office drama – BerthaBlog

New Person, but Maybe Not for Long

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Mar 052015

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.

More Work Craziness

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Sep 082014

A couple of weeks ago, the last of our original payroll staff put in her two weeks’ notice.

This particular payroll girl is the one that did over 50% of the payroll work. The boss hired one new person to replace her, then finally realized that one person wasn’t enough and has now rearranged the staff. Sparky, who used to be our receptionist/office administrator, is now doing payroll. The new girl that I was training has taken over Sparky’s old job. (But I still have to train her so she can help out when things get busy.)

Sparky and the payroll girl who is leaving do not get along. The payroll girl has told our boss that she will not be training Sparky, or have anything to do with preparing her for her new role. So Sparky is left to swim on her own with a very basic knowledge of payroll, and zero knowledge of the various specific tweaks that each individual client wants.

Long story short, now I’m training Sparky, too. Someone get me the hell out of here.

The Drama Continues

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Mar 142014

Speaking of drama with Queenie (she is often the source of drama in the office), part of the reason she is so touchy with Freda is that Freda really does know more about accounting, and when Queenie makes mistakes Freda will tell her.

It’s not that Freda picks on Queenie particularly; she tells everyone if she sees them making mistakes. I personally love that—I certainly made mistakes when I first started, being a newbie with little practical experience, and I welcomed feedback that helped me improve. But Queenie seems to feel threatened by it.

Last week Freda gave me a bank statement to reconcile. Five minutes later I brought it back. “The beginning balance is wrong,” I said apologetically. “I think Queenie’s deleted something.”

It’s been a problem for years. We simply cannot seem to get Queenie to understand that she must not delete transactions that have been reconciled. It’s not like you can do this accidentally; if you try to change or delete a reconciled transaction, Quickbooks will pop up a warning saying “That’s a really bad idea, ARE YOU SURE?” But she continues to do it, because she makes mistakes and doesn’t know how else to fix them. Then Freda and I have to go back and re-do whatever she fucked up, so she’s making more work for us as well as herself.

So Freda tried (again) to explain to Queenie that she shouldn’t delete reconciled checks. I don’t know what all was said, but for a little while Queenie was definitely raising her voice—to the extent that the Boss came out to ask what she was yelling about—and afterwards was muttering in Spanish for some time. She really doesn’t like it that Freda knows more about accounting than she does, it undermines her status.

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