The Office Personality Short List
The Brown-noser
He’s easily one of the most annoying individuals on this list. In addition, he likely knows it… Constantly piling on healthy doses of highly generic outbursts of kiss a**ery to anyone above him and doing it with the consistency of a well-tuned timepiece.
In addition, you’re just trying not to crack your keyboard in half-listening to this crap every day.
This is the same guy who volunteers to zip Mr. Kirk’s fly when he leaves the restroom and is also the very first to dangle from his scrotum when he walks into the building.
“Hey, Mr. Kirk! You don’t see many bosses getting in there and showing the employees how it’s done, you know? You’re a real class act!”
The Delegator
Don’t we all love a good delegator?
However, they do no work, but they make sharing tasks with you sound so noble. As a result, they have this keen way of coaxing you into feeling trusted to do the really tough, important work. For that one time, you added all the art and formatting to their company PowerPoint presentation. They let you be the clicker when they presented. Dope! You’re a valuable asset to the company, Jamal.
You’re a step above the trash receptacle. You’re like, the paper shredder or that weird drawer on the file cabinet with all the pens and stuff from people’s old desks! #worth
The Re-doer
Finally, this person is often anal-retentive but can also be very passive-aggressive. As a result, they are a sadistic perfectionist and are very fond of their way of doing things.
Let me map out a scenario for you. Chances are you know this person very well.
As a result, so let’s say you have been working for 2 days on an integration of your company’s Outlook contacts into the new phone system. You’ve just about gotten it seamed up. Friday hits, and you email a small group of coworkers to test your dope new integration. One of the recipients is your buddy Gavin (enter Re-doer). Over the weekend, he noticed the integration works like the system he set up at his friend’s mom’s bingo buddy’s church. In addition, he wants to “help” you by redoing the f***in’ thing. He knows you won’t mind because he is Gavin, the church IT expert.
Like the pro he is, he logs into the system, gives no f***s. Completely reworks the integration. Because why not?!
Honestly, your company and Greater Missionary Green Valley Hope Grove Baptist Church have the same directory setup. Sweet!
The good thing is that nothing has changed regarding the outcome. It’s the same result, exactly.
In fact, gavin sends a company-wide email detailing his great deeds. Oh, and he doesn’t forget you. In addition, he thanks you at the end for helping him get it all done.
The Expert Corner-cutter
Bill Gates once said: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
Particularly, this expert corner-cutter may or may not be a genius.
They can show you the easy way to fill out your timesheet. As a result, they know which doors are unmonitored in the morning for those clandestine late-morning entries into the office. They can show you how to game the receptionist for the good pens and the key to the snack drawer. They can show you how to cut 50% of the time off those monthly reports. something about templates and merging data.
Meanwhile, they are gurus of laziness, but the good kinda of lazy.
Ultimately, they save the company a lot of money. They never take overtime because they finish their job early. They’re efficient. They’re smart enough to do the job right, just lazier. Sure, they never get employee of the month. They’ve been with the company for 20 years. Well done, sir/ma’am.
The “Nepotee”
This guy shares a last name with the president of the company. In addition, he works two days in the office from 10:30 to 3:30 and the rest of the week from home. He calls the IT department when his computer goes into sleep mode and talks down to the supervisor because, you know, Dad. This guy has his own corner office and hasn’t even been outta college for more than a few months. He has ZERO experience. He only knows 3 people’s names (one of which is his dad). His paycheck has more distance between the first and the last digit than yours.
The Ghost
You won’t find a calendar more full or a chair more empty. The Ghost has mastered being technically employed: replying “circling back on this!” to threads that died a week ago, surfacing for the catered lunch, then evaporating the moment a deadline takes shape. Their Slack dot has been green since the Obama administration. The work still gets done somehow — just never by them.
The Credit Vampire
Does the Credit Vampire do any of the work? Unclear. What’s certain is that when the project lands, they’re the one walking leadership through it, saying “we” for the parts that went well and a very specific “they” for the parts that didn’t. You did the late nights; they did the slide deck. By the time you think to push back, the story’s already set and you look petty for raising it — which is the trick.
The Meeting Maximalist
Some questions take a sentence. The Meeting Maximalist takes that sentence and books forty-five minutes, optional attendees quietly set to mandatory, no agenda, camera on. They open with “I know we’re all busy” and spend the next hour proving they don’t believe it. You’ll leave knowing exactly what the one-line email would’ve told you, minus the hour of your life.
Which One Are You?
The uncomfortable part: reading back through, you probably spotted yourself somewhere. Most of us are at least one of these on a bad week — the Re-doer when we’re stressed, the Ghost when we’re burned out, the Maximalist when we’re insecure about looking busy. The office isn’t full of villains; it’s full of people running the same coping you are, in a key you happen to find annoying. (If you genuinely can’t find yourself in any of them, there’s a good chance you’re the Brown-noser — and if you want to know how you measure up on other fronts, we’ve got a whole piece on that.)
