    secretly_hipster Walked in on my boss taking screen shots by taking photos of his computer screen. It was a film camera. For years he had been taking photographs of his screen, getting them developed, and then scanning them.
    via u/secretly_hipster
  • 56
    [deleted] I asked a girl I hired to mop my dining room in my restaurant. I told her to make sure she cleans the mop and changes the water first. I have your standard mop bucket/wringer combination. I look over and I see her trying to ring out the giant mop by hand in the sink.
    via u/[deleted]

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