Venomous Voicemail

Don’t you just cringe when you call someone on the phone and their voicemail greeting is: “Hi, this is So-and-so. Sorry I can’t take your call right now. I’m either on the phone or away from my desk.”

(Well, DUHHHHHHHHHHHH! It has to be one of the two!)

My dream voice mail greeting (that would get me fired) would be something like this:

Hi, this is Corey. I’m sorry I can’t take your call right now, but please leave a message and I’ll return your call when I’m good and ready, AND only if I think you’re worth my time.

If you have a question about someone else’s calendar, then please call them directly. What do I look like, a crystal ball? If you are a cold-calling vendor and want to sell something to our company, then just hang up right now; we don’t have the budget. If you wanna know about job postings, we don’t have any. If you only speak Spanish - sorry I don’t. So, ‘por espanol para una numero dos’ won’t do you any good, and stop pressing that #2 key already. If you need directions to our office, Google it. Don’t you know that’s what the Internet is for? If you’re calling to ask me to help you solve a problem, I know that if I don’t return your call within the next few hours, you will eventually solve the problem yourself. So why bother leaving a message.

Thank you, and have a nice day.

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP!

Postmortem Pot Luck

I live in Atlanta.

I work in an office full of women.
I live in Atlanta and work in an office full of women who like to cook.
(And so do I)

Over the past few months, we have had a few cakes for celebrating birthdays, etc. and four departmental luncheons. Luncheons, mind you, where everyone is asked to make something at home and bring it to work to eat. In the past few weeks, I’ve made carrot salad, a roast beef, potato salad and pumpkin cupcakes!

All this on top of the fact that someone is ALWAYS bringing in some homemade concoction every other day to share with everyone else (I’m guilty, too).

Today, we are having yet another luncheon – a hot dog luncheon, complete with all the fixin’s: baked beans, coleslaw, potato salad (I made that, of course) and everything else. Just last night, when I got home from work and started rummaging through the pantry for ingredients to make my potato salad, hubby said, “Is that all you people do at the office is eat?” He had a point.

It’s now 9:30 in the morning and the smell of hot dogs cooking in the crock-pot that someone dragged to work is making me nauseous.

This whole thing is getting kind of out of hand. We eat to celebrate birthdays, we eat to celebrate a holiday, we eat to celebrate when someone leaves the company. This week alone, we had a retirement party, and today we’re having a going-away party. (Trust me, if you knew who is going away, you’d celebrate too!)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to shove a bowl of potato salad somewhere into an already over-loaded refrigerator.

Quitchabitchin'!

Why do some people always feel the need to put their two freakin’ cents into the mix? I’ve been asked to order hot drinks for an hour-long employee meeting called “Hot Topics & Hot Drinks”.

Usually when we have one of these meetings, only about 100 employees show up and they’re usually all about ten minutes late – always!

Back to the hot drinks. So, here we are one day before the event, and after much debate and planning, it was decided that I should order coffee, hot chocolate and tea. Hot, hot, hot being the theme, right?

So, Miss Prissy Pants comes to my desk this morning to ask what kind of drinks we are ordering, where we are ordering them from, etc. I told her I spent the better part of an entire day trying to locate a business that would make all three drinks and deliver them.

Then she says, “I thought you were going to get the cocoa packets and things like that, so they could make their own drinks.”

I stopped her dead in her tracks, “It took me a long time to find one restaurant that would deliver all three kinds of drinks. And I’m NOT dealing with packets. First of all, where am I gonna get hot water? And second of all if we have to WAIT for 100 people to MAKE their own drinks, AND we know they’re gonna be LATE, that meeting will start 30 minutes late!

Then she asks, “What kind of tea did you order?”

“Whatever kind the restaurant wants to give me, dear.”

It’s FREE for employees, so quitchabitchin’!

I swear, sometimes around here, it’s like standing in the government’s free cheese line, and complaining that they give you cheddar cheese instead of Swiss.

The Devil is your co-worker

Let me tell you a story about Customer Service. Allow me to begin by saying, personally, I think customer service has become the biggest oxymoron to hit our society since “government worker”.


For the past month and a half, our department at work was diligently planning a presentation for about 75 executives, including the CEO, to discuss the 3rd quarter operating results. The planning for this event is not an easy task, and involves the participation of several departments to gather information, rehearse for the presentation, secure conference space, set up A/V equipment, etc.

My part of the project is to coordinate the details and logistics to ensure that those presenting just need to show up and present. The meeting was scheduled to begin at 9:00am sharp today.

A month ago, the invitation went out to 75 people (director-level managers, mind you), of which approximately 55 responded with ‘yes’. By 8:55am, only four people had shown up.

8:45am Building Services didn’t finish the requested seating arrangement, even though details were confirmed the day before. I then called the person who confirmed the set up to see if they could rush to finish it properly.

(Meanwhile, the requests start pouring in and people began hovering around my desk, “WHERE’S THIS, WHERE’S THAT??!!”)

8:49am I get an email from the IT ‘Service Desk’ saying the technician they sent to assist with the A/V set up that we scheduled for 8:30am, left after 15 minutes, because no one was there to meet him. Now, it must be said, the person from our department that was supposed to meet the IT tech at 8:30am WAS running a bit late. However, the bigger point of contention is that the auditorium that is being used for the presentation is RIGHT NEXT DOOR TO OUR DEPARTMENT!

Did the technician think to just pop his head in and ask where the person is that he was supposed to meet? (That would be TOO EASY.) So, the technician just leaves, and sends an email to me at 8:49am saying: (including errors): “Arrived at 8:25 and Waited unit 8:40. No one Came.”

Didn’t bother to call. Didn’t bother to stop by. Just dropped the ball with the attitude that ‘it’s not my problem.’

You know what?...I’m so TICKED off right now, I can’t even finish this post!

The point is... Customer Service is not just a company dealing with its customers. Customer Service is ALSO employees fulfilling the requests of other employees, so that a goal can be accomplished and without incident. In business, if we cannot even do that right, how do you think our actual PAYING customers feel?

The Devil has been DISMISSED!

It's been several months since I've written a new post. Can't you tell I love my job now? Nothing to legitimately bitch about now. The MANAGEMENT has changed!

Ya see, it's not always the front line worker bees that are the problem. Sometimes, it's the bun (bitch) on top of the sandwich that ruins the whole meal.

Everyone is a Devil today

So, here it is late in the day, and I find myself staring down the clock awaiting the 5:30pm Fred Flintstone rock quarry whistle to blow. And what a day it has been, trying administrate all that needs to be done in so little time, while working in an environment where it seems you have to jump through hoops like some circus poodle to get the most miniscule of projects completed.

You need a pink form for this, you need a blue form for that; and you need an orange form for the other (not the day-glo color orange form – just the regular orange colored form), you need a cost center, you need authorization, you need to go six floors up, take the magical elevator that climbs at a 45 degree angle to the far reaches of nowhereland to sign your name in blood, promise your first born, and swear allegiance to the almighty copy room gods so you can get the Xerox machine fixed.

Here’s an example of just one thing that would cause anyone to reach for the gallon jug of vodka they keep stashed in their desk. I needed to get a security keycard for a new employee we are on-boarding this week (the names have been changed to squelch the carnage:

Mark asks Christy for keycard.
Christy asks Bob for keycard.
Bob asks Charlotte for keycard info.
Charlotte asks Lucy for keycard info.
Lucy gives Mark form to fill out.
Mark receives email from Christy (after Lucy gives Mark forms to fill out) stating that Bob will handle directly with Dick to resolve keycard issue, Mark need not do anything further.
Mark emails Bob (and cc's Christy) for follow-up, to confirm if Bob has contacted Dick yet.
Bob tells Mark to sign the form that Lucy gave him last week.
Mark fills out form and takes it to Bob for additional signature authorization.
Bob informs Mark that Bob cannot sign, and that Dick must sign the form instead.
Mark has the form completed and sends it to Dick for signature.
Dick now says the form must be signed by someone named ‘authority’.
Mark then goes back to Bob to get Bob's signature.
Mark gets signature and elusive keycard.

Ugh! There’s bad juju everywhere today...and when I ask the magic 8-Ball sitting on my desk if there is relief within sight, it reads, "Don't ask me, I'm a ball." Today, I feel like someone trying to get their last nickel out of a ponzi scheme before the gig is up.

Red Devil Valentine's Day

It may be Friday The 13th today, but it's the day before Valentine's Day (a Hallmark Holiday that I loathe), and already this morning I'm collecting the booty. I came into work with all kinds of sweet treasures sitting on my desk.

That can either mean the people who left it there are either feeling guilting for their oversight of such a wonderful job that I do, or they really are appreciative of my administrative talents. It can't be because someone may be romantically interested in me, could it? If there is someone, Sweethearts ain't gonna do it. I'd prefer a Montblanc fountain pen instead!