Canadian students in a lecture hall - not my students, but students nonetheless

Some of you might recall a little over a year ago when I wrote about how I was getting a little suspicious of the online learning environment and its influence on student achievement. In short, that blog entry talked about how I was unimpressed at the amount of classes that the online college I work for allowed their students to take at a single time. Further, I’ve been continually unimpressed by the inability for my online students to write in an academically acceptable manner or conform to basic academic formatting standards. Frankly, my students are not great writers nor do they give a damn about the required academic formats (APA, MLA, etc) when submitting their papers.

And still – as aggravating as those issues may be to an educator, believe it or not the focus of this article is something different! Today, my unnecessary complication is the with the attitudes of my online learners. To put it succinctly, these students don’t understand the first thing about the teacher/student relationship! Actually, there is a second annoyance that I’ve been encountering with my students which has to do with their inability to comprehend the nature of the online learning environment, but let me bitch about the teacher/student relationship first!

I’ve been continually amazed at how poorly prepared for the advanced learning environment some of my online learners are when my classes start. Now granted, I’m not talking about the entire class of students nor am I referring to even half of the class. However, at least 10% to 15% of each class that I teach is comprised of students who do not understand their role in the teacher/student relationship. Let me define that a little bit more…

I do not expect my students to be rote learners like we’re all stuck in the 1950’s or something. Instead, I expect my students to understand that they are not my customers – they are my students. This is a big topic of discussion in the higher education circles: whether the people who sit in the classrooms are customers/consumers or students. And, to my great disappointment, the trend is pushing more towards students being viewed as customers instead of seekers of knowledge or impassioned learners.

This is a big problem.

Defining a student as a consumer puts the student in a position to believe (incorrectly) that they can control the flow of work in the class (homework and weekly assignments) or the requirements for passing the class (grading metrics and evaluation rubrics). Why does this happen? Well, it happens for the same reason that, as a consumer, you can bitch and moan to your local auto mechanic and get your bill lowered. Namely… the customer is always right!

Exacerbating this problem is that this customer/teacher relationship just doesn’t work well in online learning (or higher education in general). In fact, it is the job of the college to tell these “customers” when they are dead wrong. At some point I hope to write a longer piece on this blog about how creating the customer vs. student scenario has led to the painful destruction of what should be a great American academic system. For now, though, my focus is on how some of my students believe that they can dictate my grading schedule. It’s outrageous! I had a student e-mail me two weeks before the class ended to tell me that he expected his final grade to be completed within 12 hours of his final paper being submitted (which was due the following weekend) because he needed to report his grade to the company that funds his education. After laughing out loud, I e-mailed the student back and explained that there is a ten day period between when the final student work is submitted and the final grades are due and that he should expect to see his final grade at some point towards the end of that ten day period.

He began e-mailing me every single day about his final grade. The student started contacting me one day prior to the class ending through the middle of the ten day period, which was when I had completed my final grading and submitted his grade for posting. Luckily, the online university was on my side in this debacle because – believe it or not – the student had been contacting the university daily, too!

For the last course that I taught, I had five or six of these unnecessary student complications. Again, all of this stems from the idea that the student is a customer and not a person being evaluated for his or her academic capabilities.

To finish up, the other item that annoys me about the online learning environment is the lack of online learners to understand how this arrangement is supposed to work. The best example that I can give is the students themselves – these are good people who, for one reason or another, could not attend college during the traditional time in one’s life where they would attend college (right after high school or a few years after high school ended). Maybe they started a family, maybe they took over the family business, maybe they had a job in the trades and are only now going back to get a degree – whatever the case, these folks are typically hard-working, already employed people on crazy schedules.

And I totally respect that fact. In fact, I encourage more people who are not of the traditional college age to seek out methods to procure college degrees.

What shocks me, though, is that these online learners don’t take a minute to do the least bit of research on the people who teach their classes because if they did – surprise, surprise – they’d find out that their professors are in the same boat! We’re typically teaching at two or three universities and, in my case, I’ve got a variety of jobs and volunteer positions that take up all of my time. In other words, when I have a “customer” student complaining that they want their grade to be submitted first and ten days earlier than the rest of the class, it makes me want to punch the wall. There’s an arrogance – an ignorance of reality – in that request. There’s a certain, “I’m in charge and I’m paying you for my degree so fork over what I want, when I want it – NOW!” in that type of request.

It’s unacceptable and I hope that my fellow online teachers are approaching these problems the same way that I do – with the knowledge that we have an obligation to uphold the academic standards of our institutions and thus we need to be sure that the teacher/student relationship as well as the teaching environment are both preserved and respected.

Let’s see if I can do it!

Do you know people who blindly follow everything that the leaders of their chosen political party or political point of view say? You know – that friend of yours who never thinks that anything a Republican/Democrat (depends on your friend’s point of view) does is worth any good at all. These people bother me. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of these brainwashed people from both sides of the aisle emerge over the national debt debate. There are conservative minded people who think that the government should stop spending money, period. There are liberal minded people who think that the debt ceiling should have no limit because they don’t think it matters. And then there are the vast majority of Americans who believe that something needs to be done that includes both spending cuts and getting rid of loopholes that allow the ultra wealthy to not pay their fair share in taxes.

In other words, there are people who understand that compromise is the right way to go and there are people who have a blind allegiance to whatever one political party says.

Those people with the blind allegiance frustrate me.

However, forget about the national debate over the debt limit for a moment. There’s an example much closer to home that frustrates me even more. Here in New Jersey we have a very healthy charter school system. For those of you who do not know what a charter school is – it’s a free, public school just like any other public school. There are two primary differences between a charter school and the traditional public school system. The first is that a charter school does not operate under the thumb of the local Board of Education. They’re independent and not beholden to the sometimes crazy local politics that shape local Boards of Education.

The second difference is funding. You know all of that money that you pay in property taxes? Well, that money is filtered through the system in New Jersey a “per pupil” amount is decided for each school district. Ideally, you should be able to track your property tax dollars throughout the system and ultimately say something like, “My 2010 property taxes paid for X students to be educated in the local school district.” Except for charter schools. Yes, they are funded through the same revenue stream as the regular school districts, except they only get 90% of the “per pupil” funding.

Two major differences – independent of the local school board and given less money in an attempt to do a better job at educating your students. Got it? Good!

If you’ve followed the charter school movement in New Jersey, then you know that they are admired by both Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike. In fact, Governor Chris Christie has ramped up many of the charter school programs that were supported or enacted under former Governor Jon Corzine. There has been a gradual increase in the amount of charter schools operating throughout the Garden State – I think we’re at 70 something schools now. And the most important note to mention about the charter schools operating in New Jersey is that, by and large, they are succeeding.

All you have to do is look at schools like TEAM Academy Charter School in Newark or Camden’s Promise Charter School in Camden or Hope Academy Charter School in Asbury Park and you’ll find students whose parents have rejected the local school districts and are now achieving levels of academic success never before thought possible in these districts. It’s happening, folks – and it’s real. There are a lot of people out there who try to marginalize the charter school movement and their arguments are pretty lame. One of the biggest arguments that I hear goes something like, “Charter schools are private schools! They take money from the public system for a private school!”

That’s totally ridiculous.

Charter schools are totally free, public schools that you can send your child to if you so choose. If there are not enough seats in the charter school to accommodate all of the applicants, then the school holds a public lottery to allocate the seats. It doesn’t get any fairer than that, people.

But what aggravates me the most and what drove me to write this entry is that many of today’s complainers about charter schools didn’t say a word a few years ago when Corzine was governor. Not a word. In fact, many of them lauded the great work that Corzine was doing to support quality charter schools throughout the state. And now we have a very strong, very well-liked Republican governor in a predominantly Democratic state and all of a sudden the supporters of charter schools have become detractors.

It’s sad. It’s pathetic. It’s blind political allegiance.

Mark my words – as soon as a Democrat becomes the governor of this state again, you won’t hear a single peep out of the hate groups that run around these days lambasting Governor Christie’s heroic efforts to support the charter school movement. Those with blind political allegiance will hoot and holler about how great the Democratic governor is and how he or she is fixing all of the problems that Governor Christie “created.”

And amid all of that rubbish there will be nearly no truth.

The truth is that charter schools have succeeded under Republican and Democratic governors alike. The truth is that charter schools have been given a tremendous amount of support under Republican and Democratic governors alike. And the truth is that this state’s politics are so wallowed in people with a fiercely blind political allegiance that those of us with independent voices must continue to shout to be heard above the chorus of blind hatred.

I wonder how long it can last. I wonder how long before someone takes these blind political zealots to task. For the sake of the future of this great state, I hope that day comes very, very soon.

FYE.com Has Horrible Customer Service

Now remember, I hadn’t regularly watched NBA games since I was in grade school and at the time I was a huge Chicago Bulls fan. Of course, I was probably a Bulls fan because when I was in grade school, Michael Jordan was destroying his competition. These days, I didn’t really feel a connection to that team so I turned to the Nets. The first thing I learned about the Nets was that they’re probably leaving New Jersey. Great. I’m not rooting for a team that is leaving the state. And what does that leave me with? Either the New York Knicks or the Philadelphia 76’ers. No thanks. I thought to myself that maybe I could find a team to root for if I had more time around the NBA and started looking into which basketball video games were popular. Not that I have time to play video games, but I thought it was a decent idea.

I did a little bit of research and it turns out that this NBA 2k11 game is supposed to be the best thing to ever grace a video game console since anything ever in the world. Or something like that… anyway, I pre-ordered the game for Nintendo Wii way back on August 31, 2010. Seems like a long time ago, right? Well, that’s the background that you need to know for my story. Oh, and you should know that the game was released for the Wii at some point last week and thus I should have had it in my hot little hands at this point.

As you might imagine, I didn’t get the game delivered to me. So, I sent the following message to FYE.com:

I’m sending this message to inquire about my order #XXXXXX. The online system shows it still listed as a pre-order and “in process.” Could you let me know when I should expect this game to be delivered to my home?

FYE.com sent me the following response which, I have to admit, reads like it was written by a robot. Take a look at this:

We appreciate your recent order.

Unfortunately, the item ordered is currently out of stock. We have placed this item on back order and expect it to become available for shipment within 30 days.

We will ship the item when it becomes available.

If you wish to cancel your order, please see the cancelation instructions below.

We sincerely apologize for the delay in processing this request.

And yes, they did provide extensive cancellation instructions below this note. Well, I thought that this didn’t sound right. How could a video game that I ordered months ago not be in stock when I was a pre-order? In my mind I started thinking, “Ugh. This is going to be one of those customer service experiences that you read about on Consumerist.com and, frankly, I’m really not in the mood for this type of crap. I’m going to cancel this thing and move on with my life.” With that in mind, I wrote the following message to the folks at FYE.com:

Thank you for the update. I just have an additional question. Since I pre-ordered this item back in August, how could it possibly be out of stock for a pre-order? Isn’t that the purpose of a pre-order – to have the item in stock so that the person that placed the pre-order doesn’t have to wait for an additional 30 days?

I’m going to cancel my order, but this is pretty ridiculous in terms of serving a pre-ordering customer. Unreal.

Look, I have no reason to bow down or cow-tow to a company that clearly doesn’t give a shit about me as a customer (just wait until you read the tirade I’m getting ready to unleash on Honda in the next few days). I normally wouldn’t write that last sentence and the “Unreal” comment, but FYE.com really had it coming to them with their robotic response and completely unacceptable additional 30 day delay. To their credit, I guess, they responded within 24 hours with this message:

Thank you for contacting the fye.com Customer Assistance Center

Please log into your account online or contact us at 800-818-1941, option 7, to submit a cancellation request.

That was it. Nothing else. No direct answer to any of my questions or an explanation of what was going on. By the time I received this absolute joke of a customer service response, I had already canceled my order. But this was pretty damn insulting and it led me to share my experiences with you fine folks. The lesson that I learned here is three-fold. First, FYE.com’s customer service absolutely sucks. They either have you talking to robots or people who act like robots. Listen up, FYE.com: when a customer asks a question – no matter how rude you think that question may be – you respond to that question. Second, FYE.com clearly doesn’t care about my business and thus, I’m not giving it to them. I happen to have a small credit over at GameStop and I’ll be going to their website to spend my money now. And third, FYE.com sucks when compared to the folks in their brick and mortar store.

What a shame. I wanted to like shopping at FYE.com but, instead, found it to be an annoying, aggravating experience. For shame, FYE.com. For shame.

Very frustrating and very annoying. This place needs a lot of things (much better weatherproofing leads the pack), but right now it needs a dual zone heating and cooling system so that we can keep the temperature downstairs at around 75 degrees while we decrease the temperature upstairs to make this place more comfortable.

And while this may not be the type of “unnecessary complications” entry that you’re used to, I’m pissed off that it’s warm in my bedroom. I just took a shower and I’m sweating again already, damn it!

This time around I’m pretty aggravated about this old guy that was in my class. Generally, I have no issue with old people enrolling in graduate courses – in fact, I encourage it! I hope to still be taking classes when I’m older. Why not? Who doesn’t love learning new stuff?

However, when I eventually take classes as an older guy, I have no intention of acting like this lunatic that was in my class this semester. This guy came off like a bumbling buffoon of an idiot with almost every comment he offered in the class.

You may remember that the last time I wrote one of these unnecessary complications diatribes I focused on an idiot girl in this same class. One of her major problems (aside from not being prepared for graduate study) was that she couldn’t properly communicate and she was enrolled in a communications program. Well, this guy has the same problem. Yet again I’m baffled by the severe lack of communication skills that the old guy in my class had. Frankly, I’m beginning to wonder about the level of rigor put into the application review for this program. Good Lord – it’s like they’ll let anyone in!

But here is an old guy who is enrolled in a communications-based program and he wouldn’t give presentations in front of the class. I repeat: he wouldn’t give presentations in front of the class! Meanwhile, his day job was working in a production studio teaching new hires for a local television channel how to operate the machinery and create graphics for the various screens. The guy worked as a presenter and instructor all day and he didn’t want to present or instruct for class assignments. What the heck type of sense does that make!?

Yet, that’s not the most aggravating part of this guy. No. In fact, what really bothered me about him was his obstinate attitude.

I remember one night when the Professor wanted to let everyone go 30 minutes early. We specifically didn’t take our regular “break” in what was a 3 hour class because we wanted to get out early. And just when the Professor was getting us ready to pack up and leave, this old asshole kept speaking and asking questions. Now, as an Adjunct Professor I would never discourage the continuation of a class discussion. However, as a guy with some common sense, I would have held my questions until after the class ended. Further, I would have asked questions that had some meaning. This guy extended our class by an additional 20 minutes (i.e. we only got out 10 minutes early) because he was asking about how the online message board system worked.

Seriously.

This guy kept us an extra 20 minutes because he wanted to talk about the finer points of an online message board! And what’s even more annoying is that the questions that he was asking were basic, easy to answer questions that had nothing to do with our topic of study. But still, the idiot felt the need to constantly repeat that he’s a cynic and he likes playing devil’s advocate. For what?! What exactly are you f’ing advocating for when you’re talking about whether or not an online submission gets to its final destination?! Honestly – what are you talking about you f’ing idiot?

This guy was a moron and I’m so glad that I don’t have to be in class with him any more. Idiot.

As you’re hanging out doing what you do tonight, know that at around 7:00pm EST tonight I’ll be ready to punch the wall in the classroom where I’m listening to an idiot prattle on in a program that she doesn’t want to be in and performing at a level that is unacceptable for even undergraduate work.

Well, I was right on target with that one. This girl was completely ridiculous last night. She may have said the word “like” two thousand times during the course of a 15 minute public conversation with the Professor. As I was trying to hold back my vomit, I refused to count the amount of times that she said “and stuff like that” and “you know.” I was, however, glad to see that the two women that sit in front of me in class were mocking this idiot, albeit amongst themselves. At least I’m not the only one who thinks that this dunce shouldn’t be in graduate school.

I honestly get so riled up over the fact that this idiot can’t speak in a communications program that I’ve thought about going to the Dean of the Graduate School to voice my concerns. She really is that unacceptable of a student – I’ve never seen a person who is less qualified to be pursuing an advanced degree except for maybe the girl who cried hateful, angry tears (see yesterday’s entry).

Oh, and the dummy girl is joined in her stupidity by an older guy who can’t read his environment worth a shit. More on this bozo in a future entry…

And tonight, giving the presentation won’t even annoy me. In fact, I like giving presentations because once I start presenting an issue I turn into one of these people that like to hear themselves talk. That’s the perfect quality for a presenter to have and I have that quality! What I will be annoyed at tonight, though, is this one moron girl who is enrolled in the same class as me. This girl (and I say “girl” because she is in no way mature enough to be termed a “woman”) is completely unprepared for graduate school work. I’ve been sitting on this entry for a while, but now I intend to share with you why this girl drives me absolutely crazy (and not in a hot, sexy way, either).

First, let me set the scene. As of Fall 2009, I enrolled in a graduate program at the local college where I teach. However, I first enrolled in this program way back in Fall 2003. I left the program after a single semester for a variety of reasons – one of which was that some of my classmates were incredibly unprepared for graduate level work and the thought of sharing the same degree with them made me sick.

Case in point: There was a girl in one of my classes back in Fall 2003 who was a complete freak show. I’m not sure what her disability was, but she cried at the drop of a dime. If you looked at her, she cried. If she raised her hand to answer a question and you called on her, she cried. If she raised her hand and someone else was called to answer the question, she cried. And it wasn’t a gentle weeping. No. This was an angry, frustrated, hateful type of crying – like she was hungry for your soul or some shit.

It was fucking scary.

One time I was assigned to the same group as this weirdo and I’m pretty much the nicest guy on the planet when it comes to working in groups (even though I, like every other graduate or undergraduate student, hate working in groups). The group had to divide up specific parts of the project to complete the work. Fine. Easy enough. Everyone knew that the crier was going to be a problem so we asked her what she wanted to do first. The tears started welling up and a look of incredulous rage came over this girl’s face. One of the women in the group became extra nice and sincere and helpful and told her that it was okay and that she could do whatever she wanted for the group if she just told us. Well… You would have thought that this other girl told the crier that she was a filthy cunt because the look on the crier’s face was the look you’d see on the face of a woman who just had her cat fall into a shredder. Her rage was palpable.

And that was her attitude in every class. She would have been better off enrolled in Michael Meyer’s School of Mass Murder.

Needless to say, I saw that a person like this was accepted into the graduate program and I told myself that I didn’t want to be associated with freaks like that in the job market. Thus, I went to Rutgers, earned my Masters Degree, and moved on.

But now I’m in this program again (because it’s free). I’m taking one class each semester and believe it or not, my class this semester takes place in the same room where I had class with the crier. Go figure.

I’ve surveyed my current classmates and they seem to be of a much higher quality than the group from back in Fall 2003, which is good to see. However, there is an idiot moron girl in this class who makes my fucking skin curl every time she speaks. Why, you ask? Imagine you’re in a graduate level class and you have an idiot who prefaces almost every comment with the word “like.” That’s what this girl does. Further, imagine that each sentence is trailed with either “you know” or “and stuff like that.” That’s what this idiot does. A typical sentence may sound like this:

“Like, what type of theory of communication should we research and stuff like that?”

What the fuck does that even mean?! And better yet – how is this asshole in a graduate program for communication!? Wait! I have the answer to that question because this bimbo told us why she’s there!

During the first class icebreaker/introductions (another waste of time), this dummy said that she’s in the class because her parents selected the program for her and are paying for her to go to graduate school. She went on to say that she didn’t want to go to graduate school, but her parents told her that they were going to pay for her to get an advanced degree to help her out in the job market, and stuff like that. The poor professor was baffled and didn’t know what to say; as a fellow professor sitting in the back of the room, I was shocked at what this girl was revealing to the class.

Frankly, everyone must have been surprised. One of her classmates asked her why she enrolled in a Masters Degree program when she didn’t want to do it, but the professor cut off Idiot Girl before she could respond. Folks, I gotta tell ya – this is the type of person that I would never, EVER hire! And if I was in charge of admissions at the local college, I would have never allowed this woman to get her dummy self in the door to begin with. This girl will be a black mark on the program that she’s in for years to come – mark my words.

It gets worse. So I have to give this presentation tonight. The assigned length of the presentation is 5 minutes. Fine – who can’t do a 5 minute presentation, right? THIS GIRL CAN’T DO A FIVE MINUTE PRESENTATION! In fact, when she gave her presentation a few weeks ago it lasted almost half an hour. As a professor, I appreciate when students go above and beyond, but this girl should have failed the assignment on time management alone. But wait…it still gets worse. Not only did this derelict go on for an additional 23 minutes beyond the time limit, she copied and pasted her entire research paper into the PowerPoint and those 23 minutes consisted of her reading the presentation word for word!

After the first 30 seconds of this bullshit my mind was blaring with: Unacceptable! Unacceptable! Failure! Failure!

If I was the professor of this class, I would have cut the student off at the ten minute mark and failed her immediately. And if she wanted more time, I would have publicly embarrassed her by saying that we can all read and we don’t need her to read her paper to us since it’s up on the PowerPoint screen (albeit it in fine print because she had WAY too much text on each slide).

Sooooo…

As you’re hanging out doing what you do tonight, know that at around 7:00pm EST tonight I’ll be ready to punch the wall in the classroom where I’m listening to an idiot prattle on in a program that she doesn’t want to be in and performing at a level that is unacceptable for even undergraduate work.

Well, since I have some bills that need to be paid (i.e. student loans) and since I always thought that I would make a great teacher or Professor, I decided to accept an adjunct teaching post at the local college. It’s a lot of fun and you can usually come to this blog to read some of my observations with respect to teaching today’s undergraduate students.

Everything seems okay thus far, right? Good!

Well, one of the perks of teaching at the local college is that you can take a certain number of credits for free during the semester that you teach. Again, as I racked up over $120 thousand in student loan debt on my way to my MPP degree, it’s very hard for me to turn down the possibility of taking free classes that will ultimately lead to a graduate certificate in a discipline that I am interested in pursuing as a future career. Further, it is hard to say no to these free classes when they might also lead to me receiving a second Masters Degree in this same discipline. And yes, that would be a free Masters Degree…

Anyway, the unnecessary complication that is related to this scenario is the work that comes along with being a graduate student! I should fully explain this, though. I’m not suggesting that graduate students should do less work. In fact, I would argue that graduate students should do a higher difficulty level of work than the undergraduate student population. Makes sense, right? And I’m not saying that the work that I have to do in this graduate program is either too hard or too remedial. Actually, the two professors that I’ve chosen to take most of my classes with are excellent, former real world practitioners who “get” that graduate school isn’t about busy work. They assign projects that are of real use in the real world – and that’s really important if you ask me.

However, I think that I get a bit exasperated with the work that is assigned because of the fact that I already have an advanced degree. Maybe it’s an inner elitism or a subconscious knowledge that I don’t really need the additional graduate certificate or potential Masters Degree – I don’t know. On a conscious level, I do know that I don’t particularly have the time in an already overcrowded schedule to set aside hours for researching and writing papers.

But that’s what you get when you enter this type of program, so I won’t complain about the work associated with the classes too much. I will, however, complain about some other observations that I’ve made while being in this program…more on that to come in a future entry!

Second, why is it that this particular post office is always jam packed with people? I know that the people working there are absolutely amazing (they really are the best postal employees that I’ve ever encountered – kind, courteous, knowledgeable, etc), but I just can’t understand why this post office is always filled up with customers. There aren’t a great abundance of post office boxes and the location of the building is slightly off of a main highway, so I don’t know if that has any impact on the traffic. But I do know that when I go to this particular post office, I usually have to wait about 10 minutes in line before I get to the teller.

Which brings up another point – why isn’t there an express lane at this post office? With the amount of traffic that comes through this place, you’d expect that they would put in a “fast lane” for people who are sending one envelope or who are just buying stamps. Instead, I often get caught behind people with dozens (no exaggeration) of boxes from their personal eBay businesses. I guess Ocean Township in Monmouth County is a hotbed of activity for eBay businesses or something. Weird.

Anyway, I went into this post office a few days before Christmas to send one package to a charity that I support on the West Coast and it took me about 20 minutes to send out a single package (which I had pre-packed before I arrived at the building). It was absolutely amazing and definitely an unnecessary complication for someone trying to complete a bunch of errands before heading away for the Christmas holiday.

Here’s the short version of the story. On Tuesday, one of my clients submitted a request to draw down money from their loan. On Wednesday, I alerted the leader of the part of my company that handles draw downs that a big request was coming. On Thursday, I submitted the draw down request. On Friday, I receive a phone call from the secretary who processes the draw downs and one of my company’s Vice Presidents. The secretary is both frantic at the large dollar amount of the request and upset that she did not receive a head’s up about the request.

My response on the phone was that our company has a process to draw down large dollar amounts so we should be following that process. I added that I happened to be following the process as proscribed in our policy manual down to the last letter. I also said that I reported that this request was coming on Wednesday so I couldn’t comment on why the report did not get to the secretary since my report was given to her superior.

Apparently, I did something wrong in that exchange. Go back and re-read those two, short paragraphs. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Yesterday, I come into the office and within an hour my supervisor comes into my office and closes the door because she wants to talk about this draw down request. She reiterates the secretary’s concerns and I state to my supervisor that not only did I follow the procedures down to the very last letter, but that I went out of my way to alert the other department that a large request was coming. She agrees completely. However, because someone in the other department (the other department consists of the secretary, her supervisor, and one other person) complained, my supervisor needed to speak with me about what happened. So, again, I told the my supervisor what the problem was as I saw it and that the real issue seems to be that the other department – aside from having too much time on their hands – doesn’t know the procedures. My supervisor reluctantly tends to agree and suggests that the entire “situation” be left alone to die.

Frankly, I didn’t think that there was a “situation” to begin with. Why didn’t I think there was a situation? That’s an easy one to answer – because I have a job that requires my brain to focus and function on other issues! The fact that there are people employed by my company who have time enough in their day to make a mountain out of nothing (it’s not even a molehill – it’s NOTHING) is astounding!

The unprofessional act that I see in this entire debacle is that the wrong person was “spoken to” for five minutes behind a closed door. Clearly, the secretary not only didn’t do her job, but she acted out in a frantic, childish manner when she didn’t understand something (which speaks to her education level and level of professionalism). Here’s a lesson to everyone out there – in this situation, you do NOT sit down with the person who is bringing in millions of dollars for the company and happens to be carrying at least half of the organization’s salary load. No. In fact, the person that you sit down with is the secretary and ask her why she had a breakdown in communication and couldn’t call the person submitting the draw down (me) directly and in a non-frantic manner to ask two simple questions.

Further, when the person submitting the request (me) went out of his way to alert the other department that a large request was coming, you thank that person for their diligence in making sure the process works smoothly.

And a final note on the unprofessional parts of this situation – neither the Vice President who listened to the secretary’s complaints or my supervisor took the time to read through the organization’s policy manual to determine who was right and who was wrong (or, in this case, who was overreacting). Why did they not do this very simple review? That’s easy. This organization and its people always take the path of least resistance. In other words, they know that they can either “speak to” me or with the uneducated and overly emotional secretary to resolve this situation. They know that talking to me will end in one result and talking to her will end in an outward bitterness from her toward her associates and an increase in her already unprofessional attitude. By the way, my response to my supervisor after the brief five minute discussion was, “Look, I really don’t have time for this. I appreciate that they have a lot of time on their hands in the other department, but I have work to do so if the shit is going to roll downhill and land on me, then so be it. Let’s get back to work already.”

Which person do you think they’re going to “talk to” about this? Obviously they’re going to talk to me about it. Why incite an already unprofessional person to be even worse?

And that’s the larger issue that this situation uncovers. My company always takes the path of least resistance. They never, as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras suggested, “Choose always the way that seems best, however rough it may be. Custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.” The problem is that always taking the easy way out allows for an unprofessional person (or persons) to dig their heels in and really take a hold of an organization to the point of destroying it.

That bothers me sometimes – that my organization will be destroyed because of uneducated, underperforming employees. Very scary…

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