BerthaBlog

Boss hired a new person to come in two days a week to do SecondCo’s administration and bookkeeping. I think he’s trying to separate the companies more.

I’m not sure she’ll be doing it for long. I spent the last two Mondays and Friday basically holding her hand and walking her through all the tasks I do—even though all my tasks are extensively documented in a binder. She seems to have a basical familiarity with computers, but not the degree of casual comfort she needs to be doing remote sessions and copying files back and forth from a remote machine to a local one (I’m not entirely sure she understands that the remote machine is a separate entity on the other side of town). She seems very flustered and nervous, too; I don’t know if that’s a personality thing or if it’s because she knows she’s floundering.

Tuesday morning she called in to apologize for not turning the computer off when she left. I was more concerned that she hadn’t gotten all the Monday invoicing done (she had spent most of the day answering emails, I finished up the invoicing Tuesday).

At this point I’ve really done as much hand-holding as I can. I can offer occasional assistance if she’s really stuck, but she needs to be able to do the job or not so I can get back to doing my own. I’m planning to make sure she understands that her priorities are payroll and invoicing, and most of the stuff in email can wait until those are completed.

I hope she can make it, I’d kind of like to hand this mess off to someone else to deal with.