Fucking Martyrs May 24, 2005 ~ 12:16 pm
Posted by Julie in : Daily Grind , trackback
Discarded iris bloom, Upper West Side.
I have spent my past week dealing with passive/aggressiveness at it’s worst. We’ve got a woman in my office in her late 60s, who is a classic passive/aggressive personality. In fact, that’s what I’m going to call her for the rest of this post. P/A. Because it’s also short for Pain in my Ass.
P/A is a thorn in the collective side of my supervisor and I. P/A misadvises students, spends inordinate amounts of time on the phone with students (I can get a student off the phone in roughly 2 minutes, all their questions answered. P/A takes 5 minutes, often 10 to do the same thing.), asks the same stupid questions all the time and when you respond that you have told her the answer previously, she says “Oh, I didn’t hear that.”
I have been waging what I’m now referring to as “The Battle of the Phone” with P/A for months now. I’ve talked about it before, but it’s getting worse, so I’ll refresh your memories. She doesn’t seem to understand proper phone etiquette. When she takes a call and it’s for someone else, she just says “You have a call on line 1.” Doesn’t ask who is on the phone, what it’s in reference to, any of that. Just tells me I have a call. Strike one. I deal with anyone from students, to professors, to deans, to the president’s office on a daily basis. I need to know who I’m talking to and what it’s about.
She also doesn’t take messages. As in, I am on the phone with someone, you can see that I’m occupied, you take a message or have that person call me back. No. Last night she literally stood around at 4:45 while I was on the phone with a student, with one finger raised, so that I would “know” I had a call on line 1. Actually, she looked like a kid who has been taught to raise one finger as a sign to their teacher that they have to go to the bathroom. I put my hand over the receiver and told her to take a message. I proceeded answering my student’s questions about Commencement. I got off the phone about 3 minutes later, and P/A actually asked me “Do you want to take this call now?” I shit you not. I looked at her and said “Did I, or did I not tell you to take a message? What do they want?” She said, “He wants to know if he can go to Commencement.” I replied, “Well, print out the graduation information screen, take his number, and explain that I will call him back after I hear from Student Life.” (Student Life is in charge of ticket distribution.) She whined, “I don’t know how to print out that screen.”
Bitch has been working here for 25 years, the past ten of which she has had a computer and been able to print. Strike two. I lost my temper. I said, quite tersely, “P/A, I have told you all week to print out that screen, and you have been doing it. This is not new information. Furthermore, I should not have to teach you phone etiquette.”
My supervisor was in the room for most of this, and after P/A had left for the day, we had a little talk. In the past, when we’ve had problems with P/A, we’ve written memos explaining policy. That way, she can’t say “Oh, I didn’t know,” because it’s on paper, right in front of her. You guessed it, this morning I had to write a memo on phone etiquette. Strike three.
This morning, after I typed said memo, distributed it, and discussed it with the staff, I was in my supervisor’s office for a while, discussing Student Life and Commencement, and P/A comes into the office. “You have a call on line 2.” I looked at her in disbelief because I had seen her reading the memo, and said “When I’m not in the office, you can take a message,” in the politest voice possible. She wandered off, and I came back into the office a few minutes later. Two minutes after that, my supervisor came in and said “Julie, the student somehow got transferred to my office.” We both turned to P/A, and I said “P/A, why would you transfer the student after I told you to take a message?” P/A’s response? “Oh, I didn’t hear you say that. I thought you said transfer it.” WTF? Strikes four through nine zillion.
This woman only hears what she wants to hear and does what she wants to do. She’s got a great persecution complex going, telling all the other women in the office that my supervisor and I “pick on” her. You’re in your sixties, woman, grow the fuck up. We don’t pick on her, but invariably when there’s a problem, it turns out she’s behind it - we’ve got a file an inch thick of her fuck-ups. I can’t stand martyrs, or people who play at being martyrs. And I also can’t stand when people act like children when they are far, far, FAR past that age. I get along really well with kids, you can ask Rick’s girls. What I don’t get along with are women older than my mother acting like they’re in kindergarten. Get over yourself, P/A.
Six more work days till Commencement and my trip back to Pittsburgh. Let’s see if I let her live that long.
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