Cast of Co-Workers Part 2: The Terribly Ridiculous

Welcome to Part 2 of our rundown. (Here’s Part 1 in case you missed it). We started realizing pretty quickly that in the interest of giving you brief but thorough snapshots of our crew, we were going to have to divide and conquer. You got the good news yesterday, now on to the rest! These are the people that have us furiously texting each other in the middle of the morning, and gossiping all lunch break, and making us sigh with relief that the day is over. At best, they’re amusing. At worst, they make it really hard for us to do our jobs. You’ll see them featured most prominently in “Overheard in the Office”. Unsurprisingly, they tend to say some of the most ridiculous things we’ve heard someone utter with a straight face.

Spent Supervisor spends her days browsing celebrity tabloids and shopping online, and doesn’t expect much more effort from her employees. Great boss, or greatest boss? The problem is, at the end of the day, the employees are still out on the front lines exposed to the general public more than is really good for anyone. And Spent Supervisor has a nasty habit of waiting until the danger has passed and an ugly confrontation is over before poking out her head and adopting a concerned tone to make sure everyone is okay.  She’ll pretend to be your best friend, until she needs another scapegoat to save her own ass.

Nope.

No Boundaries is perhaps simultaneously the most frightening and most entertaining person either of us have ever encountered. Earning their title by giving every new hire the rundown of their family’s medical history, heritage, and religious viewpoint within minutes of introduction, it only goes downhill from there. We know that reading about No Boundaries might stretch our credibility to its utmost. You might be tempted to write off coverage of our conversations with a “No, they made that up. Pretty funny, guys, but no person would ever REALLY say that” Before Paul got hired, he thought Anya was exaggerating. Now all of his friends think he is exaggerating. It’s real! We promise. No matter how much we all wish it wasn’t, it’s real.  In fact, so real that we won’t assign any pronouns for fear of a (frivolous) lawsuit. All we’re saying is, it’s not libel if it’s true.

Next we have our That Guy, the resident delusional blockhead.  He’s got something to say to everybody and none of it’s necessary.  Go ahead and try to tell him that his attempts to bump elbows with his boss and “complement” Anya’s comely figure are unwanted.  Maybe there was a point in his youth when he was good at conversing with others and had other things to offer, but middle age has not been kind to his body, hairline, or charisma.  The fact that his wife and kids probably find him as ridiculous as we do might elicit sympathy from us, if he didn’t act like such a stupid boob in every single one of his interactions.

There’s also the mostly-harmless Faded Hippie.  Nobody (aside from some silent HR worker) knows exactly how old she is or how long she’s been with the organization.  She still maintains the same styles of clothing and hair from her wild younger years, and despite some kind of religious conversion during the Reagan administration, you can still find her meditating outside on sunny summer days.  Faded Hippie has deemed herself our unofficial goodwill ambassador.  She has taken it upon herself to make sure every visitor and volunteer at our building feels welcome, and is more than willing to put aside all of the projects she’s supposed to be working on to spend her entire afternoon doing so.  Interestingly enough, she is also the first one to comment when anybody else is five minutes late returning from their lunch break.

Picture this, but without any of the qualities that make it look relaxing or desirable.

Finally, we have someone fairly new to the scene, Overzealous Hire.  She flew into the office brimming with ideas and confidence, ready to implement some much-needed changes throughout the building.  However, her methods have been somewhat lax in a little something called tact, the presence of which has been known to greatly improve workplace relations everywhere.  This has won her very few fans at work, something that she is both unaware of and unconcerned with.  While you might think that her crudeness would be something we’d admire, she has yet to prove that any of her “revolutionary” ideas are actually good.  It also doesn’t help that she can be annoying as hell, dropping travel tales, wardrobe values, extreme sporting experiences, and dating woes at inappropriate places in every conversation. She provokes a LOT of this:

Goddamnit, Edith, stop acting like you have real ideas.

Sometimes we think our faces are going to get stuck that way. Not that I’d mind being stuck in Mary Crawley’s life/attitude/body...although we did skip the last two and a half minutes of the very last episode. Remember what I said about my psychic powers and talking through movies? Yeah.

Welcome to the major players in our work lives.