Tuesday, July 15, 2008
I have this one co-worker. We call her the Poop Smith. Not for lack of a better name (which, incidentally, her real name is a better name), but because it's so fitting. Now, don't get me wrong. Usually I give people the benefit of the doubt. And I did with her for as long as humanly possible. But after two months, I've finally reached the conclusion that she
just doesn't like me. Which, hey, that's fine. You don't have to like me, I can accept that. It's when you don't let me do my job (you know, that thing for which I was hired and am payed to be there for) that I start to have issues with you. Yesterday we reached the climax of the issue.
So I file for the first two hours that I am at work, generally. There is a lot of filing to be done. I have, at last, almost finished and it's the tedious stuff that's left now. Well, there were a few PMGs that were just needing a couple of pages replaced, so I replaced those pages and took the books over to the Puncher. He was, obviously, doing his job and punching and didn't have time to take them right then. Fine, I can understand that. I do his job, too.
But then there were about, oh, I don't know, like 10 pages that needed to be punched. And they were all the back pages of which we are in desperate need of. Once those pages were punched, I would have another complete book to give to Puncher. These pages I took over to the Poop Smith, as she was feeding the machine, to have her put them just on top of the stack. Then Puncher would be able to bring them over to me and blah blah blah, life goes on all hunky-dory that way. But no.
"We don't need those pages," she tells me.
"What?" says I.
"We don't need those. We have a lot of them."
"The back pages? No, we don't have any of these. We need these."
"No we don't, we have a whole bunch of them over there."
"Umm... No, we really don't. I promise. There aren't any. This is it. I need these punched."
"Oh, well, we're ordering them. They're just not here yet."
"Just the back pages?"
"Yes. We're ordering a whole bunch of them."
"Oookay." And that's when I turned and walked away.
Now, here's what you have to understand. PMGs come to us in full books already bound. We cut the bindings off (they are not user-friendly the way they are bound), punch them, and then re-bind them with coils. This is the way you will find them in the stores or at the MTC or wherever else it is that you find PMGs (I don't know, I'm not a mercenary.) So it's actually basically impossible for us to
just order certain pages. They don't come to us that way.
Well, Puncher gives me this look as I walk away and I just roll my eyes and shake my head at him like "don't get me started." He comes over and he's like, "She won't punch them? Why?" So I told him and he gives me another look that says "She's insane." I shrugged my shoulders and he said, "We'll get them later."
Maybe half an hour passes. Poop Smith comes up to me lugging this huge empty pallet behind her, drops it on the floor and says, "The books that you are putting together don't line up perfectly and won't run through the machines. We can't use them. Don't put them on the stack and don't bring them to us anymore. You have to put them on this pallet." She reiterated a few points then left. I just kept my mouth shut because I was already in a foul mood and didn't want to end up saying something I'd later regret.
Break time rolls around. I chose not to go and coiled the books that I'd given to Puncher earlier. Mostly to prove the point that, hey. I know what I'm doing and I do my job well. So let me do it! And I tell you what. Those books ran through that inserter smooth as.
And that's the end. She didn't come to work today, so all was well.
