Friday, November 05, 2010

Oh, now you try to put your foot down?

So this happened:

Earlier today one of my coworkers brought over some mail that had to be returned to sender for various reasons. The majority of this mail is actually stuff received by a different department, but they are too lazy or stupid to be able to multi-task answering phone calls and typing on the computer at the same time. You see, sometimes customers misread the letters we send, so they send payments that should go to one of the counties to us and those have to be sent back. This task had been ours when I started, but we eventually got our boss to send it to the department this mail is actually addressed to. That was two months ago.

Over the course of these two months, we have been hearing a lot of grumbling from this other department about having to do this work. Whines like, "This is lot more work than I was told." Slowly, we have started to get some of this work back, largely because my boss still has this horrible people-pleasing problem. It's an issue I've counseled her about on several occasions and she makes tiny steps forward, but then someone pouts or whines or has a little hissy-fit and it's back to "I just want people to be happy" land.

So today, this other coworker brought this stuff over to me and I couldn't bite my tongue. I sent over a ranty email to my boss about how we have enough on our plate and don't need to be doing the jobs of others. She sent something back about how the person in this other department who does these is on vacation, so we're covering. I noted that we have TWO people out of the office and we aren't getting any volunteers from them (or any other department) to cover our asses.

A few minutes ago, I got pulled into a little meeting in which she says basically, "I don't like getting complaints about workload from people I see on Facebook all day." Ooooooooh, snap! You might be thinking. Well, no. Because as I explained to HER, "I can sort mail, enter over 100 record requests, AND cover the front counter all while typing up this whole blog and still have extra time in my work day." Response? None because she knows that shit is true.

I hate to bitch about my job in a time when I'm fortunate to even have a job, but this shit pisses me off. It's fine if she wants to be a yes-person, but then she needs to be the one doing the work she said yes to. Don't sloff it off on us just because you think you know something about how much time we spend on the Internets. Shit, she doesn't even know how much time I spend playing on my iPhone.