The Duh Factor

I sometimes find myself clicking on the Yahoo Home Page snippets about life at work. Today's home page snippet is about bad co-workers. Here are the five things that make you a bad co-worker, according to Yahoo.

1. You dump last-minute work on people when you could have avoided doing so.

2. You complain about people without telling them your beefs directly.

3. You exude negativity.

4. You bring your personal life to the office in ways that make people uncomfortable.

5. You're chronically defensive.

Here's the end to this ENLIGHTENING (sarcasm intended by the all caps) article:

"If you recognize yourself in any of the above habits, you may be the irritating coworker that colleagues are complaining about to me. Try a one-month moratorium on the behavior and see if any of your relationships improve."

Here is the problem: YOU WON'T RECOGNIZE YOURSELF IN ANY OF THESE ITEMS AND THAT IS WHAT MAKES YOU SO **%#@@ IRRITATING. Thus, the DUH factor.

You see, people who do these things are painfully self UNaware. And that is what makes them so hard to work with. I have often joked with clients that we are going to start providing an anonymous service to people where we send emails that say "hey guess what? Everyone thinks you are a royal jerk!" That reminds me of a funny bumper sticker I saw once "Jesus Loves you, Everyone Else Thinks You're an Asshole". Now that is funny.

Maybe I should just buy a bunch of those and hand them out as a service project. It would make the world a better please me thinks.

DUH!