It's actually nice going from full time to part time, because you can use that excuse to make the co-op student do all your filing and mailing for you. True, some days I have had absolutely no time to do that stuff anyways, but there have also been a couple where I haven't had much to do other than nap, which I confess I've done on more than one occasion, not always voluntarily. Well, I could have done filing, but fuck filing. I've had enough of it.
I found out today that there have been a couple of people holding back work from me for a while, assuming that I was completely swamped. I wish I had known. If nothing else, I could have prepared some of it in some sort of logical and coherent way to be able to train the person who is going to replace me a little easier.
This on the job training thing has been a gongshow from the start.
She arrived yesterday, and because they knew that I can only stay a couple hours each day because of school, they plopped her down in front of me and expected me to show her everything I knew.
Little did I know that some very nice, helpful people had decided to help clear up some of the backlog that they're convinced I've been swimming in, now that I've been working part time for the past two weeks instead of full. The problem there being that no one else in the office knows exactly what I do or how I do it and no one bothered to talk to me before going ahead with it, and so the work that they had done was sort of half completed and gimpy.
Needless to say I spent the first half hour of my morning with the new girl trying to figure out what the hell had been done with my work while she looked on, confused. When I finally decided what still needed to be done, I began to show her. However, I wish that everyone else had just left everything alone so I could show her the process from start to finish, rather than from steps 5-8, but oh yeah, looks like someone left out number 2 so we'll just do that too.
So I ended up showing her a mishmash of random crap and explaining a lot of stuff when ideally I would have been doing it with her instead. Even at that, we didn't really complete anything before I had to leave.
It was just as I was about to escape out the door that I found out that the poor girl hadn't been given any sort of orientation yet and didn't even know the most basic things like where the washroom was, or where to get more supplies for her desk. Or where to meet outside if there was a fire or an earthquake.
Or even what the whole office does and why it exists.
It was at that moment that I realized that no one had bothered to go over any of the specialized terminology that we use in that office, reducing everything I had said for the past three and a half hours to unintelligable babble. Fuck.
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