flatlined, there are several flavors to “This is not my job” which range from “I don’t want to do it” on one end all the way up to, “This requires specialized training and equipment to be performed safely, none of which I have.” I think you’re a few pegs past the further end of the scale.
Absolutely stand your ground. And please continue to vent here. We’re rooting for you.
Dear Partner, One of Four Attorneys For Whom I Do Work:
Please keep in mind that you are one of the four attorneys for whom I do work.
Please also keep in mind that when you get rid of two associates and a paralegal, the remaining staff are not going to be able to turn out work as quickly as they did when they weren’t also taking on the caseload of the people who aren’t here anymore. Yes, that includes me.
Please keep in mind that when you and the managing partner of the practice group tell me to manage the caseload of the associate attorney who is behind on managing his caseload (when I asked whether I had just been appointed this attorney’s official Jewish mother, the response was affirmative), and has been for the 5+ years he’s worked here, and you tell me to make managing his caseload a top priority, this necessarily takes time that I would otherwise use to other, billable work that you (and don’t forget about the other 3 attorneys!) have assigned to me.
The above task, which has festered for years, isn’t going to be completed instantaneously once you assign it to me. This is, in part, because the attorney in question and I also have other work to do, some of which is quite time-sensitive.
When I spend time managing the associate’s caseload, it is really freaking annoying for you then to constantly nag me about when I am going to do the other work that you have assigned to me. You know, the work I told you I would have to put aside to be official Jewish mother, which is what you just told me to do, remember?
I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’d like to think I’m pretty good at knowing which tasks are actually urgent. Example: a court-imposed filing deadline within 48 hours is, in fact, urgent. Nagging, for the 5th time, a client who hasn’t provided preliminary information for a green card application that doesn’t need to be filed for more than a year? Not quite as urgent. If you think otherwise for some reason, please enlighten me.
It’s pretty freaking passive aggressive to tell me to write a weekly report of the tasks I’m working on so you can help prioritize my caseload if you’re going to ignore the 75% of the report that consists of work I am doing for people who aren’t you (see above).
No, I don’t have a small child at home. However, this doesn’t mean that I am willing to ignore the rest of my life and blow off any commitments I have outside work because you think something is urgent when I know damn well it’s not. If I wanted not to have a life, I would have gone to law school and been making a lot more money. You know, like you are.
If I wanted to be a Jewish mother, I would have had babies.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! [/New Darth Vader]
My boss, who heads the tech department, just told me that *his *boss, the president of the company, thinks me and my position ought to be in the marketing department.
Oh dear god please no. Not marketing. Not marketing. Seriously. You would hate me in Marketing. I’m a total tech geek! I swear!
(runs off to write Master Plan to promote self/self’s position as 100% techie)
Dear Mrs. Boss: Please shut up, go away, and let me do my godddamnedmotherfuckingunderpaidoverworkedblanketyblanking job. Just leave me alone and shut up. You’re not helping when you jump in to “help.” Really, that rooming list, room assignment, and billing for tonight’s group would have been a 20-30 minute job had you not tried to “help” with something that you have no freakin’ clue about. Instead, it was 1.5 hours of hell, with you moving my paperwork, questioning my every move, and even re-keying rooms after I had assigned them. REALLY?!
Also, nonchalantly taking my coupons from my Sunday paper? “Oh, I just need these sales papers…” Yeah, that was kind of the final straw. I hate you.
And Mr. Boss? I’m really sorry that I’m gonna quit as soon as I have another job, but your mother is a cheap, venal, clueless, meddling, obnoxious little witch. Also sorry that you have to put up with her - I would have long since emigrated or killed her.
Attention office ladies: not every shade of light blue is “Carolina [Tarheel] Blue”. Fuck off and mind your own wardrobes. I didn’t select my university (NC State) based on some stupid sports rivalry.
Update to the rat problem. Nothing has happened to the U-store place. I still refuse to go into it and there is a small uprising happening. Word is getting out to the owners of the boxes that there might be rats and concern is rising. Nobody is willing to allow me to borrow their office drones anymore. The head of Facilities has told the County Director that he isn’t going to risk his untrained people on cleaning up rat droppings.
I’m just a box tosser, I never signed up for politics and intrigue.
SG called in sick for the week. I was going to let that stand on its own, but suddenly remembered that there was no cutlery in the break area on Monday. Not only were the thrift store forks gone, so were the knives and spoons.
Thanks all for the support. You help me stiffen my spine. “No” is hard to say in a “right to work” state with no jobs around.
In other news, one of the IT guys managed to upset one of the elderly people who live on the other side of the alley. I don’t know what the story is, but I’ve twice seen a very old lady come out in her walker to hurl food trash over the fence at IT guy’s truck. Mostly, it hit the fence the first time, so she went back and got a broom, swept it up and flung it again. The second time, she just used the broom and managed to splatter his truck.
I’m not sure if I want to know what he did to tick her off so much. I’d probably be on her side and I’m pretty sure that flinging trash at a coworkers vehicle is forbidden. It being a government agency, I’ll bet that there are different rules about different sort of trash.
Go ahead and find out what she’s so pissed off about (if only so you can share the egregious details with us :D). If it turns out you ARE on her side, you can explain to her about what constrains you from joining the Great Garbage Toss. I’m sure she’ll understand, especially if you make it clear that you haven’t officially “seen” any of the garbage tossing…
What happened with those 300 boxes you had to move overnight?
1.) If they haven’t fired fucking SG, there’s no way in hell they’re firing you.
2.) “Right to work” doesn’t mean “right to fire you for *illegal *things.” One of those OSHA things I posted was about whistleblower protection.
This is awesome.
Concur. The only thing that would have upped the awesomeness is someone catching it on video and posting to YouTube.
{Hint hint.}
Unless I am mistaken, those are the ones which are rat infested.
I’m getting really ticked off today. There are two people here, TWO! it’s also budget time which means I went from month end to budget and haven’t done much else since. I have people asking for things and getting cranky because I haven’t done them as a higher power has the first dibs and I’m cranky because IT is all fubar and head office gets fixed before the other plants. If we still had a dedicated IT person instead of a consultant that does less than our old IT person I might be able to do more.
I also have class tonight and haven’t studied much because of working hard, and needing some downtime so I don’t have a headache that won’t quit and.. Dad called this morning as I got in to work. Great Grandma passed away last night. She was 102, so it was a long life well lived and not completely unexpected as she was getting frail, but still 
This is Carolina Blue.
This is light blue.
This is sky blue.
Carolina blue is darker than both of those. It’s closer to blue than light blue.
Pulling the “important” people off to second guess the work done by the rest of us while simultaneously needlessly pushing the crew to produce was demotivating enough in and of itself. Sending me a “You Suck” email with only three pieces of work that I mis-categorized out of the 300 odd pieces I completed last month was ignorant. Especially since I’ve been asking you for a process since 2007 that would help me avoid such mistakes. Ok you’re too important or whatever to write one? Fine I’ll do it myself. And yes, you did agree wholeheartedly with me that people are only as good as their instructions when I said this to you a month ago.
My “batting average” has dropped from perfect to .750 and it’ll probably go even lower. It looks like the non-flushers have come back from vacation.
Bri2k
Just getting caught up with this thread
That was totally unexpected. Yay!
Fuck.
Your boss is a mensch to warn you about that, and that’s only 3-4 weeks away.
Good for you.
Umm…that might be a bit hasty.
If ever there was a time, this is a time when that statement is appropriate. You were not hired to be bait for a colony of wild rats - that’s a different job description than the one for “government file manager” or whatever your official title is.
I eagerly await further updates on the tale of Flatlined and the Rats of Doom. I’m hoping for a chapter in which SG’s mangled and chewed body is found buried under a huge nest, in which the Queen of Rats is giving birth. You, being the person who discovered the Threat To Humanity, are awarded the keys to the kingdom and a lifetime supply of Rice-A-Roni. And a decent fucking job.
I read this as Rats-A-Roni the first time through. WTB horrified smiley.
Thanks for all the tips! Headphones are a great idea but a no-go for me as a non-avoidable part of my job is answering incoming calls. Thanks for suggesting it though. I like the humorous sign idea, and may put it in play soon. I did end up staying 3 hours late last night and hacked down the jungle of data entry uninterrupted. Now I’m in a much better place to be able to organize and knock off the rest of the stuff piece by piece. Today was much smoother.
A stressor I didn’t mention before is that I am going out of town for a work-related conference next week, leaving Thursday and not coming back til the following Friday, and I need to get a lot squared away before that. The silver lining is that I’m really looking forward to the conference itself and the associated visits to friends in the region I’m going to. So there’s a light at the end of my tunnel.
Flatlined, I am so, so happy to read about your staying strong. I’ve certainly had a few experiences in my working life where something so far out of line is what got me to the point where I could draw the line, leading to a better overall situation and this whole rat-pocalypse reminds me of some of them. I am rooting for you to have a similar positive outcome!
Maybe I should use this to create a color chart to post on the office bulletin board. 
Actually, I think Carolina blue is closest to the HTML Named Color ‘DodgerBlue’ – but they would probably get very upset to be told that.
See this chart of HTML named colors.
If you do that, I suggest using thisas the background.
