Monday, February 27, 2006

Mid-Morning Rant

Sean's on deadline and struggling with a
"difficult" client, so I can't vent to him.
The people I would usually vent to in the
office are going through crap of their own.
So I am turning to the blog.
My retreat.
My outlet.
The welcome void I can stick my head into and scream at the top of my lungs.

Give me strength to deal with on man who can't yank his head out of the sand and another who's head is so far up his ass I can't even remember what his face looks like.

Huge apologies to my in-laws and other innocent souls who have come to read about Briar and are instead getting my workplace vitriol.

Most days I can handle a little ineptitude, tolerate apathy, but when you combine the two and twist in a bit of attitude and totally misplaced arrogance, well then my friends, you get me madder than VI Warshawski being called a bitch (Kathleen Turner, 1991).

So each month I have a program on the first Tuesday. I have a speaker that addresses something relating to working women. A few weeks before the event I send out postcards. Sean and I have long since dummy proofed the postcards, so that the "dummy" that I work with can't screw them up. Or so we thought.

This guy truly takes settling for "c" work to new heights. Once upon a time I had a mailing for all the new home owners in the area. The addresses that he gathered were missing towns, street numbers, zip codes.

He sent it out because, "That's how the addresses were given to me."

It's one thing having a 5 year old send a letter to the north pole, it's quite another thing for 55 year old man to send out 500 post cards to places like"

R. Smith
Western and Main
New York

So today, I see him in the production room cutting post cards and placing labels for the mailing for my March event. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

"Oh! What are you doing?" I squealed in a non-threatening, sing song voice. "I'll do that! Thank you for the help, but you don't have to do that!"

He said something like, "Oh, ok, we all do sticky-sticky here." I can't even open the door to how that irks me.

So I jumped in and started placing labels. After a bit he said, "Ya, looks like something must have happened with some of the labels. Got off track a bit or something."

"Oh? Well so long as it didn't mar the addresses we should be fine." I said, thinking that he meant just a few of the labels were maybe crooked.

No. Of the 15 sheets of labels, the first column of each sheet was missing the first 3 characters of each line. For example:

ne Walter
4 Blue Bird Lane
eau, New York 12803

"Did you save the labels that were cut?"

"Naw, they should be fine. At least the big ones like banks and what have you. Those should get delivered ok."

How is that acceptable? Like we just have money laying around to send out crap we know is going to get returned? And my programs can afford to have one of every 3 people invited, not even really be invited? Or, better yet, some of these women get these pieces and see how little care we take in presentation?

But wait, it gets better, the ones that didn't have messed up labels? Oh they were special too! Oh yes, they were mistrimmed so despite having a full mailing label, the message on the post card was missing two characters from every line.

I don't know what is worse, the fact that this guy just doesn't give a shit or that my boss will probably want to just do another mailing and not address the failure to perform any sort of quality control. We'll just go through this month after month, until I take the post card production away from this dinosaur.

It would be easier if I didn't care.

"Oh well, just spent three hours doing a mailing, half of which will come back as undeliverable and half of the half that actually got delivered will be unreadable. Better luck next time." But I don't operate that way. So I either go and tattle to my boss, confront the idiot, or handle it myself and try everything in my power to head him off at the pass next month.

Just take the extra work, you logical people are thinking. When does that stop? When do I stop taking stuff off of his plate. And actually, in this case, he isn't even supposed to do this.

He is just so incredibly unexceptional in everything he does. Just going through the motions. And he smells. Bad, stinky, cheap cigarillo and coffee breath, mixed with that inimitable odor of the unwell. Yuck. And he's a lech.


Well, gotta get back to these nifty post cards and labels. I have about half of the mailing I can salvage, the other half I may just take home and redo by hand.

Luckily, my walls here at work are plastered with lil Miss Briar pics.

Happy Monday.

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