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since January 21, 2004

 
WORK STUFF

I guess I haven't written too much stuff about work, but that's mostly because I try to keep work stuff at work and the outside stuff outside. But occasionally, there's some stuff that weighs on my mind and just makes things worse.

For example, there's a worker... let's call her Pam M. Or how about P. Mingo. Anyway, Pam M. is a processor. Basically, a monkey could do her job. Unfortunately, she was not trained like a monkey, but since she's been promoted and been named "Employee of the Month", she thinks she's some hot shit. The problem is that she lazy as hell. She cuts corners all the time and just sometimes doesn't enter any information at all. As a result, there are plenty of times where I have to do her job, that is entering information that she should've entered in the first place. I've basically had to do her job in addition to my job. And I don't get paid enough to do two jobs.

This has happened multiple times, enough that I dread every email that she sends to the group because there's a 20-30% chance that I'll have to do her job and that she'll make some stupid mistake that'll piss ME off.

One such event happened on Friday. In addition to it being the end of the week, I was in the middle of the period where we get swamped with work. I've managed to hold up pretty well under the workload, but this was one time that I just had enough.

Basically, what happened was that we received both a delivery bill and a supply bill for a particular location. Our job is to make sure that the location is being billed correctly. For this particular location, we need to have the delivery bill entered in order to verify that the correct ammount was supplied.

Unfortunately, Pam did not do that. What she did was that she entered the data into the wrong column in the spreadsheet. Then, rather than reentering the data into the correct column, she just linked the cells to each other. So, of course, the supply bill is going to be wrong. Nevermind that one of the cells was just left blank entirely.

So basically, I had to reenter two columns and spend all the time looking for the invoice that should have been entered already. As a result, I had to spend two hours on something that should have taken 15 minutes. So needless to say, once I was done, I was not happy at all.

So in the email I sent back to Pam saying that the problem was solved, I let her know that she should... put more effort into her work. In fact, I'll go ahead and put the email I sent out up on the web. In case she had no idea what she was entering, I made it crystal clear that both columns of information had to be entered correctly and not just to make one of the invoices fit. I could've said that what she had done was lazy, sloppy and just something that should've been better done. I also said that the processors should take the time to make sure that what they've entered is accurate, since it's not uncommon for some stupid mistakes to be made that have been sent in my direction when they didn't have to be sent if someone would just make sure that everything fits. But unfortunately, speed is more important than accuracy over there, and it stems from the top, where the manager has been known to send over emails with names of locations and clients spelled egregiously wrong. A spelling mistake or two is fine, but when spell the clients name kkELLLOGG, or something horrible like that, you can see how much the apple falls from the tree.

So of course, after I write the email, my manager writes me one saying that I pushed the line a little bit. Of course, I avoided him all day, but something tells me that the email didn't go over well with the processors. After the last time I sent an email like that, Pam, in particular, was snotty in her emails to the group. I don't expect any different from her.

And I swear if she gets employee of the month any more while I'm there, I'm looking for a new job.

And I won't even go into the racial self-segregation and cliques that happen to go on at the office, but that's a different story altogether.
posted by Mike at 10:17 PM