Throbbing Forehead Vein, Feel My Rage

I can take only so much bureaucratic stupidity and I snap like a gym towel on a hot chick’s ass. The details aren’t important as much as the general stupidity and laziness I’ve encountered these past few days. The source? The impression that job X isn’t in bureaucrat Z’s job description.

Even though it really is.

There’s nothing more frustrating than having to be the middle man for the simplest of tasks. To hold the hands of other adults. To outline to them, in excruciating detail, how to do their job. Like informing them when they fix a teacher’s computer, they need to go ahead and pick it up off the floor and reinstall it, instead of just leaving it there so it can sit for weeks unnoticed, assumed to still be broken.

I seriously blew a gasket this morning when I walked into the classroom and bore witness to a fixed machine lying exactly where I put it two months ago. Fixed, though no one knew that tiny detail except the bureaucrat, who kept it to herself for, what, national security reasons?

I guess this is my version of the TPS report, though not really. It inspires the same rage, but it’s mostly just me cleaning up after someone else’s laziness and inability to communicate with their fellow human beings. It’s the lousy attitude that chafes me the most. I suspect it comes from the difference between salaried and hourly employees. The former is often asked to do a myriad of duties outside their official job description. I think the latter does too, but I find them much more likely to balk when asked to do something they don’t want to do.

Like shelving books, for example. I’ve got four assistants that “help” with returning library books to the shelf. It’s mindless work, to be sure, but a certain precision is required. Otherwise, a mis-shelved book is as good as lost. One of assistants hates shelving books. Her solution? To deliberately mis-shelve them in hopes for reassignment. She actually bragged about her strategy to a crowded teacher’s lounge, catching herself at the last moment when she realized her mixed audience. Another assistant whispered the frank confession to me immediately. When I confronted the conniving assistant, she freaked out on me, accused me of talking down to her and motioning to her “like a dog,” and then ended the conversation by asking me if “I was threatening her.”

Smart enough to deflect and distract when caught, not smart enough to stealthily go about the business of injecting chaos into library book shelves.

Part of the problem is I can tell these kinds of employees have an exaggerated notion of their importance to the school that runs counter to their actual abilities and performance. They feel empowered enough to analyze whether they feel like doing a requested task, even completely reasonable, though admittedly onerous, jobs. And when they deliberately work slowly or bungle the task, they implicitly communicate, “Wadda ya gonna do, fire me?” In this kind of economy, maybe! I can only hope that qualified applications increase right along with the nation’s unemployment rate. I’d like to see a bit of humility out of some of these people, a snap in their step, a scurry to get something done, rather than the usual hunched shoulders, eye rolling, and foot shuffling I usually get.

I’m making it sound like the majority of people at my school are degenerate slugs. They aren’t. It’s just a handful that seems to exaggerate the impression.

And get my forehead vein throbbing to the bursting point.