the Village Knittiot

You all remember the Lorax, right? You know, he who speaks for the trees?

Well, I think he might hate me. And if he doesn’t, he should.

My job, in case anyone was wondering, is the devil. I swear to god, it is like stepping back in time to the 1950s. And not just the sexism either, mind you. Or the racism. But also the technology. The racism and sexism I can address head on, and have done and will continue to do should the need arise (although, pretty much everyone has stopped talking to me about anything other than the weather and things directly related to my job). But the technology? I am at a loss.

Like most companies, everyone here has a computer and email. Since email is one of the easiest forms of communication, you would imagine that everyone would use it, right? Wrong. Nobody uses it. And I mean nobody. When I ask them to email me something because it is important and I don’t want to forget it, I get actual whining and complaining and resistance.

One particularly awful, self-entitled, priss (who thinks that having a job is beneath her, but has to have one because her famous surgeon husband divorced her and took his money with him after discovering she’d had an affair with their gardener — yes, I know, how cliche can you get) once complained to a manager that she wasn’t able to notify me about something because I only use email and so she couldn’t call me. This was considered a valid complaint, and I actually had to explain to people that just because I like email and use it doesn’t meant that I don’t know how to or won’t use the phone.

So, when information needs to be circulated to the members of our office, the dimwitted, techno-phobe, incompetant “office manager” (who seems hell bent on giving all her work to me because I “know computers”) types up a memo, prints it out, and passes it around with a list of people in the office attached to it. We are supposed to “note & pass,” which means I have to take time out of my already busy day to read some stupid information about a company bowling league, or daffodils that will be for sale, or the passing away of some former employee’s grandmother’s cousin’s dog, then put a check mark next to my name and pass it on to the next person on the list. What the hell? Because email would be soooo much more difficult than that.

But that stuff, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. The real vileness is an ancient database system called TOM. Total Office Management. *snort* Talk about your misnomers. Anyway, this “system” (and I use the term loosely) will, on occassion, give me completely different results when running the exact same report. Run the report one day, get certain results. Run the exact same report the next day — completely different results.

When I do manage to get the reports to print correctly, part of my job requires me to take the information I managed to scrape out of the “database” (and I also use that term loosely) and put it all into Excel — BY HAND. You know why? Because the piece of crap won’t dump it’s information into a digital format. So if I want to be able to use the 100+ pages of information, I have to print the report and hand type the relevant info into an acceptable format using Excel. And because Baboons “run” (note sarcasm) the company, they are incapable of receiving digital reports via email. So I then have to print up copies of 5 different reports for about 12 different people.

All of this results in a considerable amount of wasted paper. I am wracked by guilt and I have nightmares that trees are making books out of my skin. Clearly I need a new job. My “boss” (I use that term even more loosely because he is a raging moron) once assured me that “all our paper is recycled,” but he is lying. I’ve asked others and I know the truth.

Knitting is a haven. I come home at the end of a long day and I want to hug my yarn. It is so simple and calming and I can just let it all go. I have finished the hood on Rogue, and the sleeves are progressing. Well, the sleeve is progressing — I am only on sleeve one. No more pictures until she is finished…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 at 9:50 am and is filed under this Random Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.