Rant-Man's Notebook

By Jim "Rant-Man" MacQuarrie

I Quit!

Oy.

After three and a half weeks in the most soul-sucking environment of my life (even worse than the telemarketing boiler room, as hard as that is to imagine), I quit my assignment this evening.

I'm still signed up with the freelance agency, and hopefully they'll still find me work, but I just couldn't go into that place for another day.

Let me tell you my tale of woe.

Around the end of September, the agency set me up with a gig at a health insurance company. I spent my days there setting up their enrollment books and applications and whatnot. Tedious work, but not unpleasant. The people there were for the most part pleasant, cheerful, intelligent and hard-working, and I was fitting in okay.... except for my direct supervisor, a woman who made up for in negativity what she lacked in competence.

For example, today she asked me to turn a dozen or so document files into PDFs and put them on a CD for her. About 10 minutes after I gave her the disc, the tech support people were at her desk to fix her CD-ROM drive. Why? Because she hadn't bothered to tell me that she needed a PC-format disc, and couldn't figure out why the disc I gave her didn't work.

Fine. Everybody makes mistakes. Pobody's nerfect, as they say. The soul-sucking part is when she brought the disc to me and told me to make a PC one. I looked her in the eye and said, "oh, you needed a PC disc?"

Instead of taking that as her cue to apologize for neglecting to tell me that in the first place, she looked at me as if I was the stupidest man on earth (my kids think I am, so I know the look) and allowed as how, yes, it IS a PC system, implying that I should have guessed what she wanted the disc for.

As I tell my kids all the time, it's okay to be stupid. Stupidity is not a sin. But if you're going to be stupid, at least be nice. This is very good advice that I wish more people would share with their own useless progeny before they send them out into the workforce.

Honest, I can work with somebody who doesn't know anything... as long as they can admit it. But when the boss wants to use the Psychic Friends method of giving instructions, and then wants you to play "hide and seek" with the files by giving the wrong job numbers, or in some cases, no job numbers at all, then it's time to move on.

It's been a gradual building up of little irritations. Solomon was right, it's the little foxes that do the damage. You see the big problems from a long way off, but the little crap sneaks right up to you. I should have caught a clue the first day I was there. See, there are a couple of other freelancers there from my agency, working in other departments. On my first day, I happened to be working next to the table where this one girl's supervisor was walking her through the handful of paperwork the company requires; request for parking permit, confidentiality agreement, I.D. badge request, etc. So I figured that since I was going to be there for at least a month, maybe two, I'd be filling out the same paperwork soon. Three weeks pass. My supervisor never mentioned a word about any paperwork, nor about the location of the coffee pot, nor any of the other things that a decent manager would let the staff know about.

Finally, yesterday morning a guy came over to my desk and told me he'd been sent over by the department head to give me my paperwork and to tell me what to do with it. He's there about two minutes. As soon as he walks away, the harridan I work for pops her head out of her cubicle and gives me a thorough reaming about not accepting anything from anybody but her-- I am NOT to do anything for anybody else at all unless it's on HER schedule. I shrug and tell her it's just office paperwork and I'll fill it out at lunch or after work or something, it's no big deal. Does she say "oops" or "oh" or anything like that? No. She pulls her head back into her cubicle without a word. A few minutes later, when the boss' lackey comes by again, she buttonholes him and makes the same speech about going through her. He doesn't seem too worried about her though, he just tells her that it's paperwork that's required of all employees and I have to fill it out.

No apology. No acknowledgement of any error on her part. Ever. Over the last three weeks, I've made a bunch of mistakes on this job, big and small, but nearly every one was a direct result of this woman not giving me the information I needed, or giving me the wrong information. Every single solitary time I showed her the mistake, her jaw got tight, her eyebrows pushed down, and she changed the subject with a tone of voice that clearly indicated (a) it's my fault, not hers and (b) the conversation is over.

The really frustrating thing is, judging by the quality of work I saw in the files they gave me, I'm by far the best production person they've had there in a long while. Every job I looked at was absolutely Amateur Night. I KNOW I was doing a good job, and this woman made me feel like I should be wearing a helmet and coming to work on the short bus.

So finally, after she left today, I thought about the recent events for a while. Then another employee was leaving for the day, and she said "good night, see you tomorrow," and I knew what I had to do.

I turned to her and said, no you probably won't see me tomorrow. I told her that I was calling the agency and requesting another assignment, and I told her why. The look on her face told me I wasn't imagining the problems. My boss really is that nasty and ignorant. My co-worker wasn't going to say anything negative about her, but it was pretty clear that I wasn't the first person to walk away from this assignment, and for the same reasons.

After I left the office, I called my agency and left a voicemail message informing them of my decision. Then I called the boss at the job and left a message for her. I told her that I feel like I'm not doing a good enough job for her, and I can't take the frustration of beating my head against the wall trying to meet her standards, and I hope she's able to find somebody who can do a better job for her.

Of course, what I was thinking was "I hope you can find that blend of Martha Stewart and The Amazing Kreskin that you're seeking; that perfect person who can read your mind and anticipate your every need, and do everything with total anal-retentive meticulousness and laser-like precision. Good frigging luck, lady."

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