Vague Dread and annoying person at work

[kitewithfish]

So, this is kind of a stupid and self indulgent thing to write about, but it's my journal and I'm going to Bitch. 

But, there's someone at work who I just hate having to work with, and this is a new working relationship even tho we've both been at the office for a couple years, and she's just annoying.

My job is to provide a very small amount of oversight for one particular area of her job - I review notes from her meetings and click a box to say, Yup, that's a "client meeting" by our office's rather narrow definition of a client  meeting! That's it - no other oversight at all - I don't supervise her in any way at all. I do this element of it bc someone has to, and it's just convenient enough for that portion of the job to fall to my team, and I am assigned to her. Otherwise, my role is mostly about getting research done. 

Only, while she's been here more than year and has been in this type of job for a while, she keeps labeling things as "client meeting" which absolutely do not even close to meet that standard. Like, not even close. And after each one, I have to email her, and say, "Did you mean for this to be a 'client meeting' because it doesn't meet the standards in x, y, and z way - please clarify." and then wait for her response and tell her how to fix it. 

No one else makes this kind of mistake. Everyone else who submits these kind of reports to me, which is currently like 10 people, ever has this issue, and it's not based on a misunderstanding.  My colleague, who used to these reports for this one person, warned me that this was coming, and that's why I even noticed these, because I don't normally have to scrutinize these reports very carefully at all. I've had to issue this same email to this one annoying person about four or five times now, in the course of maybe a month, when I have had to approach this issue maybe once in the last year for anyone else. 

And I have a meeting with her today, in an hour, and I am just annoyed by the fact that I am going to have to handle her weird feelings about this and also reinforce, again, that this rule exists. I don't care about the rule! I just have to enforce it, and it's REALLY unprofessional and a waste of my time to have to spend effort on this. 

Comments

[author_by_night]

That's so odd! Wonder if she's trying to be misleading or if she's just clueless. Not fun for you to have to manage either way. :/

[phi]

Ugh, I'm sorry. How annoying. Is this the same person who did the petty bullshit of not introducing you at the handoff meeting?

[kitewithfish]

Nope! That one is pretty much out of my professional life except in minor tangents

[yourlibrarian]

Either this person is doing this deliberately or they must be quite incompetent, because this doesn't sound difficult at all. Are you at all involved with their performance review, as in reporting to their supervisor about it?

[kitewithfish]

The number of client meetings is, in fact, a metric she is judged on and she has been v behind in it. But the money matters more, so if she were effective on that front, the meeting numbers would be overlooked.

I'm not involved in her review in any direct way, this is not a supervision thing. It's just a 'don't put trash in the database to make yourself look good'.

If she wasn't desperate and also kind of useless and unpleasant, she wouldn't try this crap and I wouldn't mind addressing it with her. But she treats me like admin staff and not a colleague, Sooo, not super motivated to help her fix the problem.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

ah, the joy of metrics. :D

[thenewbuzwuzz]

My colleagues habitually track birthday celebrations as "meetings", because if you're in a meeting then that adds to the percentage of time spent "efficiently", which affects our bonus. So they're like, "can we get away with pretending cake is a meeting even though our supervisor specifically told us not to do that, or will we have to settle for tracking it as "non-project task?" Meanwhile I'm going, "guys. this is a break. it could not be more breaklike."

[tropicsbear]

That's such a weird thing to make mistakes on. I hope the meeting went well and you didn't end up with a giant headache.