Work Vent

I… just… cannot…handle it today. So you get to read my vent.

About three weeks ago my work brought in a temp to cover basic administrative duties while I’m off on maternity leave. Fine.

Then it ends up that they didn’t even screen her for her knowledge of Microsoft Office, which, you know, I use constantly in my job. Like most of the corporate world.

Especially Excel. We use Excel for just about everything. She had never been in the program. Which meant I spent much of her first week teaching her things like how to color the background of a cell, how to insert a row, how to delete a column, etc., etc., etc.

I get that it’s not her fault. The blame falls on the management members who hired her for not screening her properly. But still… Drives. Me. Nuts.

And then there are things that I just consider intuitive in a corporate office setting. Things like if your computer hasn’t been working properly in a week, call the Help Desk. Or, I don’t know, maybe let me or our supervisor know, so we can tell you to call the HelpDesk.

Or you can just sit there complaining about it until I explicitly tell you “call the Help Desk”, then you complain for another 20 minutes before making the call.

Things like when you’re logging into a new system, and  Information Systems has informed you to leave your password blank the first time, and you will be prompted to create a new password. So you try to log in, then when you get to password, you ask me what to put. And I say “Didn’t I/S tell you to leave it blank?”

“Well… yes.”

“Then I suggest you leave it blank.”

{{ head desk }}

Stuff like this happens all. day. long.

Things like, our Assistant Manager tells you to book a specific meeting room. There’s a problem with the room. You inform me with a helpless look on your face. I tell you to call the Assistant Manager who made the request. You do so. Problem solved.

Why do I have to explain this to you?

Like having someone send me an attachment for a meeting notice that you sent out, then me having to explain to you that since you sent out the invite, I cannot add the attachment.

Why would you have them send it to me, when you sent out the original meeting invite with the original attachments?

This makes no sense to me.

Like when you’re expecting someone  to stop by your desk, so you have to discuss with me whether or not it’s okay to take your break right now, or if you should wait.

You are a 40-something supposedly professional. Can you not figure this out for yourself?

I don’t understand.

And when I told you to use the group email for our entire group, and not just our location, it wasn’t just for fun. We have employees located at other locations. The email needed to go to all of our employees. So why did you use the one just for this location? When I specifically included the correct group address in the written work instructions, and verbally explained to you which one to use and why?

Why?

And when our Manager told you to remind an entire group to fill out a specific form, then you ask me if you should remind everyone, or just one person. He said the entire group. He gave you a list of names.

I don’t understand why you even have to ask. He very clearly told you what to do.

Today, my patience is thin. I’m tired, I’m irritable, I don’t want to be here at all.

And it doesn’t help that this temp, whose previous best trait was the fact that she was really super-nice, and willing to learn has decided to cop an attitude, demanding why she hasn’t been trained on more (because you can’t handle it), and blaming me and other team members on her lack of training thus far.

Here’s the deal: how can I train you on more complicated items, when I have to teach you the basics of the software first?

So no, you will not be getting access to our secure database system to run queries, pull data streams, etc. Because it’s too easy to mess up the entire database if you don’t know what you’re doing. Which is why only three of us in the entire division have access to it to begin with. And since I just taught you how to bold the text in an Excel cell, no, we don’t trust your skill level to even be able to do that part of the job, let alone not screw up the entire system because you don’t know what you’re doing. So quit stomping your feet.

Besides your skill level, you’ve shown over & over that your attention to detail is not what it needs to be to be successful at this job. There are too many mistakes on too many menial tasks.

Oh, and as for not having a full work day? Talk to management. I advised them months ago that since you would only be doing the very basic administrative  items, part-time would be more than enough. They insisted on bringing someone in full time.

The transition work plan that you have a copy of clearly shows a workload of approximately 12 hours per week of standard work. Leaving roughly another 4 hours for non-standard requests. That’s an estimated 16 hours per week. I don’t have more to give you. Don’t like it? Talk to the manager. Stop huffing at me like I’m holding out on you.

The management team & I have discussed it. There was talk of letting you go. You got to stay. The decision was that:
a) the department can muddle thru for a couple of months, and
b) since I could be out literally any day now, re-training someone else on the items you have learned is too time consuming. It’s risky.

You got to stay. Appreciate that.