- Sep 21, 2001
- 18,447
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Cliffs: If you've ever posted tl;dr, feel free to surf elsewhere for more entertainment.
My department recently had the misfortune to hire a new legal assistant. A few examples of interactions so far:
My boss (10 year veteran at the co, pretty much peer to the VPs in our dept): "We're going to do it this way so that if we re-org, the information will all dynamically follow users into their new roles."
B (two weeks after hire): "No, I just don't ever see that happening."
My boss: "Excuse me?"
B: "We won't re-org or change responsibilities; that just won't happen on our team."
ummmm
B emails my coworker: "I need all these NDA files pulled immediately for an urgent project."
Coworker (whose job does not include pulling files she has full access to herself): "Um, ok. Sure, I'll do that for you, but just so you know, our team has a 24 hour SLA and can't necessarily drop what we're doing to do this, so if this comes up again you'll want to go to the file room and pull these yourself."
B: "OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS GUY KEEPS HIS JOB, HE SHOULD BE FIRED" (is intercepted by the executive assistant as she writes a nasty email to my boss about my coworker) I think they fired a few emails back and forth anyway that pissed off my coworker, the only dev and probably the most helpful person in the department.
B: "I've had this problem at all my previous jobs; people get jealous of me because I excel so much more than they do."
B: "Everyone is so competitive here that I can't work with any of the other legal assistants."
(B has alienated the other assistants by correcting, insulting, talking down or taking over their work.)
She finally put me over the top tonight.
She's been bitching that I'm not providing user training on a new tool (I am; training was today for a select group of users in which she is not included because she's not a user) so I figured I'd let her test the interactive online end user training to shut her up. Instead she logged into the production system and started creating test records, any of which could potentially have gone as high as the CFO for approval.
I KNOW she's doing this because one of the other legal assistants was a user acceptance tester and she's pissed that she wasn't part of the testing (despite not having been involved in any of the rest of the year long project). However, deliberately messing with the production system and possibly sending email notifications off to a C level executive in a company of 20k people is NOT ok. I love the audacity of her feedback though: "The asterisks on the required fields are not clear enough; the field names need to be in red." Yeah, we launched last week sweetcheeks, and your opinion doesn't mean squat after we've been cleared by the SMEs and stakeholders.
She's been here four weeks; if she makes it another four it'll be too long...
My department recently had the misfortune to hire a new legal assistant. A few examples of interactions so far:
My boss (10 year veteran at the co, pretty much peer to the VPs in our dept): "We're going to do it this way so that if we re-org, the information will all dynamically follow users into their new roles."
B (two weeks after hire): "No, I just don't ever see that happening."
My boss: "Excuse me?"
B: "We won't re-org or change responsibilities; that just won't happen on our team."
ummmm
B emails my coworker: "I need all these NDA files pulled immediately for an urgent project."
Coworker (whose job does not include pulling files she has full access to herself): "Um, ok. Sure, I'll do that for you, but just so you know, our team has a 24 hour SLA and can't necessarily drop what we're doing to do this, so if this comes up again you'll want to go to the file room and pull these yourself."
B: "OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS GUY KEEPS HIS JOB, HE SHOULD BE FIRED" (is intercepted by the executive assistant as she writes a nasty email to my boss about my coworker) I think they fired a few emails back and forth anyway that pissed off my coworker, the only dev and probably the most helpful person in the department.
B: "I've had this problem at all my previous jobs; people get jealous of me because I excel so much more than they do."
B: "Everyone is so competitive here that I can't work with any of the other legal assistants."
(B has alienated the other assistants by correcting, insulting, talking down or taking over their work.)
She finally put me over the top tonight.
She's been bitching that I'm not providing user training on a new tool (I am; training was today for a select group of users in which she is not included because she's not a user) so I figured I'd let her test the interactive online end user training to shut her up. Instead she logged into the production system and started creating test records, any of which could potentially have gone as high as the CFO for approval.
I KNOW she's doing this because one of the other legal assistants was a user acceptance tester and she's pissed that she wasn't part of the testing (despite not having been involved in any of the rest of the year long project). However, deliberately messing with the production system and possibly sending email notifications off to a C level executive in a company of 20k people is NOT ok. I love the audacity of her feedback though: "The asterisks on the required fields are not clear enough; the field names need to be in red." Yeah, we launched last week sweetcheeks, and your opinion doesn't mean squat after we've been cleared by the SMEs and stakeholders.
She's been here four weeks; if she makes it another four it'll be too long...
I'm just disappointed; she came off as bright and cooperative when I first met her. It's a real PITA that she's turned out to be a troublemaker, both functionally and relationally.
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