…Especially if you’ve been the boss for the past** six years.**
Last month, in a cost cutting move, our school district started taking postage meters out of schools and departments where the cost of the lease wasn’t justified. So, off I toddled to the post office to grab a roll of stamps for the rare instance we mail an actual letter, design a fancy-schmancy Excel sheet to keep track of where the stamps all go, and I’m all set.
Now, my normal procedure for mailing anything is to write the letter, packet or what have you, hand it to my secretary, who is just dying to do something secretarial for me - she’s busy with other things and I feel bad asking someone to type a letter I’m perfectly capable of typing myself.
But today, I have two letters to mail. Got them typed, figured out how to print envelopes on the big-ass Ricoh print/copy/scan/toaster oven/x-ray machine, and stamped said envelopes, making sure to document on my Excel sheet what I sent and to who. (whom?)
Then I got stuck. I have NO IDEA where to put an envelope here that needs to go out in the US Mail.
:eek:
I know the mailman shows up sometime around noon, but does he grab stuff that we leave in a special spot to be mailed? We have an in-district mail truck that makes the rounds a couple times a day, and I know that the district office has a big bin that gets to the post office everyday. Does it go there?
Turns out that yes indeed, that’s exactly where it goes. In the inter-school mail place, where Mr. Van takes it to the Admin Center, combines it with all the rest of the outgoing US Mail, and drops it at the post office downtown each afternoon.
I am head of technology for a major name pharmaceutical facility. I never even applied for the job and got hired in an emergency situation right before last Christmas. I can do the fancy parts of my job because that I is what I consult for. However, I never got any real training and it is a secure facility so we aren’t supposed to talk to people that much. I just have an office by myself. I have no idea how to mail anything either. The one time I had to do it, I just went to the post office during lunch rather than beat down doors to get someone to tell me. I also have no idea whatsoever how to get any office supplies. I have the ones that the person that had my office before me left but after they run out, I am screwed. There must be a way to get some because everyone else seems to have stuff but I’ll be damned if I know what that is. I just swipe unclaimed things I see laying around to keep me going but I have caught other people stealing stuff from me when they thought I wasn’t around so it may just work in a big loop. I can probably come up with a bunch of these. I have been here three months so it gets more and more ridiculous to force someone to tell me these things so I just plug along waiting and watching for an epiphany.
LOL! I feel your pain! There comes a time when it’s just too late to ask. Then you have to survive a long stretch of torture until it becoems too late not to ask. At that point your only choice is to hire somebody new, and assign them to figure it out.
Please hold while I transfer your call. I’m fairly confident that my process is wrong and that when trying to transfer the call I disconnect the party. That’s why I always give the tranferring number.
No one ever explains how to use the phone system, nor is there ever a manual. And the buttons are often labeled cryptically if at all. So I’m never quite sure how to do anything more than answer or make a call - like how to transfer a call to another phone, or how to make a PA announcement.
For the past six years, a CRITICAL, ALL-IMPORTANT part of my job has been to make sure that anytime someone has a question about about Product X, we log it into the Product X Tracking Tool.
Tomorrow is the last day that the Product X Tracking Tool will be in existence – they’ve been phasing it out, and at the end of the month, it’s gone.
I have logged into the Product X Tracking Tool exactly one time, six years ago, for my Product X Tracking Tool training. I couldn’t even tell you what my login is, I couldn’t tell you how to work it…hell, I couldn’t even tell you how to find the tool – they changed the URL years ago, and I never updated my bookmark.
And they wonder why I’m mildly cynical about new internal product launches.
I’ve been here for almost 10 years, and I still don’t know the names of half the people on my floor. It’s a big newsroom, to be fair, but it’s still embarrassing when someone says “Take this proof over to Bob,” and I have to say, “Er, which one’s Bob again?”
I find many symbols confusing, but I’ve never understood how the greater than/less than symbols can possibly be < obvious. The big side of the symbol points to the big number - it really is that easy!
