Thursday, October 4

Just call me The Instigator


This is why I love my workplace:

We all work with one particularly intense woman who spends a lot of time telling us what she does not do, outlining what is not part of her job responsibilities. It wouldn't be so bad except she does this on an almost daily basis. We all have times when we need to clarify that a request does not fall within our job descriptions but saying "that's not my job" every day both verbally and in emails is a bit much.

Last week a group of us got at least three emails from her (that we had not started) stating things like "I'm not responsible for this project. I don't know why I'm on this email. Please remove me from this and all future emails on this subject." Sometimes her emails are in all caps. *sigh* Too much email is always annoying but most of us quietly hit delete and go on with our day.

Today an email had gone back and forth about three times when this woman "replied all" (to 15 people) and said "Please take me off these emails now." I think it was the "now" that got to everyone. Although I wasn't on the email, my neighbors were, and told me about it. I told them if it were me, I'd reply with an annoying "No problem" then ask everyone else to respond with similarly useless and aggravating replies. They loved the idea and spent the rest of the day promising to take the woman off the email. Here is a sample of the email chain:

Reply #1: Consider it done!
Reply #2: Thanks Lynn!
Reply #3: Oops! Sorry. I hadn't realized Allison had handled this
Reply #4: Oops! I meant "Thanks Allison".
Reply #5: Thanks Lynn AND Allison
Reply #6: No worries, we'll handle this.

... and so on.

Now, I realize this is immature and annoying behaviour but I'm telling you, we were in fits of giggles all day. As expected, we received no response from the victim. We have no way of knowing if she understood that she was being teased. It will be interesting to see if she changes her behaviour.

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