Kid, you’re new. That’s OK, we were all new once. Unlike you, some of us had real grown up jobs with paychecks and standards of conduct before this one, so maybe it’s taking you a bit longer to catch on. That’s OK, too. We have lots of patience.
Your boss, who is the manager of the whole department, told you to pass on your reports to a senior co-worker (a pseudo-mentor, if you will) for editing before you submit such reports to him (the manager). These reports are the most important deliverable that any of us are tasked with producing. Other people (like your boss) will use them to make decisions involving millions of dollars of the shareholders’ money. Sometimes, bad information can result in people getting hurt, expensive equipment being destroyed, or nasty environmental damage.
When your ‘editor’ tells you to make changes to your reports, it is because you are in error. He is helping you learn your job, and he is helping our boss by relieving him of editing duties, so he can go back to making decisions. Most importantly, your ‘editor’ is doing exactly what the boss asked him to do.
Nobody is ‘holding you back’ or ‘being mean’ to you. Having to revise your (incorrect) work is not the same thing as ‘doing the whole thing over again’, it is fixing your mistakes before turning in a finished product. Freshman composition class must have been awful for you with that attitude. Also, nobody is impressed when you corner them in their office or the hall and rant like a spoiled liitle girl about how the people helping you are ‘wasting your valuable time’ and that such waste is the moral equivalent of ‘stealing from the shareholders’. That sounds like the kind of resume-speak answer you’d give in a job interview. If it is just a bad attempt at impressing us, it isn’t working and if you really believe it, you’re very stupid.
You have an immense sense of entitlement and far too high an opinion of yourself. Your attempts at ‘playing politics’ in the office are laugably transparent. You are playing with people who know what they are doing, and if you keep it up they will crush you. You are running out of friends here. Sooner or later there will be one less pig at the trough and I’m perfectly content to let other people wield the hatchet.
Your young colleague does sound like a fool and the kind of kid who would annoy me.
I remember an intern. I had to explain to her the rules of using apostrophes – as in, you can’t just stick them in whenever a word ends with an s – and she argued with me.
On the other hand, I remember a time when a person senior to me did repeatedly waste my time by giving me round after round of edits on a document. (1) He wasn’t making corrections; he was changing his mind on word choice, mostly regarding things he’d written himself. (2) This was the kind of thing he should be handing to a secretary, whose work isn’t billed to the client by the hour.
Just popped in to say this thread generated one of the most insightful instances of sequential thread titles I’ve ever seen:
[ul]
[li]Sticky: Revised Forum Rules for the BBQ Pit: read this before posting[/li][li]Revising and ‘doing it over again’ are different things.[/li][/ul]
Oh, and your coworker needs to get a clue - when you’re new, and someone is trying to teach you something, you don’t push back - you sit down, shut the hell up, and learn. I predict she will have a short future in her position, with that attitude.
I had that same argument with a coworker. Only it was my LAST NAME we were arguing about. Yes, she actually was arguing with me about how to spell (or should I say punctuate?) my last name!
Well, really, why would you know how to spell your own last name? Holy crap, that’s the best misplaced apostrophe story I’ve ever heard.
In retrospect, I should have chosen a better title or stuck a [Workplace Idiot] on the end.
Do understand, these aren’t typos or spelling errors, these are factually wrong statements that have the potential to screw things up for the entire department.
I imagine she’ll eventually get shuffled to another group, not fired. More evidence that nepotism is always a bad idea.
Egads, I could start an entire thread on this guy. It would be my version of The Ron Thread.
This guy had me go back to not only change wording, but try it in different fonts, layouts, colors, and scratch and sniff odors. “Let’s see how the word ‘guarantee’ looks in arial bold on blue paper.” Each revision took me about 30 minutes. We went round and round on this for two days.