Ah…the passion of the new employee or new temp with all those ideas…so refreshing, yet so makes me throw up in my mouth.
How ironic. I once WAS her. So helpful, so eager to convince everyone how smart I was and convinced beyond measure that they'd never seen anyone so talented as I.
She's on the phone right now explaining to Supervisor why we get so many calls looking for the wrong number. In order to preserve my anonymity, I can't really talk about what these callers are so excited about, so we'll just call it the latest widget.
We have this website and the website has no phone number to call about this widget. For a good reason. Let's just say we want a certain caliber of 'customer' for this particular widget and we can be very picky about who gets to use the widget. Whomever we pick to use this widget needs to be able to get through the process of signing up for the use of the widget all by themselves. There's no tech support. And many of the people interested in said widget are what I like to call 'lowest common denominators'. Remember that term, hereinafter invoked using the acronym, LCD.
So the LCDs who are interested in the widget look at the website, see that there's no phone number to call, and they decide to cut to the cr*p and call the first 800# they see where a live body answers the phone.
When this widget came out, Twiggy was driven to distraction by the callers. It was a nightmare. We worked long and hard to find out where these calls were coming from and how to stem the flow. Meetings galore we held. Twiggy constantly lamented about how these meetings didn't do sh*t to help. A year or two later, Marketing finally figured out what to do to take care of it, and since then, the phones have rung so much less, it's almost boring compared to the previous widget frenzy.
Enter Nitpicker. We know how much Nitpicker desires to please and get approval, right? She's just dying to strut her stuff, probably because she's bored stiff, bless her heart.
So ever helpful Nitpicker the Temp is trying to explain to us unknowing serfs where these calls are coming from and what they want. And she's so nice to the callers, whom she often explains that the website we have will explain everything. Actually, she seems to desire to pick fights with the LCDs. And she almost succeeds a lot of the time. Frankly, all she has to do is give them the right 800#, hang up on their sorry a*ses, and then let God sort it out. But no, when a new employee is left with nothing to do, said new employee will manufacture work somehow, and so she has.
I used to ferret out new work too, until I got tired of rearranging newspapers and magazines, filling the copier, monitoring copier supplies, cleaning out the collateral room's endless boxes of 1990s junk that no one feels empowered to just dump in the trash, etc ad nauseam. Then I became the slacker you see before you, who no longer is too solicitous unless a project actually rouses interest. IE does not include performing work that I consider to be stealing from janitorial's feelings of job security.
After all, I couldn't possibly do such a thing...
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