The job this week

I have a co-worker who always drives me nuts. She needs me to process orders and invoices for her on a fairly regular basis. It's pretty standard stuff. Rarely do any of her requests not require me to send another email (or two) back to her for more detailed information.

It's pretty basic stuff.  You need me to place a PO for you. Well, of course I need a ship to address. Every. Single. Time. Nothings changed in the 5 years she's worked here. Today she sends me the part# to order, next day air.  Ok.....who is the manufacturer I am ordering this from? We represent like 80 of them! and also (of course) I need the ship to address (we usually ship direct to customers).  My boss and I have discussed her lack of correct information when communicating in the past, and we both chalked it up to her being swamped and my boss said she was going to work on that issue. Well, now the past 4 or 5 months she has an additional person added to her dept who took over quite a few of her duties and it's still happening.

It really threw me over the edge when I realized this incompetent person now makes more per year than I do. That's annoying. Not to mention she got a raise this year of almost 7%.

I had a phone chat with my boss yesterday, too. (of course I would never mention the above). Yep, my boss does have way too much on her plate. She also said that bickering between dept's has become quite the norm and affecting customer service. I'm sure a lot has to do with the company growth in # of employees this year. A bit of growing pains. We're good at under 50 employees, over that and things change. Which sadly usually means more policies, rules, and loss of perks. We'll see. There's that fine line between being overworked in your position and adding the extra employees to help with the work load and then that creates other problems. Maybe the move next year to a bigger office space will ease some of the tensions. But basically, it sounds like people just need to stop passing the buck and saying "it's not my job". Apparently there have been some complaints from our customers that they can't even get a hold of people when they call (always voicemail) and calls and emails aren't returned timely or at all. That is unacceptable. One of our owners was not really believing it (we've always been praised for our company's excellent customer service) so he sat with the customer while they tried to call in to a couple of people. Yep. Just as they said was happening. His company wide email was not very happy, to say the least.

My "customer service" is basically all internal and I do a good job. My co-workers can always get a hold of me via phone or email and if they can't I reply back right away. I process their PO and invoice requests immediately (mostly to get it out of my inbox, ha!). With my position all I can do is help support them, so they can do their jobs.