I am Australian, and I’m at a company-wide meeting with colleagues from all over. I find myself explaining to an American the difference between Kiwi and Aussie accents; they are similar but there has been a vowel shift in New Zealand.

A few minutes later, we join another group who are asking a new colleague what he thinks of the city so far.

Colleague: “Before I got to London, I’d never seen a bigger.”

Everyone But Me: “What’s a bigger?”

[Colleague] holds his cupped hands toward us.

Colleague: “A person who asks for money.”

Everyone But Me: “Oh, a beggar!“

My American colleague leans towards me and speaks with the pride of a student finding a practical application of a recent lesson.

American Colleague: “He’s from New Zealand, isn’t he?”

It’s the end of a particularly bad, cold, and rainy day, and I am complaining to my coworker while we get ready to leave.

Me: “I just couldn’t really get anything right today. I don’t know where my head is.”

Coworker: “I was gonna say, ‘Up your a**,’ but maybe it’s not the right time.”

Me: “No! No, you’re right! That’s exactly where it is!”

Coworker: “Is it at least warm?”

Me: “No! It’s cold! Because it’s closer to my heart!”

I have a coworker who regularly comes to visit our cubicle to hang out and banter for a little while. He is prone to resorting to exaggeration or hyperbole to get a response out of people rather or not he really means it. One day he brings up trans individuals.

Coworker: “If they can decide to be what they want, so should I. From now on, I’ve decided I’m going to self-identify as a bear.”

Me: “You want people to call you a bear?”

Coworker: “Yes, I identify as a bear. You have to respect that!”

Me: “You do know what most people think it means when a man calls himself a bear, right?”

Coworker: “That you need to call me that because that’s what I identify as!”

Me: “Yeah, calling yourself a bear usually means you’re a big gay man who is extra proud about it.”

Coworker: “There is no way that’s true!”

Some quick Googling brings up an article on “Bear (gay culture)” backing up my claims. He ended up wandering off then, but near the end of the day, he wanders back to my cubicle.

Coworker: “I looked it up and you were right about bears, so now I’ve decided to identify as a grizzly bear, specifically.”

Me: “I admit that I haven’t heard of that in gay slang before, but just to be sure…”

I do some quick Googling.

Me: “Okay, looks like now you are a big gay man who is extra hairy.”

Coworker: “Really?!”

Me: “See for yourself.”

Coworker: “Fine, then I’ll identify as a panda bear.”

One quick search later…

Me: “Okay, now you identify as a big gay man who has extra hair and is of Asian descent. You know, I’m really glad you finally are comfortable enough to come out to us all like that. I’m sure everyone will be very supportive of you!”

Coworker: “You have to be making this up.”

Me: “Says it right here. You know, I think your effort to mock the LGBT community has been thwarted by your lack of understanding of the LGBT community.”

He just looked lost. Sadly, he apparently didn’t catch on to the point I was trying to make; the next day he came in to tell me he had decided to identify as an Abrams tank, instead. Yes, I did Google it, but I couldn’t find any amusing slang meanings for that one.

I’m currently in a weekly planning session with my coworkers. Due to the recent health crisis, we’ve been primarily working from home, and today, some of our team are back in the [City] office to socialise for the first time in months. They’re discussing their plans for lunch and where they’ll be going.

Colleague: “Well, it was a fifty-fifty between Greek and Thai, but we decided to go with Greek.”

Me: “So, what you’re telling us is that you had a Thai-breaker?”

The entire team groans.

Team Leader: “How can you have such bad dad jokes without having any kids?”

I’ve trained one of my coworkers to use some software. It’s not exactly hard, but you need to do things in precise order or the software won’t work quite right.

Me: “Hey, [Coworker], just noticed a few blips in the data you sent over.”

Coworker: *Abruptly* “Well, I did it right!”

Me: “I’m not saying it’s wrong; it just maybe needs looking at, tweaking maybe. Let me show you.”

She sighs dramatically. I try to show her on her screen but she does all she can to not look. It’s a bit pathetic and more like a child being told off than a forty-something woman.

Me: “Instead of copying the data from there, if you copy from here, it will be formatted properly.”

Coworker: “Yeah, yeah.”

I leave it there. I don’t need her rudeness. She has had as much training as me; I shouldn’t even need to train her. The next week, more data, more issues.

Me: “Could you please resend that data? It’s not formatted properly.”

Coworker: “No. If you want it a certain way, then you do it.”

Me: “Okay, fine. Don’t say I haven’t made every effort.”

She mutters something under her breath. I ignore it and manipulate the data by hand. It’s not a big deal but annoying and time-consuming. I jot down everything she said and the times and dates for everything, because I know what is happening next.

The following week, I am on holiday. The reason I deal with the data after [Coworker] is that it is needed by a senior manager. I tidy it up more as a favour to him as we get on well, and that I know he is stupid busy.

I come back in from holiday to find several emails from my boss.

Boss: “[My Name], what is this mess of data? I know you help me out, but half of it isn’t even spelt correctly.”

Boss: “Sorry! Just saw that you’re on holiday and this didn’t come from you. I will address this with the right person.”

The third and fourth emails are to my coworker but I get copied.

Boss: “[Coworker], this data is not up to the standard that is expected; there are a number of basic mistakes that are not acceptable. Please redo this immediately and send this to me by the end of the day.”

The next day:

Boss: “I didn’t receive the data yesterday, despite making it clear that it was needed. Please send this ASAP or I will have to discuss this with your boss.”

[Coworker] took a few days off due to “stress” following this. Of course, she blamed me for it all. No one believed her, as I’ve trained many others without issue, and the fact that I documented everything just was the icing on the cake.

She continued to blame me and refused to be trained by me. As I was the trainer for many of the tasks, this just meant she couldn’t learn anything new. In one case, I had to train someone solely to train her. As all pay rises are directly linked to performance and the number of tasks able to be completed, she was just hurting herself.