Work was nuts today.
Today I received all the supply orders I have placed, starting with the first one (dated 1/8/07). All of them. At once.
These orders are not just for me. Oh, no. They're for all 10 units in our department. When I took over the supply ordering, I set everyone up with instructions, the departmental catalog, and custom-made PDF forms to make the process as painless as possible, and told them that I would only process orders during the first week of each month. Because the person doing the supply ordering before me was a little bit, oh, let's just call her "busy," when people heard there was a new person doing it, they all got right on it, and started ordering stuff.
So I got right on it and processed all those orders, and placed about 7 of them.
And today? All that shit arrived.
So I'm not sure if I've told you, but my counterpart - my co-worker - my boss's other secretary - well: she's a pack rat. This woman keeps everything (for example: when I first started she had just finished "cleaning" out some file cabinets for me. Most of the contents of her file cabinets were placed on the floor between our cubicles. This was in December. That shit is still there today. Anyway, one of the items was a disgusting old blue dish sponge. It was dried up and not really blue anymore. And that thing was sitting there about 2 inches outside of my invisible wall [if I were Less Nessman, I'd have masking tape on the carpet delineating my space from hers, but I'm not that crazy yet]. It was grossing me out. How old was it? What hundred year old goo had it wiped up? How much of that scuzzy goo was I inhaling with each breath? So? One day in a fit of grossed-out-ness, I threw it away. She never noticed). Anyway, her stockpiled crap left me no room in which to process all the 30-odd boxes, so I had to find another location.
That in itself was a bit of an adventure, because the office remodel started a few weeks ago, and things are upside down and crazy just from that. However, I was successful in bribing someone to let me use their office and their Student Worker (I gave her my bag of 10 baby carrots. She's in Weight Watchers too), and getting the boxes all unpacked and sorted was easier than I expected.
Anyway, I was pissed off before I even started opening boxes, because I got to see the original order that our procurement section placed with Corporate Express, and when do you think my almost three month old orders were placed?
March 23.
It's dedication like that that makes me... Oh, I can't even be sarcastic about it. It's just sad. Nobody cares anymore.
There was another incident today that's similar to this one... we need to order a special chair for someone, an ergonomic chair that her doctor wrote up a whole justification on, and this poor woman has been totally getting the runaround. Instead of ordering the chair like they're supposed to, the so-called "Health and Safety" office has informed me that they're not normally involved in "ordering equipment" for employees, and that this person's supervisor is supposed to do it. Well, it's a long story but to get to the bottom of it, nobody wants to do their job, and now my boss is involved, and she's pissed off. Order the goddamn chair already is my opinion, but of course that's not the way it seems to be working out.
So who do you think is going to order the chair?
The person whose job it is? The supervisor? Nope. A clerk who works in a totally unrelated section is going to do it, and I will have to sit in on the proceedings to ensure that if this happens again, I can do it too.
I mean, I appreciate gaining all this additional experience, I really do. But it kind of sucks.
