Etiquette

I have been working in offices since I was 20.
It was a bit of a shock after working at markets  and then in a shop for the seven years before that and took some getting used to.
The problem with working in an office is that you can’t get away from annoyances.
In another environment, you can move yourself to another area of the building and busy yourself with another activity, far away from whoever is annoying you.
Lately, a number of friends have been complaining about their office environments and the annoying habits of their co-workers, which has prompted me to create the following list:

Office Etiquette
compiled by Hermia and her office-working friends:

1. A bar of soap and some deodorant won’t break the bank. Invest in them.
Similarly, I don’t care how much YOU like that perfume that you BATHED in this morning, stop abusing it because I don’t want to spend the day choking on it. Remember, less is more.

2. If you eat at your desk, keep in mind that no one else wants to smell your latest frozen delight of fish and sewage. It can be forgiven if it only happens now and again, but not on a regular basis.

3. If someone is popping down to the shop for a snack and asks you if you want anything, they mean it along the lines of “Do you want me to grab you a bar/crisps/banana?”. This is not an invitation for you to dump your complicated sandwich order on them, forcing them to queue forever at the deli counter.

4. Just because a co-worker comes into your office to say something to whoever shares the room with you, it doesn’t mean you’re allowed to sit there listening in on everything that’s being said. It mightn’t be super private, but it’s not being addressed to you. It’s also not socially acceptable to reference said conversation at a later time.

5. If someone is taking a phone call with a client, don’t make as much noise as you can in the background because it will be impossible for them to figure out what the client is trying to ask/tell them (working in a call centre was fun). Also, don’t listen in on the phone call, because it’s none of your business and if it is, you will be told…take your nosiness elsewhere.

6. Stealing food is not ok. It is NEVER ok. It’s even less ok in this beautiful recession where people now have to budget and plan out their week’s lunches. To you, it might just be a yoghurt, but to the person it belongs to, it’s leaving them short of food and possible costing them more money. Don’t be an asshole.

7. Don’t give people nicknames…actually that one applies to every job. As does ‘don’t leave poo floating in the work toilets for the next person to find’.

8. Don’t be a knuckle-cracker. The noise makes a lot of people want to vomit. If you really need to do it, take it outside

9. Don’t force the person you share a room to talk to you if they obviously don’t want to. Take the damn hint! (this was particularly bad in the call centre, because you didn’t have a designated seat and sometimes ended up sitting beside people you didn’t like or who were just too weird)..this one also applies to bus stops.

10. Don’t mess with another person’s desk. It’s just wrong to adjust the height of their chair or mess with their screens or move their papers and pens around, while you’re arsing around on their computers. A side-note to this rule is also not to root around on another person’s Facebook/Personal Email/etc if they’ve left themselves signed in on THEIR computer that YOU are violating.
Frape is hilarious if it’s your best mate, but messing around with a co-worker’s private sites is just unacceptable. Don’t be a dick.

To summarise, just don’t be a self-obsessed, rude, social-retarded jerk and you’ll be a lovely office person.

What do your co-workers do to annoy you…?

EDIT: I’d forgotten about this one:
11: Do not – I repeat, DO NOT – stare at your co-workers when they are eating!!!!!!!!!!!!