I am evil, hear me roar…

I was in a gooood mood today at work. Many of you know that this is normally not the case. What could possibly have brought this change about? Well, I’m glad you asked.

I have next Tuesday off in order to attend a lecture at Cal State Northridge. One of the authors I have been studying, Charles Rameriz Berg, is speaking in a Chicana/o studies class. I asked for and was approved to take this day off about a month ago today. As I was asked to, I coordinated this day off with my onsite supervisor before it was submitted to the accounting manager for approval. Both my managers have known about this day off for a month right? So, who will do my work while I am gone?

Because, while Mondays and Fridays are generally slow for me, Tuesdays are full of exactly one day’s worth of work with time to take my lunch and 2 state mandated coffee breaks. Wednesday and Thursdays I have an insane amount of work to complete in two days. So there is no way that I can do both Tuesdays and Wednesdays work when I return after my day off.

Enter my malicious sense of joy. I got a new manager about four months ago. It used to be that the accounting manager in my office oversaw Inside Sales (me) and that was about it. Since she left, they restructured accounting and changes her position to a manager for Inside and Outside Sales in this office and promoted the Outside Sales manager to the manager for all Outside And Inside Sales. Following me so far? I have two managers, one onsite and one that both my manager and I report to who is not in the office. They had promoted the Outside Sales accountant to the manager position here in this office and hired another accountant to perform his Outside Sales duties.

Needless to say, this was not a smooth transition. The old manager, whom I loved, left the week after I returned from my two week vacation in Italy. The new manager had never worked in Inside Sales. But he’ll learn, right?

Yeah... It’s been four months and I have been shouldering the majority, if not all of the Inside Sales work. Well, except payroll but I have never worked on payroll. Not even with the old manager. I could, if a bus hit both current managers at the same time, complete the payroll but it’s not really one of my duties.

Well, it was finally pointed out, by yours truly, that if I suddenly got deathly ill, there is no one who knows my job. At least not currently employed by the company. So my boss who is off-site said that today I would have to train my onsite manager to take care of my duties while I was gone.

Heh, heh, heh.

It was a fascinating experience this morning. My frustration all along is that I tell my on-site boss something and he either reverses what I just said or forgets. What do I mean by reverse what I said? Well, I run a report every morning and it has all sales on it. Not all the sales are for our department and I have to subtract the sales that were recorded from the other department to reconcile our revenue. My boss was taking copious notes and as he was reading his notes back to me, he said that he needed to add the revenue from the other department rather than subtract as I had just told him. And it was like this all morning. Half the time it was like I hadn’t spoken and the other half of the time, we had to go over it three or four times. This included the items that I trained him on months ago, before I went on vacation in October. Half of this stuff is NOT NEW. He has seen this before, he’s done this before. There was just no retention.

Perhaps I should take such glee in getting to order my on-site manager around for the morning. But I have been left on my own and gotten more and more work for the past four months with no assistance from either manager. At least my off site manager has admitted that she does not know anything about Inside Sales and our communication has gotten much better over the past few weeks. I think that she has learned that the best way to manage me is not to accuse me of not doing my job correctly, like the onsite manager tends to do, but to instead ask me what happened-what I think happened. Oh yeah, that happens all the time around this office. All the time. He asks me if I updated a file that links to the one that he is using. When I tell him I have updated the file. He asks me, “Are you sure?” Hold on, wait… didn’t I just answer that question? I tell him again that yes, I’m sure I updated the file correctly. He insists that it is not correct since the document he is using still isn’t correct. I take a look at the file he is in, and he hasn’t relinked the document to the current week’s file. I point this out to him and he still asks me to check to make sure I updated the file. I bite my tongue (no mean feat, considering how outspoken and opinionated I am) and go check the file. I call him from my desk and let him know the file has been updated and flip him off through the wall separating our offices. He thanks me, we both hang up and I take a deep breath and start counting the reasons I should not quit right here on the spot.

Multiple this scenario to at least once a week since October.

Yeah…I’m not cut out for corporate America.

DEAR LORD, PLEASE LET ME BE ACCEPTED TO GRAD SCHOOL THIS FALL.

I receive the first grad school notification at the beginning of next month.