This isn't one of mine
but one from my mum. Now, she has a pretty high (non-british) diplomatic position in a large European organisation which mostly deals with human rights issues and currently has a twunt tory at its head. he is a twunt for many reasons, but let's ignore that and get straight to her secretary.

The woman has worked in that office as a temp for about 20 years. This basically makes her un-sackable. She does fuck all, is unable to perform the most basic tasks and natters on the phone to friends and family all the time, at the cost of the taxpayers from almost 50 countries. Every time she's asked to photocopy something she asks how the bastard thing works AGAIN so people are starting to give up giving her the job and have passed it on to the poor buggers who are there on apprenticeships.

My favourite story, which despite my mother's anger I laughed at, concerns this woman's amazing archiving skills.

For some security reasons my mum can't put anything in the shared folder of the office network so that her underlings can receive documents easily. Instead, she always has to email them. bearing in mind that this office has about 8 workers and deals with loads of different requests every day she only ever passes the most vital things on to them and keeps the rest herself. The rest would be merely interesting to others at a later date.


Come July/August this year and NOTHING is happening, and only her and her secretary are sat in the building. So she decides to clear the huge backlog of stuff that needs to be put on the network for all to see. Thinking this would be a good exercise for her dimwitted secretary, she tells her to put these documents into the shared network. "no problem", comes the reply.

So my mum begins the time-consuming task of attaching these documents to emails. For some reason she could only send about 50 or so at a time, so she sent about 15 emails with 50 documents.

job's a good'un! she thinks and forgets the whole episode. Until about christmas, when she's looking for one of these documents (since they're on the network she deletes them off her computer) the shared folder. Using "search" brings up nothing. Strange, because they're all sorted by date and subject. About to give up hope and just randomly clicking through, hidden in the depths of some nonsensical folder name is "*morrybyte's mum*'s emails". She opens it, and what does she see? 15 Outlook email files (or something similar). And they're all named things like "Documents to put on shared folder", "more documents", "even moooore documents", "wow, that one took a while", "I'm getting bored now" etc etc...

The silly bint had just put the saved emails into the shared folder, which effectively meant that no one could find anything from those hundreds of documents. Goodness knows how much grief that caused for her other co-workers who will have had to embarrassingly ask for a new copy directly from the sender. When questioned about this she said "What? extract them each and every one and sort them? But that would have taken hours!" she seemed unaware that this was (and, sadly, is) her job.

She cannot be fired, and is apparently thinking about taking my mum to court for harassment and bullying because she always gets negative reports at the end of the year.

FEEL THE LENGTH
( morrybyte made a subtle namechange at, Tue 29 Jan 2008, 21:53, Reply)