Speaking of things things that are here, then just go away and sometimes (please, dear god) come back again...

First off, I have to admit that I am still cold and cranky and probably will be until at least April or so. I am probably allowing my bitterness over the premature end of fall to impact my extreme hostility towards Special K at the moment.

I am the big spender in the company. I rack up hundreds of thousands of charges without batting an eyelash--EXCEPT that the boss lady is a penny-pincher, and thus I scrutinze every invoice that crosses my desk, knowing that if I don't she'll call me out on it later. Raw material costs went up since you created an estimate for us 4 years ago? She doesn't care, she thinks that we should be invoiced exactly what you quoted in 2003. The cost of fuel has gone up and therefore affected shipping charges? Well, it just so happens that we don't acknowledge fuel surcharges here, so can you please delete that line item? It's retarded. But I am used to retarded around here.

So on Monday I was doing my oh-so-favorite task of reviewing and coding invoices to pass along to our accountant, including one with a couple of charges that were actually the responsibility of a partnering institution. So I carefully marked up one copy of the original invoice for accountant, telling her exactly what to pay, and exactly what amount of foreign currency to order a check for in order to settle the bill. The other copy of the invoice was to be submitted with our payment, so again, I carefully marked it up to show the subtraction of the contested charges.

Our accountant ordered a check in foreign currency, then carefully explained to Special K that when it arrived, she was to:

1) make a photocopy of the check for her records
2) give the check and the marked-up invoice to me

This shouldn't require explanation, we do it very frequently and have for years, but we know what we're dealing with here...

The check arrived when I was at lunch, and Special K dutifully photocopied the check, and left the original (AND a copy of the purchase order for which I have utterly no use) on my chair. But no coded invoice. I thought perhaps our Accountant had forgotten to give Special K the invoice, so I went up to her office and explained that I really needed that copy back to send with the check, since it was critical to understanding why we were submitting payment for less than the full amount of the invoice. Seh said that K had been instructed to return it to me, and sent me back to Special K, who first claimed to have given it to the Accountant, then claimed to have given it to me, then shrugged and said it had just mysteriously disappeared.

I have actually asked her to call the foreign currency check issuer to see if she might have somehow handed it off to their courier (which would not be surprising--although I would expect her to randomly hand off odd pieces of our mail with it). So far that has turned up nothing. I also requested that she go through the various "files" on her desk (not really files, per se, as they have absolutely no order other than being an assortment of colored folders into which she inserts papers in an entirely random fashion). I even told her to look through her trash, since I have seen her sitting in her chair for long periods over the past few days and randomly tossing papers into her bin--I am quite certain that she is probably tossing critical financial records, and holding on to old annual leave requests from 1996. But alas, no luck.

I guess it's time to give up and request another from the issuer of the invoice, but as we all know around here, the second I do, the one I have been seeking will probably mysteriously appear on my coworker's chair. Grr.

Bye bye, Miss M's files...

In our company, we often work years out on projects that may or may not materialize. There will be a flurry of activity--endless emails back and forth, contracts, diagrams, lists, letters. Then suddenly it goes dormant for months on end. Sometimes we resume it, sometimes we get an email saying "The Watkins project is off. Please give all your files to Special K."

A couple of years ago, we began work on a particularly complicated project. Many contributors, many extra facets of the budget--it was a regular pain in my ass for quite a while, but I kept painstaking records in neatly organized files. It went quiet for months, then The Boss Lady called out of the blue and asked for a particular file. "No worries!" I thought, but then opened our F drive to discover, um, Project Malaysia was gone. No sign of ANY of my Word files existed.

Now, Special K has, on occasion, accidentally moved files around. And hey, it happens. I have accidentally mucked things up before, too--I just call our computer person, D, sort it out quickly, and let anyone who might have been affected know. I debated about whether to put Special K on the spot, but after hours of searching my computer and the entire F drive, it was clear that they were gone.

So I begrudgingly trekked up to Special K's desk, and asked "Special K, do you know if there is any chance that you might have moved any of the files for Project Malaysia?" She immediately got defensive and huffy, saying no, that was none of her business and she certainly would not do anything with those files. I guess that in and of itself was a bit of a sign, so I decided to give up on trying to get a straight answer and called D instead.

D came over almost immediately, and she and I started delving into the stash of backup tapes, going back several months to finally find and recover all the files that had been lost. But in showing her the folder and what I suspected had happened, we made a startling realization. Special K was, in fact, aware of this situation well before I mentioned it to her. Special K must have deleted not only all MY files, but her own, as well. Because in a careful, methodical way, she had been retyping each document from hard-copies for the past couple of months. She still had a ways to go, but when I asked D whether we should just bring Special K up to speed and explain that we could restore them, she rolled her eyes and said, "No, if she wants that, she has to be willing to admit that she messed up."

For the next several weeks, any time I walked past her desk, she was dutifully pecking away at the keyboard with two fingers, looking back and forth between hard copies of letters and her screen. Poor Special K, I almost wanted to be helpful and tell her I understood. I never did.