Work Venting

This has been an incredibly long week and a half. I have considered writing a handful of times, but have been exhausted most of this last week. The days have run together. It's this girl at work. She's awful in every way. She's the kind of dumb in which I'd prefer to have an actual box of rocks, because at least I could get some small hysterical entertainment out of shaking it and hearing the rattling. I feel shaking her might be frowned upon. I know I have limited patience anyway, but it goes right out the window with her rudeness to me as well.

Aja, the other chick in the office, has been out with this awful flu all week, so I have been the primary babysitter. So it is this woman's 5th week here and she still can't be trusted to do the simplest of tasks of my previous job, but we were kinda giving more chances because neither Aja or myself wanted to answer phones anymore. This woman is awful on the phones (telling customers "I can't help you" and "I don't know" or "why didn't you call your sales rep" - about every other call you hear this) and she IMs or yells questions for every call anyway. It's repetitive 1st-week type questions, and it drives me nuts and makes me think I should have just answered the damn phone myself, because I sure as hell can't get through anything on my desk without an interruption anyway. Wish granted yesterday when she decided to stop answering phones and signed out of the phone loop, so I signed her back in and she signed back out and I wondered what possible purpose could she serve yet again.

Besides the extra two hours every evening I stay to go over her stuff and fix things (this is in addition to checking every aspect of her work through the day, but she doesn't always correct what I tell her to), the outright doing of her job and struggling to do my own as well through the day, and the bedazzled phone of bad country music that I imagine chucking across the room... it's really the blank stares, the sighing, the blatant to my face eyerolls and the turn and walk away moments as I'm explaining something yet again. I lost it yesterday morning before 9am with a sigh and eyeroll and walk-away combo. The rudeness when she's the one screwing up equaled confrontation. Since she wouldn't even turn around when I asked her to come back, I felt I had to be loud enough to be heard as I told her "If you need me to point out where to find the terms that we use for 90% of all customers on the price sheet again, just ask, but rolling your eyes at me and walking away is not helpful." Sound carries remarkably well in our office and I find it difficult to believe that our CFO and CEO didn't hear that and I'm glad. So after Aja came back today and we compared notes and decided this wasn't gonna work, we walked over to our boss and she just looked at us and said "I'll put the ad back up on Friday". Sometimes I really love Laura for that, she said our CEO had already approved getting rid of her. Aja wanted to keep her another week, so she could catch up from being sick this week, but by the end of the day she asked if we could move the date up.

I feel a little bad about the situation because she left a permanent job to come temp for us in a job that doesn't offer much growth unless one of us leaves. But that's her own stupidity and she should have put more effort in. She's got three kids ranging from 19 to 8, but she's also bragged that she's recently divorced from a Rolla grad (she was a townie) and I can only assume that a UMR grad 20 yrs out of school is established enough to be paying a nice sum of child support and alimony. Lance, Rolla grad in our office, and I have been wondering how the hell a Rolla grad marries someone that dumb. Either she was a hot blonde 20 yrs ago rather than the bulldog look of now, or maybe desperation of a nerdy Rolla guy, or maybe a shotgun wedding because of the now 19 yr old son...?? I'm being mean, but I've also stressed a shit ton about this this week. I've tried to be nice, so it's not a "Tracy wasn't nice" thing, but then I realized I was avoiding the printer by her desk to avoid her rudeness, which I still don't get why she's been rude to me from the beginning. I've not been as nice as this post would have you think either, but I didn't start out that way.. Ok, at one point while she was telling me that I didn't know what I was talking about, I didn't say a word but pulled a reference page with the information and just held it up to her. When she snapped "I don't know what this says", I respond with "Try reading". After that confrontation, Lance just walked over and took my scissors away "For everyone's safety", which made me crack up.

Anyhow, hopefully we can move up her end date to tomorrow and I can relax better and not wish for Wine Wednesdays at the workplace. I know it's gonna be a lot more work, but I also feel like I am already doing both jobs and staying late anyway. Done venting about her, sorry, she's just been the biggest stressor this week as I've tried to not be too much of a heinous bitch to her.