The many sides of my co-worker

[amkxoxo]

So I just started this job about 9 months ago and everything seems to be going okay. It is a small office with only about 6 of us, which I thinks adds to it being so casual.

 

The secretary for the office is extremely nice, but sometimes she has been getting on my nerves. She will text me when I am out sick to see how I am. Has offered to come to my house to bring me things. She seems like a super nice person, but in the last few months she and I have been butting heads at work somewhat.

 

I am supposed to be responsible for the 3 interns we have in the office. She is responsible for college workers we hire part time. More times than not, she is questioning what the interns are doing, what I have them doing, and she tries to be in control of them. Now I know that before me she did have a stint where she had to oversee them, but it is my job to do that. It has gotten to the point where she questions the interns so much about what tasks they are doing, that they get annoyed with her and think she is down their throats.

 

She will email me to ask what a certain person is doing, because she can see their computer and it doesn't look like they are doing work. I am just out of college, so I know most likely the interns aren't doing work I gave them. They are in college. I do not need to justify the tasks or run them by her.

 

She also drives me crazy about her work load. She complains she does so much work and has her hand in so many pots, and that she doesn't get paid enough. At first I could see that, but now that I have been here for a long while, I see that she pushes herself into some of these tasks. She does more work than she needs to do. Yes, she has certain necessary job requirements, but I often catch her talking to my other co-worker, and myself, about stuff that pertains to our jobs and not hers. She shoves her nose into the project and then complains she is doing so much work.

 

When I came here, she was doing a task that interested me, so I took a lot of the task on for myself. She doesn't need to do it anymore, but she still does. It drives me crazy. She actually makes it harder on me to get it done, because I feel I have to work with her the whole time, instead of bumping it out myself.

 

Most recently I got angry at her because she made a mistake and blamed me for it.

 

I am still learning, but she will sometimes criticize the way that I format and write things. Our boss taught her many tasks when she first got here, 5 years ago. Many of the things she is doing are outdated. When I offer up new ideas that I think are beneficial, she shoots them all down, because she claims this is the way he told her to do it. I understand, but that was so long ago, and frankly our boss doesn't care as much anymore, as long as we don't mess up royally. He is so busy, that we often make changes to things and he has no idea.

 

We were supposed to be formatting a flyer to go out from our office. She said she would write up the content, and I could make it look pretty, which is more my job. She formatted up the content and sent it to me. The wording she chose was horrible. We were offering an early bird special that was $100, normally $150.

 

Instead of writing Save $50 dollars with the early bird, she wrote Only $50 dollars for the early bird.

 

I was shocked she would write this since she often judges so closely what I write on things. I told her of her mistake and told her I would fix it. I fixed the wording, but something went wrong. Either I didn't save the fixed version, or she went out the wrong copy. The "Only $50" went out to the public. We started getting calls about the deal, and had to honor it. She immediately blamed me saying I said I would fix it. I told her that I did and that it was her wording. It was just a misunderstanding, but I did not like that it fell on my back, like I wrote those words. She wrote the words to begin with and she costed us money.

 

She is a very nice person and she does a lot for our office, but some of the stuff is not in her job description and she doesn't need to be involved in. She even tries to learn computer skills only I have, which makes me mad. That is why I am here.

 

Like right now she is in talking to our boss in his office. She will often have conversation with our co-worker, or me, and then she runs into our boss' office to almost give him the down low on our conversations. This makes me mad because its not like I wasn't going to talk to him about it. Especially if it is about my job. But she almost tries to make herself look very proactive to our boss.

Edited August 17, 2015 by amkxoxo