Frog and Goat

This morning has started off in brilliant fashion. First some nitwit was wandering around the hallway and attached herself to me, naturally. And, she was a chatty nitwit to boot. A chatty nitwit who spoke nonsense. I really don’t know what shit she was babbling because it became my mission to get her away from me as soon as possible. I did manage to get some facts out of her. She was here for a class (God help the trainer) and was here yesterday but all these rooms don’t look like her training room. Oh really? You were here yesterday? And the reason why these rooms don’t look like your training room is because the rooms on this side of the building are offices and not large expansive training rooms. I told her I didn’t know which room she needed but that I’d try to find someone to help her. Of course, our support staff were off in the bat cave so I said, let’s go look at the board to see where you need to go (straight to hell and would you shut up already). I take her back out to the main entry area and look at the color coded signs that indicate class title, room designation and a GREAT BIG ARROW pointing the way to the classroom. I said you need to go down there and take a right…you know, where the other blue sign is with the other GREAT BIG ARROW. I just walked away. I have no idea what other babbling she was doing because by then the hearing part of my brain had been fried with the constant yammering. I got back to my office hallway, shut the door to the hallway and then pushed my door closed. I sat down at my desk and sipped some hot tea. I got back to work and thought all was OK. You’ve seen enough horror movies to know that I was enjoying a false sense of security.

Drinking tea equals a trip to the bathroom. My mistake. I walked into the Ladies and am knocked over by the stench. But it gets better! Just because I wasn’t having an annoyed enough time of it, someone grunted in the stall. Oh for crying out loud, it’s bad enough you decide to take a dump at work but must you grunt? It’s already offensive enough in the bathroom as it is. We don’t need anymore special effects. I went into a stall, did my thing quickly and without stinking up the place, and as I was tucking in my shirt, I hear someone saying, hello, hello. I know that person isn’t talking to me and furthermore I would have just walked the hell on out had they been talking to me. No, the person was sitting on the can, taking a dump, stinking up the place and talking on the phone.

The first new fangled, no-touch soap dispenser just chirped at me and so I had to go to the other dispenser to get soap to wash my hands. Then the no-touch paper towel wouldn’t work so I had to tap it and then dry my hands with the skimpy little piece of paper. All the no-touch equipment in the world doesn’t mean that you don’t end up having to touch surfaces in a bathroom and at that point in my trip to the bathroom I wasn’t so worried about germs as I was of dying of stink inhalation and revulsion of toilet stall phone usage.

I’m tired of hearing the word can’t. I work for a training organization that is funded by a grant. We’re frequently caught saying we can’t do this, that or the other to the grant funder. How does that work exactly? The last I heard when someone is paying your salary you should figure out how to make requests real. Or at least talk to the “boss” and conduct a needs analysis and then figure out how to do whatever that analysis shows needs to be done.

This can’t culture is also true for when we’re talking about our customers. We don’t sell anything but we have customers–those people who take our classes. Most of our classes are for a specific target audience, but we have a couple of classes that are available for outsiders. Those courses are out there because the grant funder asked for them. Consider these courses as those that serve the greater good. When there’s some confusion about which of these classes to take, I think it is our duty to explain which course is best. The easiest way to do that is to put an explanation on the website. Sounds simple? Pshaw.

When the mood of the organization is bleak and when morale rattles around in the bottom of the barrel, don’t you think there’d be some sort of attempt to make things better for those of us still here? If you said yes, you’re wrong. Someone wants to move into a bigger office that stands empty and she’s told she can’t. She then asks to have her furniture moved to make it more conducive to work and she’s told no. So, she takes time off to have the crick in her neck taken care of. And, then she takes another day off because the crick came back.

Then there’s the woman who lives in another city. She’d very much like to work at home two days a week. She’d like to take the advice of the state’s governor and telecommute. She’s told a committee will look into it. The committee that doesn’t exist and will never exist. So she makes an agreement with her supervisor that every once in awhile she’ll work from home.

There’s the other person who finds gross errors in a document that all trainees have to use. She rewrites the document but is told to chill out. The error-filled document gets used. The organization looks like an idiot every time someone uses the document to complete a class evaluation. In case you were wondering, the round buttons you use to choose options in a software package or on the web are called radio buttons, not radial buttons. But if you take one of our classes, you’ll go away with the wrong idea. Because we’re too damn lazy to do it right the first time.