BerthaBlog

Last week I worked overtime. Generally, the Boss has a policy that we are not to work overtime, because he doesn’t want to pay the time and a half. If someone winds up going into overtime, it gets distributed as vacation time rather than as money. I don’t really want more vacation time, so I haven’t worked any overtime hours. I keep track of my time worked in a spreadsheet (because I’m a geek like that), and am careful not to exceed 40 hours per week.

A couple of weeks ago Freda was out sick. As a result she got behind and needed me to work some extra hours to help her get caught up. She talked it over with the Boss beforehand, and got his approval to pay me in money for the overtime. So last week I worked about seven hours of overtime, helping her get caught up. Yey.

Monday morning we had a bit of a row. The time clock is connected to Queenie’s computer, and she prints the time sheets, so she saw the overtime. And she had also gone over 40 hours, frankly because she makes a lot of mistakes and spends a lot of time fixing them. So she turned in her time sheet for overtime payment as well. And Freda explained to her that the Boss was still giving her vacation hours instead of money for her overtime, and I was getting money because we had cleared it with him ahead of time. It was the Boss’s call.

So we had some stupid office drama going on Monday, because Queenie is convinced it’s Freda’s doing somehow (because she perceives Freda as her main competitor in the power struggle to be Queen Bee of the office). Of course, Queenie could always talk to the boss about getting approved for overtime pay, but she knows she’d get turned down so she just steams about how we’re getting preferential treatment. And Freda doesn’t care if she grumbles, and I don’t care, so Queenie basically spends a few days being worked up and agitated while the objects of her ire go on about life unaffected. It must be very frustrating for her.

I was out of the office pretty much all of last week. The doc-in-a-box assured me that, although it might feel like strep, it was not, in fact, strep. I spent the week subsisting almost entirely on hot and sour soup, and popsicles. I slept on the couch so my sniffling, coughing, and bitching wouldn’t keep Alpha Geek awake.

All of which is just to let you know that a week went by in which I was not reading the office e-mails. All the interesting stuff was waiting for me Monday when I got back.

E-mail from the boss, to everyone: He’s noticed that some of us are spending a lot of time on the internet doing personal things. He had hoped we’d cut it out, but we didn’t, so now he’s installed monitoring software to keep track of how much time we spend on non-work-related sites.

My first thought: is it me? I do keep a tab open to my personal Gmail account throughout the day. But I also keep a tab open to my work Gmail account with Second Company. And now and then I do check the local news site to see what’s going on with the weather.

New Girl apparently sent a reply to the effect of, “Sure, you’re the boss, that’s your prerogative.”

Boss replied, to everyone except Freda: “Actually this was just meant for Freda, she’s the one I think is spending too much time on personal internet stuff.”

O_O

Okay.

I don’t want to be the office snitch, or get myself involved in shit if I don’t have to.

But.

I really have a problem with this style of management. If I’m doing something wrong, I would prefer the boss tell me—me, specifically and individually—”Hey, I don’t like you doing this thing.” A general e-mail to everyone is going to leave people thinking “I don’t think I’m doing this thing. It must be someone else.”

I’m thinking I should give Freda a quiet heads-up about it. Probably it will be obvious I’m the one who said something to her, because we work pretty closely together. And once I tell her, she will go talk to the boss about it. She won’t tell him how she found out, but it’ll be pretty obvious she heard from her little protégé.

But if everyone was saying shit about me, I’d want to know about it. And Freda has certainly been looking out for me while I’ve worked there.

Dammit, just when it seemed like the drama had all died down.