Over the course of 40+ years, I worked with a lot of insufferable morons!
Every time I find myself sliding into the “Retirement Guilt Phenomenon” (I have no required schedule! I have so much free time to read! I have only the responsibilities I determine for myself!)—well, every time that happens, I remind myself not just of the many, many years I worked full-time, but, even more importantly, the incredible number of truly idiot coworkers I dealt with over a career that spanned 44 years.
The “idiots born of morons” coworkers part is especially poignant for me, since for most of that career I functioned as what is now so lightly termed “office support staff” (think: Ms. Dogsbody). Administrative Assistants, lowliest of the low, answer to everyone and take care of everything. It’s a hellacious job and the people performing it deserve, not a bunch of flowers on Admin Professionals Day, but canonization, for they are truly saints.
Some moments of my career still stand out brightly illuminated in a haze of Darwin Awards-style imbecility. I recall the section supervisor who stormed up to my desk, incandescent with rage because, rather than wait until I had a moment to take care of it, she’d changed the toner cartridge in the printer—twice!—and neither cartridge was working. Her handouts had to be printed RIGHT NOW for a meeting that was to begin IMMEDIATELY. (I bit my tongue on the questions of why she’d waited until the last minute to print the paperwork, or why any of this was my fault.) Instead, I hurried to the printer, and in seconds diagnosed the problem: She hadn’t removed the cellophane tag from either of the new cartridges before installing them. One good rrrip, and that printer was functioning once more.
The same supervisor jammed the fax machine while I was on vacation one year. Rather than refer to the “For Emergencies In My Absence” e-mail I’d sent just prior to leaving, and call the appropriate repair tech, she (and everyone else in the office) just left the fax machine hopelessly jammed. When I finally returned two weeks later and had the machine repaired, it whirred away for hours until it had printed hundreds of backlogged faxes.
Standard office machinery seemed to baffle a good many of my coworkers. I still remember with no fondness whatever the employee who hated me like hell’s fire because, during my absence, she changed the toner in the copier, but (much like Ms. Broken Printer), failed to remove the cap from the new toner bottle. The machine not only malfunctioned, but the toner bottle burst and sent clouds of fine black soot sifting like a Pompeian ash cloud throughout the copier. Our copier repair tech, with whom I maintained a consistently friendly and courteous relationship (as if my life depended upon it, as it frequently did), commiserated and spent hours meticulously cleaning the machine. But Ms. Change-the-Toner never forgave me for the general e-mail I that I sent out (carefully naming no names, mind you!) to all staff following this incident, gently reminding them of the proper procedure for changing copier toner. The culprit forever afterwards treated me like something nasty on the bottom of her shoe.
I shrugged it off; she had plenty of company. I was also genuinely hated for reporting a pair of coworkers who skimped their work (sitting in one another’s cubicles, talking and crocheting!) and who refused to read their e-mails until the in-boxes had reached their limit and bounced incoming e-mails, sending them skittering right back to the senders. Another employee despised me eternally when I discovered and reported that she’d found a back door into a boss’s e-mail and was casually perusing every word that was sent to and from him! (I am still bewildered by the fact that she was not fired, but instead hung around for several more years, making my life hell.)
And that was the critical factor: Despite the fact that these people, some of them, at least, despised me—or at least made my job twice as difficult by their ineptitude–I had to continue working with them daily, treating them courteously, even respectfully; doing my best to deal with their requests, solving their problems, fixing the machinery they gummed up…and somehow managed it.
And, as I pointed out in Administrative Professional (or, A Tale of Popularity), I outlasted every one of these boneheads to retire having achieved something which none of them managed to gain: Appreciation. Approval. Friendship. Popularity. Respect.
And that, looking back on the years that I worked, makes it all worthwhile.
You might also like “Administrative Professional (or, A Tale of Popularity)”, which you can find in the Archived posts from April 25, 2018
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