While I Was Out

On our way to the credit union this morning, Grace filled me in on what happened at work while I was gone.

Grace and I complained that Cindy's music was too loud/too distracting for us to work, so Cindy got herself a pair of headphones. Grace didn't have to listen to the music, but Cindy's toe tapping and singing along proved a new annoyance. When G needed to ask C something, she'd have to go into C's office to get her attention--C couldn't hear G calling to her. How can anyone concentrate on work with the tunes cranked that loud?

Last week was Administrative Professionals Day. As usual, the party planning fell on the Closeout Group's shoulders--and they pulled together a pizza party with only two days to plan. (I'm not sorry I missed this).

Grace also mentioned that our Academic Part-Time employee, Kathy, got a job at the LA Times and had given her 2 weeks' notice. This is blow to our little group--and puts more of a burden on our supervisor.

Kathy was the Subject Matter Expert in Oracle data entry. We used to have a full time person doing Oracle data entry; when she went out on medical leave, my old supervisor, Ken, and the new APT Mayra filled in. When Mayra left, Kathy took over--with the programmer, Yvonne, Grace and our section secretary, Socorro, filling in on the days Kathy was at school. Soco is out on medical leave until late July, leaving the team short.

What was really needed: one full-time person and a backup to perform the job. Instead, there's a patchwork of people, each with an incomplete knowledge of the entry process. Now, The Powers that created the scenario in which a transient, academic part-time worker performed critical data entry into our financial system now has to reap what was sown.

In another alarming decision, the same Powers have decided that detail-averse Camilla is going to take over the Oracle data entry and the new APT will be trained to do the document scanning. Lordy, I can't think of a worse move. Oracle is unforgiving and errors are complicated to fix. Data entry errors and the operator who made them have high visibility in the system.

Despite the regular demonstrations of C's ineptness with daily chores like photocopying and distribution, her poor performance after she took over the scanning and her frequent absenteeism, the Powers are assigning her more demanding work. Good luck with that!

And again they'll pay the piper for it. I'll be around just long enough to see the train wreck--and be glad that the cleanup is Not My Problem.