Saturday, March 20, 2010
Vexatious to the spiritI have had an interesting couple of work weeks with two very difficult volunteers at one of our shops. They are husband and wife, and they both think I am the worst person on the planet. Well, at least the last couple of weeks it has been me. I’m sure it changes with frightening regularity.
We have had a few work-related phone calls, some of them have gone better than others, and there has been a frightening regularity in the faxes, all in capital letters, containing very specific orders for me and my organisation. These orders are frequently ignored by my manager who hopes that these volunteers will get bored and go away. Apparently I am a bossy, uppity secretary with no common-sense who is in league with the lazy woman who is the other coordinator, protecting her from getting fired and encouraging her to be lazy so that the shop can go further downhill as it fills up with more and more rubbish furniture instead of the clothes we should be selling. My manager and I were surprised to discover that I, and not my manger, was behind all the ‘ridiculous’ decisions that have ever been made, that I have been hiding those weekly shouty faxes my manager received. Even when my manager spoke to both the husband and the wife in person and told them that none of those decisions had been made by me, that they were all directives from the manager, even then they did not believe him.
I was pretty pissed off at first, but it has become clear whilst attempting to disengage ourselves from these two that they will believe and say anything that suits their purposes, and instead I have become kind of amused by watching these delusions lurch along entirely under their own steam. Their view of me, my manager, of the shop, of our organisation is so foreign to me and so removed from reality its hard to see how they got to that point. Actually; “women are stupid” and “big organisations are always out to exploit their workers” and “head office doesn’t know what they are doing” and “everything I think is true and right” and “I should be in charge” would get you a fair part of the way to that point.
I’m hoping that one of two things happens - that they are either so desperate to keep the drama going that they get bored by our lack of response and turn their attention to other matters (hopefully not other people, but the chances are slim) in order to maintain that rush; or that they are satiated and will go away now and rest for a while. In either case, I feel sorry for the charity they have already moved on to. Always ask for references.
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