Sweet Caroline.
From a personal standpoint, I love my secretary. I really do. She’s a fantastic lady—sweet, hard-working, and congenial towards everyone. Most significantly, she’s never taken issue with respecting my authority. If I were her, having a boss half my age would be a hard pill to swallow. Having said all of these things, she’s really starting to bug me.
First off, she fucks stuff up. I’m not your ideal stone-caster: at best, I can be acceptably thorough; at worst, excessively sloppy. So attention to the finest detail is not my strong suit. But in addition to that, I routinely have to fix shit that, for whatever reason, my secretary doesn’t do properly. I have a hard enough time reining in my own incompetence, having to audit her work product should not be first on my list of things to do. For instance, today she typed up one of my letters on someone else’s letterhead. I almost missed it. Had it gone out, the client would have learned—correctly, as it were—that I’m a doofus.
Second, she’s very sensitive. Not sensitive in a bad way, meaning that she isn’t easily embittered by real or imagined slights. Rather, sensitive in that she really, really just wants to do a good job. I am a fairly mellow person and usually non-plussed by screw-ups. But I was pissed with her yesterday, the day that my federal appeals brief was due. She farmed out my table of contents and table of legal authorities to word-processing. I fault myself for not seeing the oncoming shit-storm, word-processing is a collection of nit-wits. Their final product was pretty crappy and my secretary, who isn’t really down with the automatic TOC/TOA generating software, couldn’t fix it. I eventually hijacked someone else’s assistant and she got it done. Throughout this whole process, my secretary felt chastened because she cares about what she does, but had to watch someone else finish her job off. Today she came into my office and tried to discuss. I was not particularly interested in hashing things out with her because: (1) it’s done with and I had no hard feelings; and (2) I lacked the patience to hold her hand, or in the alternative, the assertiveness to take the opposite route and tell her how I had really felt.
Third, she doesn’t knock on my door before coming into my office; this is inconvenient at times, particularly when I’m having phone sex with strangers.
First off, she fucks stuff up. I’m not your ideal stone-caster: at best, I can be acceptably thorough; at worst, excessively sloppy. So attention to the finest detail is not my strong suit. But in addition to that, I routinely have to fix shit that, for whatever reason, my secretary doesn’t do properly. I have a hard enough time reining in my own incompetence, having to audit her work product should not be first on my list of things to do. For instance, today she typed up one of my letters on someone else’s letterhead. I almost missed it. Had it gone out, the client would have learned—correctly, as it were—that I’m a doofus.
Second, she’s very sensitive. Not sensitive in a bad way, meaning that she isn’t easily embittered by real or imagined slights. Rather, sensitive in that she really, really just wants to do a good job. I am a fairly mellow person and usually non-plussed by screw-ups. But I was pissed with her yesterday, the day that my federal appeals brief was due. She farmed out my table of contents and table of legal authorities to word-processing. I fault myself for not seeing the oncoming shit-storm, word-processing is a collection of nit-wits. Their final product was pretty crappy and my secretary, who isn’t really down with the automatic TOC/TOA generating software, couldn’t fix it. I eventually hijacked someone else’s assistant and she got it done. Throughout this whole process, my secretary felt chastened because she cares about what she does, but had to watch someone else finish her job off. Today she came into my office and tried to discuss. I was not particularly interested in hashing things out with her because: (1) it’s done with and I had no hard feelings; and (2) I lacked the patience to hold her hand, or in the alternative, the assertiveness to take the opposite route and tell her how I had really felt.
Third, she doesn’t knock on my door before coming into my office; this is inconvenient at times, particularly when I’m having phone sex with strangers.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home