And The Polictics Begin

I am starting to believe what Lorene has been telling me all along about the way I handle situations through rose-colored glasses, trying to make everyone happy and look for the positive. I got a rather rude reminder of that today at work.

Our computers went down yesterday, due to a large cement truck getting its’ crane hooked around some AT&T wires. We lost our computers for the better part of 6 hours, but we made due. This, by effect, put everyone behind in their work, including me.

So, I come into the office today and go to the central desk to turn in some reports. The central desk is manned by the wonderful Lori who sorts it, batches it, balances it, and just accounts for it in every which way. She looks stressed, the computers being down put her a day and a half behind in her batching. I ask her if there is anything I can do to help her, since I have 30 minutes of discretionary time I won’t be using today. Relieved, she gives me a few batches and asks me to run 10-key tapes on them. Wow. Takes about 2 minutes per batch.

I grab all her batches and go around to the rest of my team and ask if anyone else would take a couple of minutes and 10-key a batch. A single, solitary batch. Only one person agreed to. One of the other ladies, who professes herself to be quite the LDS member says, “We are behind in our own work, you know. We don’t have time for that.” I turn to her and say, “We are a team, aren’t we? If it takes 2 minutes and helps us all out, don’t you think it’s worth it?” Needless to say, she didn’t help.

I keyed 10 of them. It took me all of 20-30 minutes. For me, it was worth it since Lori needed the help and she would do the same for me (she has, in fact). If her desk is bogged down, we don’t get our work, and our stats suffer. And all I could think while keying was, “Just wait until YOU need help.” I am not gonna forget this “little” thing. Especially since they were yakking most of the time anyway. Too busy talking about the Ward...

Oh, and as I type this, the one co-worker who was willing to help asked me to change the toner cartridge in the printer, since I am wearing black and she is wearing all white. Loud enough for everyone to hear, I said, “Sure, I’ll be happy to help YOU out. You let me know if YOU need anything else.”

Lorene, you need to teach me the basics of Bitch 101. I just might need them.