office drama – Page 4

Fireworks

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Feb 252013

So the boss said I’m to start doing payroll for his other company, and new girl is to start doing payroll for a few of our clients.

This morning Freda*, my sort-of supervisor, sat us down to show us how to pay 1099 vendors (since that’s part of what we’ll be doing).

As we were going over it, Queenie happened by and noticed us.

My friends, she was livid. She went off on a little tirade: payroll is her responsibility, the boss told her to show us how to do it, does Freda have no work of her own to do, Freda thinks she knows everything and Queenie knows nothing, et cetera, et cetera.

Freda is not at all intimidated by Queenie, but she was placating and conciliatory in an attempt to defuse the drama bomb. “Sure, Queenie. Boss told me to show them, too, so I was showing them. You go ahead and take over.” She vacated the room, and Queenie sat down and walked us through the 1099 vendor payments.

The rest of the day was reasonably quiet.

If I hadn’t figured out by now that our drama stems from a turf war, I think this would have clued me in.

*Not her real name.

So Much Drama

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Feb 242013

The drama level at work has been unusually high the last couple of weeks. Allow me to share some highlights (for obvious reasons I’m not using their names):

One afternoon Queenie, one of the ladies in payroll, had cross words with Sparky, our office admin. I was on the other side of the office doing invoices for the new company, and when I got back Queenie, Sparky, and the boss had all gone.

Toward the end of last week, there was a similar kerfluffle with Chalina, another of the payroll ladies. Again they got the boss involved. Again, I missed the details by virtue of being on the other side of the office at the time. I’m liking this new gig more and more.

(After this one, my quasi-supervisor went into the boss’s office and said, “Boss, I’m very annoyed with Bertha.” He gave her a horrified look. She laughed and said “Just kidding.”)

Now, all unintentional, I’ve gotten the drama going again. When I came in on Monday, someone had clearly been on the computer I use to log in to the new company’s books. Internet Explorer was open to some flash game site, the antivirus program had popped up a warning that it had intercepted a virus, and there was a piece of paper in the trash where someone had stamped all over it with my various business stamps (return address, check endorsement, etc.).

Obviously someone’s kid had been playing on the computer. I know sometimes one of the ladies will work over the weekend, and have to bring a kid along for lack of babysitting, so the kid will play games on another computer while she works. But I was worried about them playing on the only computer that has access to the new company, especially if they’re going to games that trigger malware warnings. I didn’t know whose kid it was, so I sent a note to the boss letting him know what had happened and what my concerns were. I figured he could just make a general announcement not to let the kids play on the company computers any more. (Don’t get me started about the policy on passwords for the computers.)

Instead, he told my supervisor lady to put a lock on the door to the office. There wasn’t a general announcement about it, so everyone else was surprised to see the new lock on the door, everyone is quietly asking each other what’s going on with the lock, Queenie thinks it was my supervisor’s idea and that it’s a personal statement on her trustworthiness (turns out it was her kid, who had always been allowed to play on that computer in the past and no one had mentioned that the policy had changed).

So this time I didn’t get to miss out on the drama, unfortunately. I guess instead of e-mailing the boss, I should have asked around to find out whose kid it was—although I was also concerned it might be a recently-fired employee.

For some reason I thought that an office with fewer than twenty employees would be less prone to drama. Shows you how little I know of the office world. And the new girl and I are just trying to keep our heads down and stay the hell out of it all.

Office Drama!

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Sep 012010

A new year is starting in churchland. The preschool classes are starting up again, the fall classes and activities are getting back into gear, the Wednesday night suppers will begin in a couple of weeks, students are signing up for the music lessons. And a whole new crop of people are rotating into the stewardship committee—the church equivalent to a board of a directors.

Both the people who oversee me are being replaced. Our new finance officer is the sort who jumps in and takes charge. She’s got a copy of the financial reports from the last stewardship meeting, and she e-mailed me a long list of questions about them. I spent last week, off and on, researching answers to those questions—I only started a month or so ago myself, so I’m still learning what went on before I got here. Many of them I had to ask Cricket about.

I didn’t mind it a bit; part of my job is, after all, explaining the financial reports. And answering all her questions gave me a better understanding of how everything was set up. Before I left Friday I e-mailed her with responses to all her questions. I expected I would hear about several of them again; they involve budget overruns that are going to merit some investigation.

And I did; Monday morning I got another e-mail from her, asking if she could come by on Thursday so we could go through the bills and insurance policies together. This time she copied the office manager, the associate pastor, and the new church treasurer on the e-mail.

Well. I’ve got nothing to hide in my office (other than confidential information about staff and church members), and normally I’d just remind her that I can’t stay past 1:00 on Thursdays because I have a class at two. But as I mentioned before, the new year is starting in churchland, and this week we’re swamped in the office. All those classes and programs and events require registration and records and bookkeeping of their various fees and tuitions. The end of the month brings its own set of tasks that must be attended to, including the newsletter that typically takes us a day or two to put together.

I didn’t have to say anything, though, because the next e-mail in my box was from the church treasurer. His opinion was that they should look over the questions and my answers at the next committee meeting, and put their heads together as a group before we start digging through the old bills.

After that I just sat back and watched the e-mails go by. There were only a couple more exchanges, and nobody got shrill or testy, but she was unmistakably frustrated at being balked in this manner. The last one I saw yesterday was from the treasurer, saying we had enough to do in the office and repeating his stance that further investigation could wait until the next committee meeting.

Today the office manager and I got another e-mail, just a brief, polite note that she wanted to make sure it was still okay to come by on Thursday. I observed that she did not copy the associate pastor or the treasurer this time.

Finally I got into the discussion again. I told her this week really won’t be good for the kind of intensive research we’ll need to do (particularly if she wants to go over the insurance policies), because of the aforementioned swampitude. I pointed out that we’re going to have to consult Cricket, and Cricket will be charging for her time, so we want to make the most of it and not try to do this when we’re distracted by other issues. And I offered to scan in the bills for some of the items in question so I could e-mail them to anyone who wanted to pore over them in detail. I also reinstated the associate pastor and the treasurer to the recipient list.

About an hour later the new treasurer phoned. “That was a good response!” he exclaimed.

“Wasn’t that diplomatic?” I replied. “I put a lot of thought into that one.”

We chatted a bit, he asked if I could send him a couple of reports, and we hung up.

It will be interesting to see what’s in my inbox tomorrow. I’m just way more entertained by this whole thing than I should be; I can’t wait to meet this lady.

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