I finally decided to offer to take the phones for Twiggy for a while so she can get some things done. It is 12pm and she still has not left for lunch, although my lunch hour is scheduled to begin at 12:30. She will probably leave (yup, it's 12:18 and she just left), get something and not come back for 30 minutes or so somewhere around 12:20. She goes whenever she feels like it.
When I offered, she said nothing. Not yes, not no, not thank you, nothing. I can tell that she thinks it is my duty to take the phones from her when she is swamped. Problem is, when I am swamped, I have not yet had the problem of turning down offers of help from Twiggy.
Am debating about whether to involve Supervisor in these phone woes. I probably will not, though, as what is the point and I don't want to be petty. Let me vent here and that is enough whining.
I always think long and hard before I report anyone for anything, even if others would not have a second thought about ratting on me. It is not their standard of behavior that I am aspiring to, it is my own. Any sort of audience I might have on this blog is probably thinking right now: standards? What standards? Yes, I do have standards, and one of them is not to mess with someone's living unless I have no choice; unless, like Adminzilla, they are a growing cancer in the department's side and I also won't do it without outside confirmation that no, it's not just me.
One time, I was in pretty hot water at work because I had made a big fat mistake. I was lacadaisical about returning some calls and it could have cost the company some serious money. It didn't, but it was bad, and the manager involved, we'll call him Mr. Persnickety, rightly assumed that it was but a symptom of a larger problem with me. And that problem was that I didn't want the task on my desk. I considered it a pain and a distraction from everything else I had to do. I think I may have written about it here.
It involved Mr. Leads. I was to handle his job while he was gone; and what that meant was taking lead calls and distributing them to the salespeople. During this crisis, I was very angry that no one would listen, that I was given a task for which I had not been given adequate training. And I was being treated as though all my other job duties didn't matter, as though my position was simply to print and to bind. I had to sit there and argue with Mr. Persnickety that even if that's all I did (and it's not; that would be more like the tip of the proverbial iceberg), those tasks are still part of the process of generating revenue, of making a sale.
And I was pretty unhappy with Mr. Leads for doing something that I viewed as having gotten me into this mess. More accurately, for failing to do something he should have been doing: providing adequate training. And then blaming me for acting incorrectly in the absence of it. Because I didn't have the knowledge I needed, I didn't have the confidence to successfully carry out what I needed to do. However, not all blame can be laid at his doorstep. I did make a mistake.
I was on the cusp of losing my job and I knew it. And I was so angry that I had a problem keeping it to myself. I had discovered, because I covered Mr. Lead's email, that he, a very married man, was having an affair with someone here at the company. I began to act evilly, telling people here and there that I knew were gossips about Mr. Lead's affair. I actually contemplated mailing a letter to his wife, I was so angry with him.
Luckily, I finally shut my dang mouth and I didn't take any actions. But I felt like a heel. And I still do, for spreading that vitriol. Mr. Leads has been nothing but nice to me and to everyone else around here. What he does in his private life is NONE of my business. And on top of that, I don't know his wife, I don't know the circumstances of his life, I know nothing, NOTHING whatsoever. One could argue that someone should be telling his wife; she could be getting exposed to all manner of things. But I am not the person to do it.
What is tackiest about it is that I didn't tell people about his affair because it was for someone else's good. I just wanted to get back at him; I was just being spiteful and ugly. I hate having done that. Perhaps he deserved to be found out, but I am still not happy with the way that I acted.
That is why you should always think long and hard before ratting anyone out about anything. You don't know what repercussions it could have, and you also have to decide if it merits ratting. You could be staking your reputation on it, both with the rest of the office and also with your own supervisor. No one likes a troublemaker employee. Offices exist not to nurture employees' emotions but to provide services, to facilitate processes and a working environment that contributes to the smooth running of the business; in the end, to making money.
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