Assist this!

So I haven’t yet really bitched about a couple of my coworkers but today is the day I start. I work with two of the possibly most useless administrative "assistants"...and I use assistant loosely. They are sweet people but 91% (yes 91%) of the time I want to beat them with the cremains of Marion. Chris wants to fire them and gets all HR-ey wondering why such incompetence is tolerated but working in a church is a whole different working culture. This will probably be a regular post because sometimes I think their job is just to annoy the shit out of me.

Anyway, the last Monday of the month I mail out 1000 or so 20 page newsletters and have a large group of volunteers (20 old folks who run my ass off, "This water isn’t hot enough," "Where is the Earl Grey tea?" and on and on) that collate and label them before I bundle, bag and deliver to the bulk mail facility (which by the way is a mild form of torture...I hate this shit.) So on top of a really horrible task, these two seem to always ratchet up their ineptitude come mailing day, like the Wonder Twins of stupidity.

Since it is a MAILING I obviously need the MAILING labels and they always seem to forget or not hear me and more often than not, just fuck it up. One month its printed on paper, the next its on the back of the label sheet (which confuses the fuck out of my old people) and once it was on sheets of labels that were missing random labels out of the sheet (how the fuck does that even happen.)

Today I get the labels and immediately look at them and think, "What the fuck? Not again!" My labels, like 100 sheets, are printed gigantically. I mean that the font size is probably around 16 pt. That isn’t normally outrageous but we are talking about little fucking mailing labels. So three quarters of the name, address and city, state and zip are on one label and finishes off on the one next to it AND only the name and address really fit vertically on the label and the city state and zip are on the label below it. Basically, like the assistants, they are worthless.

I bring them back and want to scream and rant but nicely say, "Hey guys, these aren’t going to work."

They look and one says, "Well look at that, how did that happen?"

Really? I think, it happened because you printed it that way...AGAIN.

So for the fourth month in a row I show them that they have control over the point size and I gently encourage them to look at the fucking screen before sending them to the printer and wasting all those labels. AND if they do fuck up how about you look at the fucking stack of labels BEFORE sending them down to me to use. I’ve tried to get them to let me mess with the management software to see if I can change the default but they giggle and say they will remember how to do it.

I am not a complete asshole and these things don’t really annoy me, but when it continues to happen month after month and they pretend like there is some computer gremlin that is out to get them, I want to flip out!

Breath. Donut. Breath. Better now.