CMcL

Pretty much every single time I post a BossLady story, I include a little disclaimer here at the top, to the effect that I wrote all of these anecdotes a long time ago. For an entry like this, I want to make that especially clear. It all happened several years ago, and these rants were written at the same time. If I were telling the tales nowadays, having mellowed with age, I’d be a lot more compassionate. This particular entry was written later in the same day as the last BossLady entry. It consists of hastily typed notes that I emailed to myself throughout the afternoon.

12:41 PM
As I go through the course of my day, I find other things that BossLady has changed, like certain templates I have for sending faxes and notes to buyers and sellers. My standard fax cover sheet is a Word document which has a field for the name of the person I’m sending it to, a field for their fax number, a date field (updates automatically), a blank line for “RE:” and a blank box for me to type my message. BossLady spent God only knows how much time diddling with this so that the template now has a default “RE:” of “Contract for your lot on Blah Street” and a default script in what used to be my blank box giving them instructions on how to sign the contract. Problem is, I send more faxes for other reasons than contracts. I know, I know, this is not that big a deal, but think about the amount of time she wasted doing this, KNOWING in her head that it was a GOOD thing and that she was SAVING ME THE TROUBLE of having to type those particular fifty or sixty words whenever we have a contract.

I deleted everything and reverted to my old cover sheet. Let’s see if she notices.

1:00 PM
OH MY FREAKING GOD.

I wasn’t sure what BossLady was talking about when she mentioned this, this morning, because I started tuning her out. Big mistake, and I should remember not to do that in the future, because this is how you miss big, important things.

BossLady was yapping away about new systems she wanted to implement for keeping track of things (reminiscent of the “chili” incident last year) and she said something about “scanning the folder.” She stopped talking right about then because I was standing there with my arms folded and what I hope was a polite expression on my face, and she realized that while she was yapping, she was also sitting in my chair and I couldn’t do any work. So she got up and I got to work, and started noticing all the stupid little changes that I will now have to start changing back over the next few days. Then I noticed, in one of the electronic folders of a property I was working on, a file called scan_cma_folder.pdf.

NO. NO, NO, NO.

I opened it up to see what it was, and it wasn’t as bad as I was thinking (I was terribly afraid that she had run the manila folder through the scanner in an attempt to preserve BossMan’s scribblings for posterity), but it was bad enough: She had scanned the entire contents of the folder. All the papers.

With a sinking feeling, I opened up the “scanned items” folder. This is the folder where, anytime you scan anything, anything at all, a copy is sent, just in case. BossLady spent all Saturday night (the scan times are recorded as the filenames) scanning EVERY PIECE OF PAPER IN EVERY FILE FOLDER THAT WAS ON MY DESK. Again, you might not think this is a big deal, but you have to understand, 95% of the folders I had on my desk were for people and properties that we will NEVER SEE AGAIN, and there is NO REASON TO EXPEND THAT MUCH EFFORT recording all that information. We have a SPREADSHEET where all the pertinent information goes: Name, address, phone number of property owner; address, legal description of property; and the estimated value of said property. We pass along this info to the owner, and if they like what they hear, they list their property with us and THEN we start recording information in earnest because THEN we have a vested interest in getting and keeping all the information on this particular property and its owner. But like I said, 95% of what’s on my desk and in my spreadsheet is information that we will never need or use, so we DON’T NEED TO KEEP COPIES OF IT IN TRIPLICATE AND SCAN EVERY SCRIBBLED FREAKING NOTE taking up valuable hard drive space! GAH!

1:26 PM
See, the thing is, don’t get me wrong, I understand that it can be a problem, not having a clue as to how your employee organizes things. Like when your employee goes on vacation and you don’t know where to find anything. (Part of that is your own damned stupid fault for not buying those organizational tools that your employee asked for more than a month ago, with the result that everything is still “organized” into piles, but that’s another story.)

But the thing is, if you don’t understand how your employee’s filing, filenaming, and organizational systems work, your first line of defense would naturally seem to be ASKING the employee, rather than spending hours and hours and hours and hours of your oh-so-valuable time coming up with your own idea of a good system and expecting the employee to just go along with it, for HEAVEN’S SAKE.

All I can say (who am I kidding, I know I’ll have more to say later) is that it is a really good thing I got a raise this morning, because otherwise I don’t know how much longer I could put up with this. As it is, with another dollar per hour on my paycheck, I can probably go another few months at least. By which time, hopefully, I will have furniture and tools and a little privacy.

1:59 PM
I’m finding all these pages all over the place, notes she has left herself, little “manuals” on how she wants the spreadsheet done nowadays. Man, what an idiot. I swear to God. Also, she has all these little hand-drawn pie charts about market share and our listings versus the other people in our office. This is the sort of thing she could and should be spending more time on, probably, but she’s just sitting around doodling and not doing anything that’s actually, you know, productive. I cannot believe how useless this woman is. I officially believe, at this point, that I could do her job were she to have an accident or go on another extended vacation. Spending hours and hours scanning crap, rewriting the rules for the spreadsheets in a completely useless way, and still taking two-hour lunch breaks every single day? Okay.

3:52 PM
I almost forgot the part where I tried to ask BossLady about the flyers. “You know, the ones we order?” That was me, with the helpful hand gestures. Then she goes, “I have some flyers right here” in the little box, and I say again, no, the ones we order? And with the hands, and she goes, “Are you talking about the ones we send out as CMA followups,” and again, “No, the ones we order?” And then followed a long, involved idiocy about when am I going to order them again and how frequently, every week on the same day or every 8 days or whatever. GAH.

4:19 PM
So another real estate agent calls, and the agent has the same first name as a lady at our main office. BossLady is confused at first, while the agent tries to find out the status of a contract she sent us. BossMan has spilled coffee all over all of his piles and piles of files, which are far less organized than my piles of files, and is not able to talk right at that moment. BossLady has no idea what the agent is talking about, gets frustrated and hangs up, flipping out and snitting that “these agents really get under your skin!” Yeah, no kidding, lady.