free at last

At long last, my days of training are over. Apparently, management has either decided that I now know what I’m doing or that they’ve simply given up and are going to let me single handedly sink the entire company. Either way, my Donna days are done.

Donna, the lady who has been ‘training’ me, made her final appearance the other day. It had come to my attention that one of my duties in the billing department was to prepare the quarterly reports for company board meetings. Having seen nothing about this responsibility previously in the training manual, I was told that it fell under the ‘other tasks as assigned’ category.

So Donna, in her swan song appearance, was going to help train me in the ways of board member report preparation. Donna, having last worked in the billing department 15 years ago, has proved to be unhelpful with the whole helping thing…and this time was no different. She pulled up old Microsoft Works files that hadn’t been opened in over a decade and began typing, merging, and printing various documents that would be included in the portfolios which would be distributed at the next board meeting.

“Now go grab those papers I printed and start filling in the projected profits for the upcoming quarter in the blank spaces on the sheet,” she told me.

I had learned that handwritten information was the preferred way of doing things in the Training by Donna handbook. A few weeks prior, I had made the stupid assumption that typing, rather than writing, would be faster and look more professional on company documents. Donna’s response was to severely reprimand me by yelling, “THAT’S NOT THE WAY WE DO THINGS AROUND HERE!”

After pulling the papers from the printer, I sat down to begin filling in the projected profits for the upcoming forth quarter and realized that ‘forth’ was not the correct way of spelling ‘fourth’. Yet Donna didn’t seem to realize this, having just printed out many sheets of paper with projected figures for the forth quarter. Trying hard to hide my glee, I pointed this mistake out to Donna.

“Of course it’s correct!” she informed me. “How else would you spell ‘forth’?”
To which I replied, “F-O-U-R-T-H. The way you spelled it means to go forth…like going forth into the future.”

“WELL THE LAST QUARTER HASN’T HAPPENED YET, HAS IT?! SO THEY ARE GOING FORTH! Besides, no one reads these reports anyway, SO JUST KEEP STUFFING THEM INTO THE FOLDERS LIKE I TOLD YOU TO!”

Knowing that her error would be credited to me, I waited until Donna left and stayed long after quitting time fixing her mistake, consoling myself with the knowledge that I would no longer have Donna in my life.

Which is good, because all the extra work I end up doing by undoing Donna’s training was adding several hours to my work week.