I’ll try not to make this too long but I don’t think that’s possible.
Summary
I got spoken to very harshly today by my office’s managing partner about a situation at work. While I did nothing wrong, the perception was I was unable or, and even worse, unwilling to assist a secretary in procuring loaner equipment for last-minute travel.
Detailed Story
The managing partner’s secretary calls while I’m the other line. I couldn’t click over so she had me paged. I email her to tell her I’m on the other line and to ask what’s up. She replies to tell me she, a group of attorneys and two other secretaries are traveling this Friday and will need loaner laptops. I ask how many she needs and she says three. I advise her I only have one, but would be willing to configure it so that multiple people can use Outlook – the primary reason they need a laptop. She replies saying she definitely needs three. I advise her to complete the loaner laptop request form on our firm’s intranet for the other two. At this point, I have to leave me office to do check a backup server in our LAN room.
In the space of fifteen minutes, the secretary has emailed me to tell me she will complete the form but the last time she did that no one saw it or responded to it until it was too late. She says she was also told she has to call and email the team that configures and sends loaner laptops whenever she submits a form. She also emailed me to ask a question about the form. As I was not in my office and T-Mobile’s experiencing severe delays with data relay, I did not get the email messages on my Blackberry device.
While I’m out of my office, the secretary has me paged. Before I can respond to the page, two other people have me paged; the office manager and another partner with whom I’m working on a completely different, but time-sensitive, matter. I call the office manager back, who had me paged from my office, incidentally, and she says she wants to talk to me about the loaner laptop ‘issue’. I tell her I’ll meet her in her office. I call the secretary back, but it goes straight to her voicemail. I call the other partner back who paged me and update him on his issue.
I go see the office manager and she wants to know why the secretary who’s requesting loaner laptops has to complete a form. I advise her that’s the procedure. She asks if I can complete the form. I advise her I cannot. She than asks if she can complete the form. I advise her I don’t know, but she’s more than welcome to give it a whirl. She asks where the form is and I direct her to it on our Intranet. She then asks if I can call to the team who deals with loaner-laptop requests to see if they have the requested number of units. I tell her to call them, put the call on speaker phone and I’ll see. We call, get no answer and have a member of the team paged. While we’re waiting for her to respond to the page, the administrative partner walks in, closes the door, tells the office manager to mute the call she’s on lays into me.
He asks me if I told his secretary to ‘fill out a form to get a laptop’. I tell him yes, I did direct her to complete the necessary form to request the two laptops I didn’t have to give her. He tells me that she called the loaner laptop team to request the laptops and her request was denied because secretaries don’t get loaner laptops. She then called the Administrative big wig (pretty much as far up the admin latter as you can go) to tell him she couldn’t get the laptops. He tells her she doesn’t know why she’s getting this run-around and he’ll take care of it. He tells me about a minute later she got a call back advising her the loaner laptops would be configured and sent this afternoon. He tells me that I’m not the one scrambling to make hotel reservations, I’m not the one trying to make last-minute travel arrangements and I’m not the one who’s going to have to work over what should be a vacation weekend. He tells me I should not have directed her to complete a form and that I should have been the one to make the calls to get the loaner laptops squared away. Furthermore, it is my job to make sure that last-minute loaner-laptop requests are taken care of from now on.
At first, I explained to him that the team that handles that request will not make a move to get laptops configured and sent without having the form completed. He cuts me off and tells me millions of dollars of fees are at stake here and his secretary doesn’t have time to sit and ‘fill out forms’. I tell him that’s the only way that team will complete the request. He cuts me off and goes on about how I should have been the one to get this done, not his secretary. When he was finished I said nothing but gave him an ‘is that all’ look and walked out of the office manager’s office. She, by the way, said nothing during this whole thing.
When I got back to my office there was a flurry of email messages about loaner laptop request and who was handling what. In every single one of them, the secretary was advised they needed her to complete the form.
I called my husband to tell him what happened and he was livid. He says I need to send an email to my boss (the asst director of IT) and cc the office manager and managing partner advising them that what happened was not my fault and that I should not have been spoken to in such a manner for following procedure and doing my job. Furthermore, I wasn’t even given enough time to respond to anything as I wasn’t in my office. Also, this isn’t the first time the managing partner has spoken harshly to/yelled at me about something that wasn’t my fault.
As to what I think, I’m torn. On one hand I feel as though I should just let it go. So he’s under a lot of pressure and saw me and unloaded. True, that’s not exactly kosher and it did piss me off but it’s not like he called me a racist or sexist name. People get yelled at everyday and I’m not thin-skinned. He’ll get over it and so will I. Plenty of other people will vouch for me and think I walk on water. I go above and beyond my job description and get things done.
On the other hand, this was not my fault. I didn’t drop the ball. I asked the secretary to complete the form because that’s what she’s supposed to do. It is her job to reserve supplies for her attorneys and, in this case, herself for travel. I wasn’t even given enough time to do anything about anything because this all happened in the span of fifteen minutes. Other people who are configuring the laptops told her the same thing – they need her to complete the form. Why should I be thought of as unwilling to lend assistance when the heat was on? I told her what she needed to do to get the ball rolling. Based on the bad reputation of another team, she called, was denied and then escalated it until the matter was resolved in her favor. I don’t want this to reflect on my review. My husband seems to feel this guy yells at me (I’d say he’s raised his voice to me about five times since I’ve been here) because he feels he can. He treats his associates this way, too. Every female associate he’s had working for him has left the firm.
I understand what the perception is and I also understand that perception is reality. I recognize that being told to complete a form seems asinine when they just want a couple of damned laptops. However procuring laptops for travel is, indeed, the job of the traveling attorney’s secretary. The last time a group of attorney’s had to travel last minute to a different continent (!) the loaner laptop team wouldn’t even begin to configure the laptop until they had the form. Once the form was submitted, I stayed in the office until 9 o’clock that night to ensure once the laptop came it was configured correctly (that team has a bad rep of half doing things) and the people using it were given a crash course.
Oh, and one more piece of the puzzle. As a child, I was abused physically by my step-father. I only bring this up because my husband seems to think that I assumed a lot of the blame for the abuse and that this carries over into my situation with this partner. While I have no problems defending and standing up for myself at work, I’m a choose-your-battles kind of gal. This guy, however, is very much like my step-father, physically. It bothers me that he intimidates me as I’ve learned to be tough and strong. He’s just like him, though, in that he doesn’t want to hear what I have to say, turns red when he’s yelling (well, raising his voice, really) at me, cuts me off while I’m talking and then walks away when he’s done, even if I’m in mid-sentence.
Question
So, I should just let this go, right?
