#386 Corporate Step Ladder

In my early 20's, I decided to "take a break" from college. (besides being on academic probation, you know?) I took a full time job in an office. This was my first introduction to life in a cubicle.

It was a small company, so everyone worked handling the phone calls, but also had other assigned tasks. As everything else in life, the newbies gets the shaft. (Thank you sir, may I have another??)

One of my first assignments, dealt with shipping and receiving. Since this company sold "stuff", we also shipped and received this "stuff". (<---BTW, this is not code for drugs.) Every shipper had a different way of handling the paperwork. Every shipper had a different set of acronyms and forms numbers. When stuff came in, the warehouse guys would just rip some paperwork off the cartons, crumple it up, sweat on it, maybe drop it on the floor in the men's room and then hand it to me. It was a bloody nightmare. I would sit there for hours trying to figure out what each mysterious piece of paper represented. (Hours!) What made the job harder, was this was all basically learn as you go. The previous person(jackass) who had this job left no instructions. (as did the person before that, and before that, and so on, and so on. Just like that shampoo commercial.) So, it was me making the same mistakes they made, while trying to correct the mistakes that they left for me. Well, as you can imagine, it was hard work, but I managed to get it under control. AND because I'm smarter-than-the-average-bear, I started keeping a log of what I did, when I did it, and why. My log eventually grew into brief explanations of acronyms, shipping terms, contact names, and everything else. Pretty soon, I had an SOP book (standard operating procedure) on my hands. I carefully labeled everything, and put it in a nice (sensible) three ring binder. It became my bible. Pretty soon, this part of the job became a breeze.

Months later, this little worker bee starts to move up the corporate ladder. I get a (small) promotion and (really really small) raise. As part of this, I also get assigned new and exciting assignments. (yay!) I hand off my piles of papers to the next newbie in line. And since I no longer needed it, I gave her my binder. I will soon learn a very important lesson.

What should have been an easy job for her, (since I had everything already written down) turned out to be a lot of work for me. I guess that she found it easier to just ask me all her questions. All day long.
Over and over again.
I had my own work to do.
So my "promotion" was just me doing two jobs instead of one.
Nice.

Something interesting started to happen. Newbie suddenly had all this free time on her hands. She spent most of it, hanging around the office, flirting with everyone she could. Newbie also went around bragging about how "easy" her new duties were. Best of all, during her review, Newbie asked for a raise because she had "re-organized everything to a more streamlined system."
Uh, huh.
The last straw came when Newbie started to bad mouth my work. What started off as "oh, look at what I great job I'm doing," soon became, "Oh, I hope I can find a way to fix everyone else's incompetent mistakes and still do a bang up job." It got old quick.
Finally, I found a quick and quiet solution. One day, I found myself alone with my old friend, the binder. I knew that I couldn't walk out with it, let alone let it be seen in my hands. I quietly found a padded envelope, stuck the binder inside, and labeled the outside. Added stamps, and waved goodbye.
The binder found it's way to some random address.

In Egypt.



Newbie did have the gall to ask me if I knew where "her" binder was. I smiled, and said, "what binder?"