I Hate The People I Work With

The clucking was extensive, as predicted. For the most part, everyone thought Tasha was an idiot; any truth in her statements was lost--and for the record, there was plenty of truth.



But that wasn't the worst of today.



They're moving the computers from the other building--at my behest, because I wasn't going to have another deal where stuff disappears from the storage closet and I get blamed. Once was plenty.



Well, I told them to put everything in the conference room, and they did--including a bunch of crappy old machines with big orange tags that say "Please Throw Away". And I'm told, at about 3 PM, that they need that room tomorrow and I have to get those computers out of there. So I did--or rather, I tried to. No sooner did I get someone to help me, than there she is--Gramma Busybody, Noreen. "Don't we have to wipe those hard drives?"



EVERY SINGLE TIME we have disposed of computers, she has done the same thing. And if she had a scintilla of technical knowledge, I might take her seriously!! But she heard about something in the media, somewhere from someone about some way to maybe take data off hard drives--which a) no one would bother to do, since these machines are old, broken, crappy, useless, and (most importantly) HAVEN'T BEEN USED TO STORE SENSITIVE DATA. She has no idea what "wiping a hard drive" is--only that someone says you ought to do it, and if someone says you ought to do something, then of COURSE that means she's in charge of making sure it's done.



So my helper and I go out and carry 2 computers and 6 monitors out to the dumpster. I come back in, all hot and sweaty, and of course the subject has been dropped and I get back to work.



Oh, wait--that only happened in a parallel universe where things actually went RIGHT.



I come back in, all hot and sweaty, and immediately THREE OTHER PEOPLE besides Noreen start giving me shit about "oh, you're gonna get us in trouble" and "hey, when you go to jail can I have your truck?" Stella, Maude, and Delora all start telling me "oh, you can't throw stuff away--didn't you get that e-mail?"



Okay. Now, as it happened, I did--but I didn't remember it, because we didn't have any computers to dispose of and we had already gotten rid of all the old ones, or so I thought. So the e-mail had kinda flown under my radar--I'll admit it.



But by this time, I was so fucking pissed that it didn't even MATTER to me what the e-mail had or had not said.



See, here's the thing. Noreen is CONSTANTLY questioning my professional judgement. It pisses me off beyond all comprehension; further, it wastes catastrophic amounts of time. With the amount of stuff I have to do, I can't afford to pacify some interfering old bat who has no knowledge of what it is I actually do, and resists any of my explanations as to why her misguided notions do not apply in a given case.



Thus, I've learned to ignore her--because I don't have time to do otherwise. What pissed me off most about this situation was, in this case she actually HAD information that could have saved me a bunch of work--but because she's constantly deluging me with irrelevant information, I've had to learn to shut out her commentary. If she didn't talk so much about things she didn't know about, things that aren't even her business, I might actually LISTEN when she had something useful to tell me!



Furthermore, when she feels like she's not being listened to, rather than dealing with it appropriately--either talking to me directly or talking to my supervisor--she brings in still MORE unrelated people and discusses my transgressions with THEM. There was no reason at all for me to have to answer to Stella, Maude, and Delora--ESPECIALLY the first two. The first two don't even know what a hard drive IS, let alone why it would allegedly be bad to throw one away.



As it turned out, the e-mail wasn't so much about wiping hard drives as it was about EPA regulations, which was fine. The problem wasn't that I was wrong--it was how it was handled. I called Amy and told her "I'm really tired of Noreen constantly second-guessing me." She was concerned about how I'd "missed" the e-mail, but she acknowledged how it "might be frustrating" to have Noreen constantly second-guessing me. (Ya think???)



I ended up having to go out to the trash and haul two computers and six monitors back into the building--by myself, since my helper had left during the brouhaha. I put them in the basement, since they just HAD to be out of the way--and then I left. I wasted an hour doing that crap, and I've got a TON of stuff that was WAY higher-priority than that. I could have stayed late--sure--but not after that.



If I was feeling REALLY ballsy, I'd stay home tomorrow and say I hurt my back lifting all those heavy monitors.