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Evil Assistant, Part II.
Last Saturday, I think it was, I started out a post with Evil Assistant stories from my former job. I certainly intended to tell a few more before going into how she was (finally) fired this year.
She always claimed herself to be a good communicator and a people person, and described herself that way on her annual evaluations. Hah. I'd seen her ask someone a question and then either interrupt the answer, or turn around and walk away while the person was answering her. I could never talk to her without being interrupted, and she claimed she enver itnerrupted even when I told her flat-out that she was interrupting me at the exact moment she did it.
She was also intimidated by knowledge that other poeple had. If you showed evidence that you might know the least little bit more about a subject than she did - which was fairly easy since she never did much outside reading or learning of anything - then she accused you of trying to make her look stupid. We had a go-round about the word "stet" - you writer-type people know that it's a term used in editing and proofreading that means the text marked for corrections should remain as it was. My previous boss and I had used it all the time when cataloging our slides, because you always write something down on the paper, then change it, then realize you had it right the first time, and this was easier than redoing the page. Well, she'd never ehard that term. And was mighty suspicious of me for using it - thought I made it up. Because she'd been proofreading for YEARS and had never, ever, ever come across that term before.
She also hated that the webpage for the college staff had our degrees listed on it - she'd go around bitching at length about how a degree didn't mean you knew something and how you could perfectly good at a job without having a degree. Which is true. However, we were working at a institute that GRANTS DEGREES. And she's surprised that this institution places a high value on staff members who have degrees? Bitch, please.
She and her husband were childfree, by choice. As she would tell you at great length if you happened to, say, remind her that the receptacle for recylable cans was just outside the library door. That would trigger a rant about how the worst problem facing the world today was overpopulation, so she and her husband had chosen not to have kids and therefore she didn't recycle cans. Apparently not having children gets you a get-out-of-recycling-cans-free card.
And then there was the time when one of our former student workers showed up six months pregnant to explain to us that she was dropping out of school for the first year of the kid's life and thus wouldn't be working for us that fall. Once TEA (The Evil Assistant) found out the pregnancy was unplanned, she flat-out asked the student if she couldn't go ahead and get an abortion so she could come back to school that fall. At six months. And then ranted to me in the back with "If *I* had a daughter, I'd make her get an abortion!" Which I managed to short-circuit by saying calmly and reasonably, "Well, if *I* had a daughter I would support her in whatever decision *she* made," which at least made TEA blink, consider what she'd just said, and ungracefully agree that that was what she meant.
She also lacked the ability to use deductive reasoning, for the most obvious of problems. In cataloging, we had to write down the dimensions of paintings. Once she was cataloging a slide of Ryder's The Race Track, and found a website that gave the dimensions as 70 cm x 1 cm. And wrote that down. When I called her on it, she said that she thought it looked funny, but went ahead and wrote it down anyway. Erg. This should be a GIANT BLINKING NEON SIGN that there is somethng wrong with that!
And my final story of the day: the bomber story.
One of our grad student workers was a Korean student, who'd been in the Korean Marines before coming here to get his Masters in architecture. He was very very good and precise in slide processing, and we found out that one of his jobs in the Marines had been building bombs, so of course he was very exact and precise. (I was all about putting that as a 'Preferred Qualification' in the job description, but I figure the school wouldn't have let me. XD)
Anyway, TEA tended to use a lot of hippie slang - she liked to talk about her hippie days, but if you calculated her age, she was in her mid-teens at the height of the hippie movement and was 20 in 1975, so she was a wee bit young to really be a part of the movement, I think. One of the words she used a lot was "Bummer."
After a few weeks, our Korean student got really withdrawn and didn't want to talk to her. This bothered TEA because OF COURSE everyone wants to talk to her! She's a people person! And a good communicator! She's everyone's friend! She eventually asked him and found out that he thought she'd been calling him a bomber when she said "bummer."
OK, reasonable misunderstanding, easy to clear up with an explanation and an apology, right?
No! SHE got angry at him and REFUSED to apologize because "HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN I WOULD NEVER DO A THING LIKE THAT!" I had zero sympathy and patience with her for that and told her point-blank that I refused to assign any responsibility to him over the situation because it was completely unrealistic to expect someone whose first language was not English to know California surfer slang.
Never made a dent on her. She had a martyr complex, by the way. In case you hadn't figured that out by now.
Off to lunch! Perhaps more later!
Last Saturday, I think it was, I started out a post with Evil Assistant stories from my former job. I certainly intended to tell a few more before going into how she was (finally) fired this year.
She always claimed herself to be a good communicator and a people person, and described herself that way on her annual evaluations. Hah. I'd seen her ask someone a question and then either interrupt the answer, or turn around and walk away while the person was answering her. I could never talk to her without being interrupted, and she claimed she enver itnerrupted even when I told her flat-out that she was interrupting me at the exact moment she did it.
She was also intimidated by knowledge that other poeple had. If you showed evidence that you might know the least little bit more about a subject than she did - which was fairly easy since she never did much outside reading or learning of anything - then she accused you of trying to make her look stupid. We had a go-round about the word "stet" - you writer-type people know that it's a term used in editing and proofreading that means the text marked for corrections should remain as it was. My previous boss and I had used it all the time when cataloging our slides, because you always write something down on the paper, then change it, then realize you had it right the first time, and this was easier than redoing the page. Well, she'd never ehard that term. And was mighty suspicious of me for using it - thought I made it up. Because she'd been proofreading for YEARS and had never, ever, ever come across that term before.
She also hated that the webpage for the college staff had our degrees listed on it - she'd go around bitching at length about how a degree didn't mean you knew something and how you could perfectly good at a job without having a degree. Which is true. However, we were working at a institute that GRANTS DEGREES. And she's surprised that this institution places a high value on staff members who have degrees? Bitch, please.
She and her husband were childfree, by choice. As she would tell you at great length if you happened to, say, remind her that the receptacle for recylable cans was just outside the library door. That would trigger a rant about how the worst problem facing the world today was overpopulation, so she and her husband had chosen not to have kids and therefore she didn't recycle cans. Apparently not having children gets you a get-out-of-recycling-cans-free card.
And then there was the time when one of our former student workers showed up six months pregnant to explain to us that she was dropping out of school for the first year of the kid's life and thus wouldn't be working for us that fall. Once TEA (The Evil Assistant) found out the pregnancy was unplanned, she flat-out asked the student if she couldn't go ahead and get an abortion so she could come back to school that fall. At six months. And then ranted to me in the back with "If *I* had a daughter, I'd make her get an abortion!" Which I managed to short-circuit by saying calmly and reasonably, "Well, if *I* had a daughter I would support her in whatever decision *she* made," which at least made TEA blink, consider what she'd just said, and ungracefully agree that that was what she meant.
She also lacked the ability to use deductive reasoning, for the most obvious of problems. In cataloging, we had to write down the dimensions of paintings. Once she was cataloging a slide of Ryder's The Race Track, and found a website that gave the dimensions as 70 cm x 1 cm. And wrote that down. When I called her on it, she said that she thought it looked funny, but went ahead and wrote it down anyway. Erg. This should be a GIANT BLINKING NEON SIGN that there is somethng wrong with that!
And my final story of the day: the bomber story.
One of our grad student workers was a Korean student, who'd been in the Korean Marines before coming here to get his Masters in architecture. He was very very good and precise in slide processing, and we found out that one of his jobs in the Marines had been building bombs, so of course he was very exact and precise. (I was all about putting that as a 'Preferred Qualification' in the job description, but I figure the school wouldn't have let me. XD)
Anyway, TEA tended to use a lot of hippie slang - she liked to talk about her hippie days, but if you calculated her age, she was in her mid-teens at the height of the hippie movement and was 20 in 1975, so she was a wee bit young to really be a part of the movement, I think. One of the words she used a lot was "Bummer."
After a few weeks, our Korean student got really withdrawn and didn't want to talk to her. This bothered TEA because OF COURSE everyone wants to talk to her! She's a people person! And a good communicator! She's everyone's friend! She eventually asked him and found out that he thought she'd been calling him a bomber when she said "bummer."
OK, reasonable misunderstanding, easy to clear up with an explanation and an apology, right?
No! SHE got angry at him and REFUSED to apologize because "HE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN I WOULD NEVER DO A THING LIKE THAT!" I had zero sympathy and patience with her for that and told her point-blank that I refused to assign any responsibility to him over the situation because it was completely unrealistic to expect someone whose first language was not English to know California surfer slang.
Never made a dent on her. She had a martyr complex, by the way. In case you hadn't figured that out by now.
Off to lunch! Perhaps more later!
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2) At least she's agreed NOT TO BREED.
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We think maybe he had a complex about fathering someone - she was certainly incapable of taking care of herself.
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I hate people like this.
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I found out that her father had died of Alzheimer's, and now I have to wonder how much of her persnality was just her and how much of it might be the very earliest stages of Alzheimer's.
At any rate, I am so glad that I'm not dealing with her anymore.
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I am stunned that she wasn't fired on the spot for this. If I had been the pregnant student in question, I would have gone straight to the administration and demanded her head on a platter. Just...WTF?!
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It also didn't help that this particular library was part of a state-owned school, and it takes nothing less than an Act of God to get someone fired. And that *I* didn't have the power to fire; my boss did, and she spent most of the day in her office outside of the library so she didn't have to deal with TEA on a regular basis and it never hit critical mass with her. *eye twitches*
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*Note: Actually, I hate American Idol.
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*Er. Well, mostly.