A whole office full of Tin Knickers clones? Could it be possible? I didn’t like to think so but I am beginning to believe I could be wrong. Here’s the saga!
I needed to get a large batch of student handouts copied, we’re talking about 4,500 copies of various things, the level of copying that would take me days and annoy everyone else in the office because I’d be tying up the copier for ages. So I took it all down to Central Printing and asked them to do the job. The process is that they take the work, give me a quote while they do the job, and I get a purchase order signed by our finance people who will then pay for it. Seems quite simple, right?
When the quote arrived, I transferred the information to a purchase order form and sent it to the finance office. There are three people involved here – Sara (the office manager), Sharon (the assistant divisional manager) and Marie (the finance person). I sent my PO to them, then I get an email from Sara saying that she’s sending it back to me because it has no signature and no account codes. I look puzzled, because I’m working from the copies of POs in the file for last year and not a single one of them has either a signature or an account code.
So I ask Shiny New Boss if she has the authority to sign things, but she says no. Then she thinks about it and says that it might have been Sharon. I email Sharon and ask her if she signs my PO stuff and if so, could she let me have the relevant account codes so that I can get it sorted out. She replies that she doesn’t sign them, and it should be either Judy or Sara! Well, Judy has already told me she hasn’t got signing authority, and Sara was the one who sent it back to me in the first place complaining that it had no signature.
Hmmm…where to go next? I decided to ask Marie, as she’s technically the “finance person” and once again requested account codes and advice on signatories. Marie says that since I work for SNB/Andrea, it should be one of them who signs for it and they should be able to tell me the account code. I already know SNB doesn’t sign them so I rang Andrea – she’s the assistant educational manager in Primary Care which is the sort of sister dept to Public Health where I work.
She rang me back to say that she doesn’t sign them because it’s got to come from a Public Health budget and she’s only responsible for Primary Care budgets. Anyway, she said she’d speak to The Office and see what she could sort out with them, after agreeing that it was getting very silly.
This morning she rang me back to say that since it was teaching materials, it comes from Public Health’s central budget and it was Sara’s responsibility to sign for it. This being the same Sara who claimed it wasn’t up to her and she didn’t know which account to use. Today, I waltzed up to their office and presented Sara with the PO, complete with funky account code…and she signed it without even batting an eyelid. Oh, and then she asked me to pass it to Marie, who sits across the office from her.
I have a feeling this combination is going to be the new TK! I wonder what we should call them – any ideas?