measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Ides of March got delayed in the mail... Hellish, hellish workday, filled with emails that if I weren't at work, I'd probably be within the middle of an email flame war. I'm truly feeling like it's me against the art buyers these days, and I'm getting fucking sick of it. Most of this comes down to two art buyers-- one who is one of those flakey, weird people who makes your skin crawl under the category of "I don't know what it is, but something is NOT RIGHT WITH THIS WOMAN!" The other is "rebel against the system, regardless of what it is" woman. When the two of them are coming at me at once, it gets unbearable. Not Right is taking cues from Rebel in the sense that she's decided-- without informing the admin (*cough* me)-- to change the system of getting signatures for invoices. Apparently she's telling her illustrators to send all of the paperwork back to her on illustration contracts, rather than to me (who has a log of when I send and receive things so we can track where everything is at), and then she gives it to me piecemeal as things are finished. This throws off my cheery little world because illustrators, wondering why they haven't been paid, start calling me asking about invoices. But of course, since Not Right has them on her desk, I have no records of receiving it. Making me sound like a clueless idiot when I tell them that I never had received signed copies from them, so there's no way it could have gone on to accounts payable. Not Right got herself into a pickle today when one of our illustrators called about an invoice that's been outstanding since February. These, of course, are illustrators who are paid per piece and get 1099 forms, not steady paychecks. So of course, they're freaking out about every piece of art that's hanging in the balance. For some reason, I have the contracts for this $1,400 invoice, but not the invoice. Don't understand what the heck happened. The vendor asks me about another one that I've never heard of, and I suggest that he call the art buyer (Not Right) to see if she ever gave me the spec sheets for the contract-- because I'm up to date on all of my contracts, and do not have anything recently sent to him. He calls her, and it turns out that the $1,400 was on her damn desk, held there while she's chewing ME out for not having gotten a response from Accounts Payable about these invoices. *sigh* And then they wonder why this process is so slow. It really doesn't help when I have to constantly ask art buyers where stuff is since they decide to change the policy on how things are processed, without bothering to inform me (who has to process everything). Meanwhile, Rebel is up to her normal tricks that began early last year. Rebel bitches about anything that is related to systems in the corporation. She complains about the contracts, saying they're worthless and that we "really need xxxxx instead, and if we'd only done this in the beginning, we wouldn't have so many problems..." when in actuality, Rebel doesn't even bother to learn the contracts we have. She screwed them up, which is why I'm doing them in the first place. She constantly comes over to scream about the injustices in the contract system (has been since Jan. 2001, although it doesn't seem to get through to her that her yelling isn't going to change), trying to take up my time with something that she's not going to sway me on, because I know she's incompetent when it comes to legalese. Last week I flat out told her that before she tries to improve the system, she had to learn the one in place, and frankly I didn't see her even bothering to try, since she began bitching about the contracts AT the original training session for them, rather than bother to learn them. At the same time, a new Art Buyer is coming in this week, and Rebel has decided to nominate herself a manager in charge of her hiring, not bothering to even ASK what the system is again. She just decided-- without bothering to even ask Linda (our department manager)-- that New Person would start on XXX date. Told New Person XXX date, and XXX person SHOWED UP today. We don't have anything ready, and I made it clear to Rebel that she's not even on payroll yet. Of course, that starts a new barage of crap. So I've sealed myself off (literally-- duct tape is beautiful) in my cubicle. Hopefully the "Go AWAY" sign will help, although even while typing this, two people have ignored it. *sigh* I want to go home. Badly. --Mel. 4:52 p.m. - 18 March 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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