Hey, if you need a cheat sheet, providing yourself with one is a good thing. Did she need to use it all the time, or only during moments of deep filing narcosis?
I’ve worked temp filing jobs. In the beginning it was: open correct file drawer - search along tabs until you find the gap. The scary thing was that, after a few days, I would open the drawer and just SEE the gap. It saved a lot of time.
I mentioned it once to my youngest son and he said that when he was in the army, the exact same thing had happened to him. It’s not something that either of us could do right now. We’d have to re-immerse ourselves. But it seems strange that we can both do it. Especially since neither of us like filing all that much.
Is it some common zen-of-filing thing that just doesn’t get talked about much?
I hate filing. It’s the worst chore of office work. Especially now that the powers that be are implementing a new system which will involve more file folders. Ugh. (Each residential property had four folders: owner correspondence, contract/taxes/insurance, tenant, and payables, + strata if applicable.) It was easy to file things: strata minutes went into strata, paid invoice into payables, email from owner into owner, copy of insurance… Now we’ll have seven files for residential properties, including Contracts, Contractors, and more. Doesn’t make sense to me.
Anyway, my to-be-filed goes into the third tray of my inbox. I have a nice, cheerful bright yellow smiley-face taped to the bottom tray. My goal is to have that smiley-face either visible or only covered by 5-10 items.
There are a multitude of reasons I avoid the HR department.
We once had a girl come in to apply for a job and when asked to step into the personnell directors office (a woman) her boyfriend wanted to go in. No, actually, he insisted. Thankfully, the applicant was told that if she couldn’t interview all by her self then they had very little faith she could work all by herself.
I worked for a placement agency. We hired geeks. We had a 6 page, tiny font form that listed possible skills in IT. It was grouped into areas. When we had someone that we knew was a coder apply, I would have to explain to them that they were expected to finish that form in less than 10 minutes, that it was just an overview for us, we didn’t need extreme detail. I found this out after I led one into a little room and he didn’t come out for 3 hours.
We just hired a guy who forgot to list on his application that he is a sexual offender (lewd/lascivious on a child under 15). Oopsie! I can see how that can slip your mind.
I think that the meticulously made hamburger guy might be really, really good at filing. I filed documents under A, I filed documents under B, I filed documents under C…
I, too, would have applied to that job ad. I do like filing. You get to put stuff away in a logical order, neatening things up, organizing stuff, you get to use those cool plastic flappy alphabet things - what’s not to like? It’s very zen.
I’ve often thought of weirding up my resume a bit. I’m not completely normal, and I would thrive in a company that also isn’t completely normal. I’ve always held off, though, because everyone says you’ll never get hired if your resume shows any personality at all.
The only really weird thing I can think of is the guy who had a cover page on his resume. Not a cover letter, but a cover page (the resume was bound). On the cover page, he had drawn a full-body self portrait, in pencil. And his drawing skills appeared, to me, to be those of an elementary school student.
I’m sure this, as with many of the weird things you see on resumes, are a misguided attempt to “set apart” the subject. They hear “make your resume stand out” and then think that a hand-drawn self portrait on the front page is a good idea.
One of my friends was a Personnel Director when a CV arrived including the fact that the applicant was a champion disco-dancer.
It got him an interview!
Ow ow ow. You just brought up a flashback to my time working with the County Assistance Office with a woman who printed out the alphabet on a sheet of paper and posted it in the file room. And she had been working there for 8 years !
I usually think the “Hobbies and Interests” section of a resume are a waste of time, but someone applying as a programmer here put “Rubic’s Cube State Champion, Louisiana, 1987.” I was intrigued enough to give him an interview. And, yeah, he was pretty cool, in a nerdy sort of way. He got the job.
You would choke if you saw our system, I think. It has seven folders for permanent administration files, fourteen for ephemeral administration files (for each year,) individual (permanent) folders for each unit, and twelve folders for annual accounting files.
Depending on the size of the property, it can take anywhere from two to four drawers of cabinet space. We have more than two hundred properties. Mwahahaha. A good system for a small company, but it doesn’t scale up, eh?
I met with a fella yesterday about implementing a document management system where almost everything is scanned & destroyed. If it works, it will free up about 30% of our floor space as we get rid of all the paper.
I have taken over keeping the records at the grooming shop up-to-date. My coworker is working on getting a computer setup so we can put the files on there and life will be SO MUCH EASIER. Previous employees have apparently not either learned to write legible English, or to learn the alphabet, or to even bother to look and see if there’s already a card on that dog because there’s three of them, in different handwriting that they obviously made instead of bothering to look to see if there was one already. And my boss hates paperwork, so she made the cards my job.
I can’t wait until everything’s ready and I can start putting all of them into the computer and I won’t have to search through those damn cards every day anymore, but I admit part of me rather enjoys getting them straight. They’re in much better shape than they were when I arrived, anyway, though I’m not done with 'em yet.
I once had a job for a few months as a general office-monkey. My main duties were feeding hundreds and hundreds of junk-mail letters through an envelope-stuffing machine and filing. I, too, experience the filing zen. It can be rather soothing when you get into a groove.
And someone at a temp agency said that they once got a resume where someone listed as a qualification that they’d managed to avoid the immigration authorities for several years.
!