Secretarial Peeve Du Jour

The BBQ Pit
1

Today my peeve is people who send us mail with multiple pages, with each individual page all nicely folded up separate from the other nicely folded pages. For example, an eight page invoice has eight individually folded pages. I have to unfold each page individually, instead of just unfolding the lot of them at once. I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason for them all folded separately (namely, they get folded that way on the printer and just all shoved into an envelope), but it still slows down my mail opening.

Also, what’s up with the trend to staple everything in the middle of the top of the page? Multiple pages are stapled in the top left-hand corner; that’s just the way it is.

Any other office personnel out there with peeves of their own?

2

I could make my own thread!

Most of mine are hospital-related so I won’t bore you but one of the more annoying ones is when people call and you ring them to the department they requested and they get voice mail.

Then they call you back and say, “I don’t need voice mail–I need a human. Find her for me.” Like I have some freaking Bat-Signal for each employee in the place.

Also, I hate when people send mail addressed to “Mrs. Charles Smith”. I mean, it’s the 21st century, people!

And how confusing would it be if we listed all female patients by their husband’s name? We’d get medical records for husbands and wives confused all the time.

“We gave you your high blood pressure medicine, ma’am. What? You don’t have high blood pressure, your husband does? Well, sure enough, look at that–it says Mr. Charles Smith right here, not Mrs.. Silly me!”

3

When we purchase big-ticket items, we must fill out purchase requests and justifications. But once a year, we are able to request large items that aren’t our usual type of purchase (like replacement office furniture, or computer items).

The first time this happened after I started working here, my boss requested a new office chair, among other things. While she was at a conference, I was asked to provide a price on the chair.

I work for a state university, and all our furniture (campus-wide) matches and is bought through the same vendor. I knock myself out trying to get this info (it’s not on the vendor site or in our catalogs). I finally call the campus purchasing office and get the price.

When I submit the price to the secretary (who was the one who asked for it in the beginning), she asks where I got the info. After I tell her, I get written up for calling purchasing without permission. This is my favorite part: the secretary had the price the whole time… I was supposed to give her the model number and ask for the price.

So help me, this woman has a date with a sockful of grapefruit!
(I’m sorry if that’s hard to follow… but it still burns me up – 2+ years later. I do a lot of secretarial tasks, too, but this woman lives to get others in trouble – she works for one of the big cheeses)

4

Oh i could start my own FORUM with SEVERAL Threads, but here’s just a sample:

Where I work, we have a monthly Board Meeting that I am required to attend to take the minutes. I am also required to help the Prez of the company (I’m his admin) prepare various spreadsheet reports to distribute to these members. And without fail, month after month, (I’ve been here 2 years) he waits until the last possible minute to approve the changes to each report. Leaving me about 10 seconds to print copies for all the attendees. {When I asked him, on more than one occassion, if we can start preparing a little earlier for the monthly meeting, he scoffed and said “I’m a postponer, it’s my nature. Deal with it.” Oh, he’s a treasure.} I am always late for the meeting, and the other members never fail to take notice of that fact since they can’t start until I’m in the room. Thankfully, after this long, I’ve come to terms with looking like an incompetent ass in front of them.

But dont get me started on what HUGE BABIES these men are! “I forget my legal pad, do you have a spare?” (said by the same guy every month, and then he uses 4 pages of the pad and steals the whole thing.) “Be a dear and get me a Caffeine Free Diet CokeTM” Um, NOT a restaurant, pal. If I wanted to be a waitress… “Where are the cookies?” We used to have cookies for these meetings, but when they stated no one was getting raises because our profits were too low, I decided to stop buying them. My reply: “Well, you’re so conerned about our expenses, I decided to cut that one.” I used that reply for about four months in a row, adn then The Prez relented and made me start buying them again. I can’t get a raise in two years, but you fat-cats enjoy those !@&^%#&! cookies. I hope you choke.

Mostly, I grin and bear it. It’s better than dealing with the brain-dead public masses any day. Here, at least I have my mangeable number of brain-deaders that never changes.

5

I so hear you on the multiple, individually-folded pages in one envelope – tres annoying!

I’ve long considered starting just such a thread, myself – thanks for giving me an outlet for the following 2 gripes…

I understand that not every business or individual uses the same style and size checks. However, especially in today’s more technological office environment, I’m sure there are plenty more than a mere handful of offices who print their checks through an accounting/bookkeeping software program such as Quicken. Therefore, I have to assume that a very, VERY large corporation would know that they get lots and lots of checks that are 8½" wide x 3½" high and at least make a return envelope to accomodate checks of that size. Yeah, yeah, it’d be nice but certainly isn’t necessary, I know. BUT… don’t give me an envelope that’s exactly 1/16" too short and 1/16" too narrow for a standard printed check, or worse, one designed to accomodate a personal check, and then tell me on the outside of your waytoodinky envelope, “do not fold check”! How the hell else am I supposed to get it in there?

Also, what’s UP with so many companies now making the outside flap on the BOTTOM of the envelope? When I sit with a stack of mail and a letter opener, there’s a method and a cadence to slitting the little buggers open. It completely throws me off (and annoys the ever living shit out of me) to have to stop, twist and turn the damn envelope around and figure out how to open it. ARGH!

Petty, I know, but there you go.

6

I once had a boss who was frightened of his computer. So the procedure for sending an e-mail was:

Boss calls you into his office, asks you to print out the following e-mails (or gives you a handwritten note, with dates and subject headers of e-mails).

Print out e-mails. Give to boss.

Boss hand-writes replies on the bottom of the page.

You type out replies, save draft, print, show to boss for proofreading.

Boss makes corrections or approves e-mail, at which point you can send the draft.

My goodness.

7

Wow, I think I’ve found my new home - this thread.

First of all, I totally agree with your envelope venting, Shayna.

My pet peeve (today) is as follows. We’re having our Annual Shareholder’s Meeting tomorrow afternoon. Last week my boss comes to me and asks me (since we have no secretary, and no receptionist anymore - I’m the accountant) to make copies of the Script for the meeting for the Chairman. I say “Should I wait till closer to the actual meeting, in case there are changes?” “No, there won’t be any changes,” he says. HAH!

This morning, there are changes. Now, I’ve wasted 140 pages of paper printing out the script, and all the resolutions that the shareholders will be voting on, and I’ll have to re-print them all when I get clean copies from my boss. Which will be tomorrow about 10 minues before the meeting starts. <sigh>

I’ll have more venting to do tomorrow, but I just got a really awesome performance review, and I don’t feel like slagging him too much today. :slight_smile:

8

This just reminded me of a Dilbert comic I saw:

Dilbert: Why haven’t you responded to my email?
Boss: My secretary is out sick, so there’s no one to print my emails for me. Bring me the message on hardcopy.
Dilbert: I chiseled my email onto this little pyramid for you.

9

Oh, I could rant about this for hours. I work with 2 women and 20 men - the men are mostly on the road and think the women are their personal secretaries to handle their house closings, moving companies, and anything else that strikes their fancy. Never mind that we have an entire office to run and 350 car dealerships to handle.

One in particular is about to get smacked by all three of us. He does ANYTHING humanly possible to make us look bad in front of the big guy. Case in point, we do personality surveys to get an idea of what prospective job candidates personalities are like. I score them with a computer program, and then get them back to the appropriate person. If it comes from a dealership, I write the dealership’s name on the finished product and place it in the file. Yesterday, he came in swearing left and right that I’d received surveys from one of our dealerships, not a normal dealership that usually does these. I told him that I didn’t remember seeing them, and that if I get it from a dealership, it will be LABELED. So after going through my file, he starts bitching that I need to put it in the job code on the program so that it prints out instead and if I’d done that, one of the blank ones would probably be for that dealership. And he chose to bitch about it right in front of my big boss - the guy who signs our paychecks. So they went to lunch and I was left looking like an idiot. I have never messed up one of these surveys or not been able to place it with a dealership - so I was steaming.

Two hours later, I got a call from the owner of the dealership who said that he’d forgotten to fax the surveys to me last week and he was doing it now. I called the asshole who’d reamed me a new one and did the same to him - I got an “Oh. Okay.” and hour later, but no apology.

If I fuck up, I will take full responsibility, and if you are polite and pleasant to me, I will go to the ends of the earth to get you what you want - but if you try to make me look bad, expect me to make your life living hell if you want something from me. And since he’s pissed off all three of us in the office to this extent, he’s fucked - no one wants to be nice to him or do anything for him anymore. It was absolutely delicious to hear the office manager tearing his ass apart on the phone this morning.

My other big pet peeve is just when the dealerships send in their paperwork for the month and keep EVERY copy except one - which leaves me with one less copy to send to the company. It’s no big deal, I can make copies, but when I get 30-40 of these a day where I have to get up and make copies in addition to everything else I do, it’s a little annoying.

Ava

10

Oh, I’ve worked for so many people who don’t know how to use a computer, it doesn’t even surprise me any more.

What does bug me is people who - apparently - don’t know how to use a copy machine. I once came back from an hour lunch to find an “extremely urgent” photocopying job (approximately four pages) on my desk. If it’s really that urgent, Boss, you know where the frigging Xerox is!!!

11

I once had a job (with engineers, no less) where they would walk right past the photocopier to hand me one page to photocopy. Talk about “Not in my job description!” I worked one three-day stint with lawyers, once, and I will never, ever, as long as I live, work with lawyers again. I have never been treated like dirt under someone’s feet like that before or after. (Standard disclaimers about lawyers and engineers, yadda yadda yadda.)

I was going to mention the upside-down envelopes, Shayna. What the hell is going on? Is it too much freakin’ trouble to have the openings of all the envelopes on the same side? I have one account that uses these (government, of course), and I have taken to turning their envelopes upside down in the pile before starting the opening so it doesn’t screw up my opening rhythm. And don’t get me started on the people that staple their cheques through the envelope so I have to remove the staples first.

I tell you, if secretaries ran the world…

12

I received two customs invoices from the shipping company DHL yesterday. They included the following message:

“Please use the new payment address located on the bottom of the DHL invoice. For your convenience, enclosed is a payment envelope to mail your check with the tear off payment coupon.”

So I obediently wrote my checks, tore off the payment coupons, put them in the provided envelopes – only to discover that the address showing in the window of the envelopes they’d provided me for sending mail to THEM was MY address! The idiots had printed THEIR address in the top center of the payment coupons!

What rocket scientist in purchasing figured THIS one out??

I won’t even start on lawyers. I worked for them two separate times, once for two years, another for three. The second time I actually worked for NICE lawyers, KIND lawyers, lawyers who treated me well and supported me in what I needed to get my job done and the whole nine yards…but the stuff that goes on in a law firm still has to be experienced to be believed.

This is my new favorite thread!

13

Oh, and after I typed up my last post and sent it, it occurred to me: Why would DHL tell me to use the new payment address if they’d provided me with a window envelope that their address was supposed to show through???

I think maybe I need to write a note to their president and point out this idiocy. Save them several hundred thousand dollars, probably, in unusable supplies. Think they’d give me a cut? :smiley:

14

What I want to share in no way compares to what you all deal with, but they’re definitely some of the reasons why I’m determined not to end up in office work.

My first clue was when I did temp jobs for a summer. My first position was working for a very old lawyer whose longtime secretary was away on vacation or something. What drove me nuts was that he expected me to know exactly how his office (which was in his house) was run, that I was supposed to keep a log of such and such, that the mail got taken out by the secretary at the end of the day, blah blah blah. He made me feel so stupid that I quit after 3 days (nevermind that my agent hadn’t told me how long the assignment was for).

Nothing beats when he was dictating a letter, fell asleep in the middle of speaking, and I thought he’d died.

15

Ohhh, I could spout off for years about the people I work with…and there are only 7, myself included.

Number one annoying thing (at the moment anyway): The coworker who gives me her petty work to do. “Find this paperwork for me”, “Such and such customer doesn’t have a file yet, you should make them one.” (When I didn’t, she wrote it on their next order and left it on my desk.)

I was behind with my filing, two weeks actually. Yesterday I got the chance to catch up. What did I find underneath my stack of filing? HER filing. Hell no. I gathered up all of her papers and filed mine, leaving hers behind.

Damn she’s lazy. Must stop typing…I feel a really long rant in the making.

~J

16

Afraid of the computer?? How about having the PA print something off the internet/email etc and then FAXING it to different department??:rolleyes:

17

Let’s see, what else.

My boss comes out and will hand me a paper, point at it and say “We need to make copies of this, and we need to change this word, and we need to send it to so-and-so” I always feel like saying “We do, do we? If you want me to do it for you, tell me, don’t be all wishy-washy about it!” This alone would cut our conversations in half, because I spend half my time trying to figure out what parts he wants me to do, and what parts he will do himself.

My other complaint about envelopes is really lame. (I mean, really. I could totally remedy this, I just don’t bother) What’s with the crappy tasting glue on envelopes? (I know, I know, I could get little water bottle thingy, or a sponge, but they leave my desk all messy … )

I know of a (female) boss at my former company who had her admin reconcile her checkbook, pay her Visa bill, and pick up her dry cleaning. First of all, you’d think a female would know better than to treat an admin like a badly treated wife (!?), but that really borders on “Personal Assistant” realm, not “Executive Assistant.”

I had to laugh at the boss who was scared of the computer - not at the pain you had to go through, cowgirl, I would never laugh at that. At my last company, the girl who sat next to me apparently didn’t have enough style and good grammar knowledge to write her own e-mails. She would get e-mails, draft a reply, her boss would read them over, and re-write (as often as not, the whole thing was totally re-done), and only then could she send out e-mails. And this was her e-mail, not the boss’ e-mail. But since she was the representative of the boss, the boss felt well within her rights. <sigh>

One of my old companies got a free trial of a new coffee machine, a one-cup system. There were little containers of flavoured coffee, and you put it in the machine, and presto, one flavoured cup of coffee. Of course, all the engineers just loved this little machine, and traipsed the full length of the building to get a cup. However, the free trial ended, and no one wanted to give it up. So, $1,000+ a month later, all the engineers are happy till we start having to let people go because we’re running out of money. But can they give up the little coffee machine, no! I was so mad at the Purchasing Agent who agreed to this free trial. We all told her just what a bad idea it was. “But, the first one’s free!” Yeah, that’s what all the good drug dealers tell you.

Or, (and this will be my last one, I swear!) just this last week I got put into an awkward position. The VP of Engineering blew off a conference call with the VP’s of our two Sales Regions, and the CEO! 'Course, they’re calling me looking for him, and he just keeps telling me that he’ll call them back. One of the VP’s actually said to me, “What does that mean?” Umm, I think it means that HE’LL CALL YOU BACK! Sheesh. Anyways, he finally ends the meeting he’s in, and disappears, so I have to run around the building looking for him, because the CEO is on the phone. My goodness, what would I have been able to say to him if I couldn’t find the VP of Engineering!?

OK, back to the hell that is my Wednesday … (-:

18

Oh, oh, I remember another one - at the last job I was at, I mentioned Secretary Day to my boss, and he thought taking me out for lunch was a great idea - then asked me to book something for it. Funny how I never got around to booking my own damned Secretary Day lunch. (Yeah, I know, it’s a free lunch and all, but I hated all the booking work he made me do that was never part of my original agreement when I started working there.)

19

OK, that is pretty bad. I mean, it’s like saying to someone “I’m going to get you a gift, why don’t you go buy it, give it to yourself, and then thank me.” Uh no, it’s Secretary’s Day so that the secretary doesn’t have to do all the crap he/she normally does! That sucks, featherlou.

20

OK, I thought of another one too. Although this is more a story of how anal I am. But it’s kind of about how peeved I get at others too.

I have to file all the cheques once they’re paid. A lot of different pieces of paper from various departments get attached to the cheque before it gets to me: the packing slip from Receiving, the Purchase order from Purchasing, the approval sheet from the manager, the invoice, the duplicate invoice the company sends, etc., etc.

Everyone will staple their one piece to the next piece in line, and by the time it gets to me, there’s 7 staples in the bloody thing. I can’t my staple through the entire package, because apparently you can’t staple through staples. So, I have to take all the pages apart, and take out all the other staples, and put it all together again. I really wish more people would use paperclips, but they just don’t understand.

Also related to this are people who don’t staple things squarely … you know, one of the pieces of paper will be sticking an inch above all the rest, or a corner will be sticking out one side. (And this is really where the anal comes in) I have to have everything square before I can file it, so I have to take it all apart, straighten it up, and re-staple it. <hangs head in shame> I know, it’s horrible. But, but … people just don’t understand that I can fit so many more pieces of paper in the files so much neater if everything is straight, really!