Tag: Co-workers

Fun, Humor, Office, Weird February 11, 2010February 11, 2010

Freudian Slip

“Demosthenes overcame and rendered more distinct his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.”
– Plutarch

Our supplier’s secretary would have done well to copy the ancient orator. Quoth her voicemail message:

censored — Pictured: a testicle handcuff key

“Hey this is [name] with [supplier], just calling to let you know your testicle handcuff keys are ready to ship, please let me know when you’d like me to proceed.”

Susie called Wise, Hennessy, and I all in to consult and figure out what on earth she was talking about (amidst some mock horror, “Susie! What did you order?”) but we finally managed to deduce she meant tactical handcuffs. Which isn’t nearly as intriguing.

Humor, Life, Office, Work February 5, 2010February 5, 2010

Chivalry is Dead

“Always be nice to secretaries. They are the real gatekeepers in the world.”
– Anthony J. D’Angelo

Not an hour into work and with stacks of paperwork already piled high on our desks, both the copier and shredder broke causing a swell of panic on the secretaries’ part. Wise, Susie, and I dove into action. After the right combination of kicking, bashing, praying, and human sacrifice was accomplished the copier shuddered, whirred, and started working again and we moved our attention to the shredder. Then my phone rang and there was a grouchy state attorney on the line, and Amanda was dragged off to do a record expungement leaving Susie to wrestle with the machinery.

In sauntered Lt. Figaro (late as usual) and he meandered up to Susie and started talking.

I imagine that if the officers ever did take the initiative to fix their own problems, the secretaries' reaction to the resulting chaos would look something like this.

While I looked up records for the attorney I watched her stick her arm and fingers into the mechanisms to fix a blockage while he told the story of an African student he knew (which is really inspirational, don’t get me wrong). As she dragged the whole thing away from the wall to poke around the electrical hookups he led into the differences of education in multiple countries, which turned naturally to American politics. When she dragged the bag of shredded paper out of its compartment (which was nearly as big as she is and threatened to spill out everywhere) he reached his crescendo:
“And that is just what the terrorists want! They want to make us feel inferior and inadequate! We can’t let the terrorists win!”

At which point the attorney let me go and I was able to scurry back in time to keep the mess from tipping over and shove the whole contraption back into place.

“Good job, girls,” Figaro said and went back to his office to take a nap or something.

Humor, Office, Stupid People, Weird January 19, 2010January 19, 2010

A Slice of J.

“I love being married. It’s so great to find that one person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.”
– Rita Rudner

The other day, J. came to my office earlier than usual and so he went to the break room to study for a while before my lunch break. A bunch of the student officers congregate there between shifts or to eat so there was a group of them there at the time.

Helper, a notoriously unobservant young man, was among them.

Helper is an interesting kid. He spent several months trying to flirt with me, mostly by slinking up to my desk, lurking behind me for a while, and then informing me of what I was doing quite suddenly.
“You’re reading CNN.”
“Where’d you come from?! Um…yes. I am.”
The weirdest thing he did was hover silently one day while I went online to my bank account to pay my credit card bill.
“You use [name of bank]?” he drawled.
I jumped, as I’d had no idea he was there, and demanded why the hell he was looking!
“No reason. Is that your email too?”
I shut my windows and pointedly asked him if he was on duty.
“Heh, yeah,” he gave me a ‘I-get-it-we’ll-talk-later’ look and meandered off.

This was two months after I’d gotten engaged and had this nice rock sitting pretty on my left hand that was supposed to protect me from the over-amorous attentions of clueless men.

It never registered. It wasn’t until a couple months after that he must have figured out I was getting married in the near future because he came to me while I was reconciling a report, lurked behind me for a couple minutes, and finally muttered, “So, you’re engaged.”
“For about five months, yes.”
“I see.” He sat looking at me for a few more seconds before sighing and murmuring, “I won’t bother you anymore.”

He wandered off while I sat with my jaw slack, wondering where he had pulled this supposed relationship out of. I don’t think he’s spoken to me since, though I have caught him glaring furtively before he whisks himself around a corner. And once I overheard him once complaining to a co-worker that I had flirted with him, and the ensuing guffaws.
“Are you kidding? She’s married, and she was dating the guy before she ever worked here. Besides, she thinks you’re creepy.”

The reason for this back story? Well, there J. was sitting in the break room for quite a while before Helper realized he had no idea who J. was and enquired.
“I’m J., C.’s husband.”
“C.?” Helper asked nonchalantly, “Who’s that?”
“You know,” Lexie said, “she works at the front desk. Dark hair, green eyes, pretty?”
“Short?” offered J.

I still much prefer him to Helper.

Drama, Friends, Humor, Work October 16, 2009

Anatomy of a Panic

“Happy is the man with a wife to tell him what to do, and a secretary to do it.”
-Lord Mancroft

8:45 – Susie comes to my desk and says, “Chief would like to meet with you and Hennessy at 10, is that ok?” C. blanches in panic and promptly dives deep into a pit of the horrors (I’m getting sacked, Hennessy’s getting sacked, We’re both getting sacked, NO!!!!, They can’t do this, Don’t they know what I’ve done for them, I’m too important, right…No, I’m expendable…AH!, Angst Angst Angst, etc.) Susie assures her that nothing is wrong, but as you may imagine, this does little to help matters.

9:00 – Hennessy comes into work and receives the same message. Panic escalates. Circumstances are dissected during morning walk to turn in checks and cash to the accounting office.

9:30 – C. alternately tries cajoling and blackmailing anyone in the office for information.

9:45 – Bleak. All is bleak.

10:00 – Chief is nowhere to be found. C. is “defibbed” as her heart succumbs to the stress and anxiety of worrying.

10:15 – Chief, Lt. Figaro, and Susie convene with Hennessy and C. in conference room. Hennessy and C. sit at the far end of the table to give them more reaction time to the blow that is coming. They are sternly asked to move closer. They grudgingly comply.

10:20 – Chief reveals that the department has new needs, and needs to go in a new direction, so they need to shake up the ranks a little.

10:21 – C. and Hennessy clutch their chairs as the vortex of doom swirls around them.

10:22 – “So,” continues Chief, “we’re going to take you out from Figaro’s supervision and make you both subordinate to Susie instead. Fun, huh?”

10:23 – “Vortex of doom” evaporates instantly leaving C. stuck with the amassed fear and anxiety that has plagued her for hours. She feel oddly cheated.

Not exactly my boss. I'd like to think *I* could be this secretary (minus the dirty mistress part) but alas... — Not exactly my boss. I'd like to think I could be this secretary (minus the dirty mistress part) but alas...

Anyway, this so-called shake up just means that Hennessy and I are now reporting…to the person I, at least, have been reporting to for months now. Susie is pretty much queen of the secretaries: Joan without being social-climbing, manipulative, or sexually adventurous, just an all around decent person. She’s also the administrative brains of the office and actually managed to pound it through our supervisors’ heads that we’d be much more effective as a secretarial pool rather than as scattered puddles. Within ten minutes of us being under her command, I’d been given a list of both long and short term projects and assignments.

Unfortunately, since I’m a fast worker (or just possibly have nothing else to do) I’ve already crossed about half of them off. No change there, I suppose.

Fun, Humor, Satisfaction, Work October 13, 2009October 13, 2009

Can You Hear Me Now?

“Technology makes it possible for people to gain control over everything, except technology.”
– John Tudor

Our resident IT guy (a species who, as you may remember, is the ancient enemy of secretaries) coming up to me one day and saying, “I’m going to take your phone so that the dispatch center in the stadium can have it.”
C. asking quickly as he started walking away, “Um, can I get a new one?”
“Yeah, the old stadium one. It doesn’t work very well, so good luck with that.”

Irritation.

“New phone” being broken to the point that it isn’t recognizing picking up or hanging up, and the surface scratched so badly the screen is unreadable. Dozens of incoming messages being lost into the netherworld of dropped/missed calls. Calling up the IT gods where they wither in their dark, lonely cave and demand a solution. An actual New Phone getting installed and C. learning from the IT minions how to personally program the phone’s appearance.

Satisfaction.

Small Dog's means are few, but she takes what she can get!

The office IT guy strolling by and looking down at the screen, where he sees, “WHY ARE YOU READING THIS?!” blazoned across it, and jumps about a mile. C. seeing the whole thing.

Priceless.

Fun, Humor, Work October 1, 2009October 2, 2009

Animal Control

“I want a pet!”
“We can’t have one.”
“I know, but can’t we get a fish or something?”
“No.”
“Why not?!”
“Because of the plant by the front door.”
“It was as good as dead when it came to me!”
-C. and J.

A day of freezing rain equals three days of kitties in the Police Department.

This is the season of animal escapades! The last three days in a row, some well-intentioned student has brought in a kitten to our office. And the last three days in a row, the sheer cuteness of these critters has ground the entire office to a halt. Of course…when does a series of isolated events stop being a series of isolated events and start becoming a pattern? apparently there’s a small…herd? Pod? Pride?…of feral cats on campus that all decided to spawn right before the temperature dropped forty degrees overnight. So these hapless little babies just keep turning up so we now have Animal Services on speed dial and we lose an hour’s worth of work every morning putting them in front of heaters, buying milk to feed them, and cuddling them (risking who knows how many communicable diseases).

The downside is that my puppy-lust has been enflamed and I want a pet even more now!

Never would think she was an ocelot wannabe, huh?

Granted I don’t have the best luck with plants…but I do have a history with feral cats! When we lived in the Pacific there were hordes of cats in the jungle. A particularly nasty one that haunted our street had a kitten we decided to rescue from the evil mother. It took weeks of feeding it in order to trick it inside. The minute the door closed behind her, she attacked the glass in terror and then hunkered down shivering, her tail the size of a baseball bat. Twenty minutes later, she decided she was “our housecat” and that was the end of the matter. And in a continuing Egyptian theme, we named her Nefertiti because of the heavy black marks around her eyes.

Of course, we were all mildly allergic to her (Buddy was catastrophically so) but we refused to get rid of her. And she repaid our generosity by having kittens under my bed while my parents were out of town.

: You can’t handle the cuteness!

Since scrubbing cat placenta out of my carpet isn’t an expirience I’d like to repeat, I don’t think I’ll want a cat ever again, but I do want a puppy. A border collie puppy! Want want!

Friends, Humor, Work August 25, 2009November 3, 2009

Observations of a Grump

“Common sense is not so common.”
-Voltaire

bad day A couple things that I noticed today because I’m (still) in a rather bad mood and grouchy towards the silliness of my job. Such an attitude invariably spills over into other aspects of life and I do recognize that I need to snap out of it soon. I’ll put on rose colored glasses again shortly, but meanwhile I’m still way too irritated!

1) In spite of the hiring freeze the University has imposed on every department, they were still able to give all employees a raise, which was rather lovely. However it was my job to individually calibrate and apply said raise to all 150+ of our student employees, which was rather horrible. And despite several emails to student employee supervisors warning them that this project would take several days and that they would have to get any other wage changes to me before then, a pile of “so-sorry-I’m-late-but-it’-just-been-crazy-and-don’t-you-look-nice-today-could-you-possibly-help-me-out” paperwork stealthily grew on my desk. Which was rather irritating, but manageable. However, today a new bunch of supervisor raises appeared on my desk and one kid, when you add up all his raises together, is getting a 10% wage increase because (and this I quote from the supervisor comment section of the form), “He has improved very much. He now diligently wears black socks.” This kid will end up making nearly as much as me because he has finally learned to match his footwear to the black shoes, pants, and belt his uniform requires?! (*teeth grind*)

2) Even after many requests, nigh unto begging, they still will not update the office website! Currently people trying to muddle through our new (still now quite functioning) parking monitoring program call the number listed on the parking and traffic website…which sends them straight to my phone. However hearing, “University police,this is C.,” tends to make people start panicking a little. (*head shake*)

duh_award1 3) And it’s not just work being ridiculous! Driving to work today I heard a commercial. “The current credit crunch and recession making it hard for you to buy a car or house? Something drastic must be done! We have bailout money for YOU YOU YOU! Good credit, bad, credit, no credit? High income, low income? Doesn’t matter, you WILL be approved for your big purchase!”

Now…wasn’t it the poor decisions on the part of lenders/banks/credit companies to lend people money that they didn’t qualify for (coupled with people thinking that their actual income should not be a factor in purchases) that got this country in the financial mess it’s in? (*facepalm*)

There! I finally feel purged of the angst! At least, I’ve complained myself hoarse, and that tends to make for a bad dinner conversation, I’m pretty sure my poor in-laws got an ear-full of it sunday night, to say nothing of my long-suffering husband! I’m grabbing dinner with Catriona tonight who apparently has much to gossip about, (but won’t even give me any hints as to what, the minx!) so I have to be in prime perked ears position. Vent-fest over.

Humor, Work August 11, 2009

Hostile Takeover

“I feel sure that coups d’etat would go much better if there were seats, boxes, and stalls so that one could see what is happening and not miss anything.”
-Edmond and Jules to Goncourt

The title is misleading. If anything I’m staging a “Mildly Irritated Reworking of Procedure” in the office, with Hennessy, Wise, and Susie. With the upcoming school year we have dozens of students to be hired, fired, given raises, etc., but the problem is that the supervisors in our department are notorious for not telling me when students quit or are fired. Then end result is that I think that lockers assigned to students are still in use, gear is still checked out, the kids aren’t hired properly (the procedures of which are federally regulated, meaning that mistakes equal risking one mother of an audit bill), wages get screwed up, and all the secretaries go home with migraines.

But no more! We have rounded up the ringleaders (mandatory meeting), studied the mistakes of the past (reviewed suggestions from a similar meeting that took place last year, all of which have been subsequently ignored by the powers that be), barricaded off the exits (cancelled all other events) and put our fates in the hands of a higher power (got Chief on our side). Liberté, Égalité…er…Sororité?

Humor, Work July 31, 2009

Challenged

“A problem of type 2094 has occurred…what the [ahem] is that?! What are the two thousand ninety three other problems I skipped to get to that one?!”
-Eddie Izzard

A spectacularly dull day at the office, livened only by the laundry run. At which time a bundle of clothing was handed over to us all clean and neatly pressed, but without a name attached because it’s owner had forgotten to put the order sheet with his instructions in the bag with his clothes. Fear not, citizens, Lt. South’s name was discovered on the tag, much to my unholy glee.

Small Dog finds a tiny degree of joy in her technological impaired-ness — Small Dog finds a tiny degree of joy in being technologically impaired

Other than that, my Outlook account for work decided to blip out of existence yesterday. Thinking it was something to do with the new software our department is bringing online, I let it go, but today it was still out. I put in a request with IT, but when the techies did whatever it is they do and Outlook reappeared…it was without my emails, projects, calendars, contacts, or distribution lists. The only thing that makes me blissfully undisturbed by this is the fact that it’s twenty minutes to five and I don’t have to deal with it until monday.

Small Dog Syndrome