Thursday, March 01, 2007

Do you do anything else?

'The Stickler' finally hired an assistant. Everyone in the office feels badly for whatever poor schlub ended up with the job, the person is either going to turn into some kind of terrible mini-me or be miserable, the chances of that person being happy and well adjusted and keeping that job are slim.
Anyway, 'The Stickler' has been interviewing for this job for ages, so I didn't really expect her to hire anyone any time soon. But the time has come, and she was poking around in the supply closet this afternoon, looking for stuff to put in the poor schlub's desk, bitching about how we didn't have the right size of paper clips -seriously! - we're up to our eyes in paper clips, but they weren't the size she wanted, "We really should have the smaller ones as well." You're putting together some stuff for a new employee's desk, is she really going to say, "Hey new boss, what kind of an operation are you running here, that you only gave me the medium and large paper clips!?"
Anyway, so that's how I found out that 'The Stickler' finally got her lackey. So I engaged 'The Stickler' in a conversation about what portions of my list of responsibilities the lackey would take on, 'The Stickler' listed office supply ordering and keeping duplicates of everyone's desk keys, and then looked at me critically and said, "Do you do anything else?"
It's not a big office, I put in a supplies order once a week, although obviously not very well since I let us run out of the small paperclips, the horror! And, I do know where the desk keys are, but I haven't actually touched them, other than to move them out of the way when I was looking for a good place to put my spare shoes in my desk. And yet, I can't say that I'm too concerned about having things to do after 'The Stickler' takes away these important responsibilities from my sparse portfolio of office duties.
On a brighter note, one of the people I dealt with earlier in the week wrote an email to say that I was, "helpful and courteous on the phone." How about them apples. Helpful AND courteous. Anyone who knows me must wonder if I have a split personality or if I've worked out some scheme where I send someone without a Social Insurance Number to do my job for me and I take a cut of their earnings, but no, it was really me. Although that cut of the earnings idea wasn't a bad one...

3 comments:

Tokyo Tintin said...

Helpful AND courteous? Ha! Next thing you know, you'll be claiming that people think you're friendly too.

Princess Pessimism said...

I find that you are usually helpful AND curteous...in a very assertive way.

Anonymous said...

Helpful AND courteous? Did you really grow up in our neighbourhood? Particularly the coureous bit!