Advice On Settling In New Fish Please

I've looked at pictures of bristle nose plecs but they seem to have short and stumpy feelers.

It tends to be that females have short (or no) 'bristles' whereas males can have quite long ones, and they often have a spotted/mottled pattern, so it sounds like you could have a male bristlenose plec. There are loads of varieties of plec around though.

It depends on just how cold your work mate's tank is. Gold barbs can go down to 16 deg, so as long as the other tank doesn't go below this, they'd be fine.
And I think they'd be OK with most cold water fish - people usually have goldfish and maybe white cloud mountain minnows. Gold barbs get too big for a goldfish to eat, and not big enough to eat white clouds..