Things she does that are annoying

• Every day, she calls from her car, a little before she arrives to her parking lot, and asks the intern to meet her there and carry her plastic bags (with documents and other personal things) to the division. 
• Once her secretary leaves, she calls me on the phone every 10 minutes and asks me to her office.
• She belittles my co-workers in every given opportunity.
• She thinks she's the cleverest, most able, omniscient person in the division.
• She constantly mentions her connections with the upper management.
• She never fails to compare our work with her previous division's stating that our work is kindergarten material, compared to what she had to do there (yet she constantly fails to grasp the essence of our job). 
• She believes nobody in the division is capable to undertake any major responsibility and will often transfer her belief to the upper management. 
• She doesn't listen to what anyone has to say, instead she will always interrupt someone when he/she speaks, often without even being coherent.
• She feels compelled to congratulate herself whenever she confronts someone who's in the upper management.  
• She is extremely disorganized and will often lose documents that have been handed to her more than once.  
• She will insist on minutiae even though she realizes they are such, because she thinks this is a way to assert her authority.
• She will disrupt any cooperation to read an email or to answer a phone call, never to return to what has been left in the middle, either because she's forgotten it or because something else has been asked from her.  

Enough said for now... more to come later! 

The Car

The bank leases cars for its managers.  Pays for parking in the city centre, gas, services, insurance, sticker, tyre changes and free access to the city centre every day. 


Once you become a manager you receive note of the cars available to you. So the note came in November of the cars among which she would have to choose: A 1800cc Volvo S60, or a 1800cc Audi A4, or a 1800cc Toyota Auris Hybrid or a previously used 2000cc Mercedes Compressor.  


To this day, she hasn't yet got one and this is why:


To begin with, all the proposed cars are big for her size (she's 5 feet nothing).  All of them are higher horsepower than what she would like to drive but most importantly all of them are cars she didn't choose!  


Since then, a vast number of emails has been exchanged between her and the division handling supplies and leases. In those emails she's stated that she would prefer the A3 Audi, or another Toyota model or a BMW 1series. All of them are cars of almost the same or even lower price to the ones suggested but obviously not in the bank's lease deal with the said companies.  The bank has explained this more than once but she believes their approach is wrong and has been trying to convince them since.  


Meanwhile, she simply refuses to accept the bank's offers.  Instead, she is sticking to her old Renault Clio without any of the above mentioned allowances (except monthly gas payments) until the bank folks realize their car choices are very restrictive.


Good luck with that! 

Corporate vs Retail

It has been a while since I last visited here but 1. It has been busy, 2. it comes a point when you're fed up with idiocy and you're not into writing about it.  This day's events though are a driving force for ventilation so here I go:

The Bank has its CEO, under whom there are three Deputy CEO's under whom there are assorted General Mangers (GMs) who supervise Division Managers (DMs). 

My division has been supervised by a GM, woman, really effective, really knowing the job, really good at what she was there for.  Reachable, clear, helping  and mostly just.  The only problem has been her interaction with our Manager.  

You know how word of mouth is stronger than anything else, and you know how things, especially when they're bad, circulate into a corporation, with the speed of lightning.  So it's been circulating that lately their relationship (GM's and DM's) hasn't been as good as they'd want it to be and that our DM has on occasion refused to cooperate with the GM on at least three important projects.   In fact, I witnessed at least one of these three occasions.  

So we knew for sometime now that the GM did not exactly like the DM.  That alone brought some hope that we'd see our manager vanish from our division pretty fast... and this would be a somewhat logical assumption or hope, right?  Wrong!

Today we were transferred to a new GM. This normally shouldn't affect us, as most of us are there to just do our jobs, but many times in the past, we had to resort to the GM to solve in-job issues that the Manager didn't understand or didn't bother to respond to.  Plus, the previous GM knew what each of us was worth while the new one knows nothing about us or our job.

My phone rings, the manager's on the line...  

-You know, our tomorrow's appointment with the GM to set up 2011's goals is cancelled. 

(We've been working our asses off on the project and the meeting had already been cancelled once).

-Ah!...  Why?

-Because we now belong to another GM

-Ah!

(Long pause) 

(I hear her breathing on the phone and decide to talk).

-Why did "Barbie" (previous GM) decide to shoo us?

-She didn't decide to shoo us, she just realized that our division has nothing to do with the rest of the divisions she supervises and that we're more affiliated to retail banking 

(Our division's title is Corporate Key Account Services!) 

-Um, we're not retail banking, we're corporate banking.

-Well, now we're retail banking and we belong to the Retail GM.

-When did this change?

-It never changed, you were always retail banking but you hadn't realized!

(Really!)

(Long pause)

(Pause gets even longer and I start feeling awkward thinking she expects me to say something, but there's nothing to say).

Eventually she speaks:

-Did they approve of my laptop and data plan?

-No, they cut off data plans for managers, they only give those to GMs and CEOs and they're out of stock for laptops so you ll have to wait till they get the new ones.

-You really think we're corporate banking?

-Doesn't our division's title suggest so? Doesn't the fact that we deal with corporations suggest so? Doesn't the fact that we're dealing with authoritative work suggest so? Doesn't the fact that we set up or approve deals suggest so?

-Well, then how could the GM make such a mistake? 

-I don't think she made a mistake.

-No - no - no this must have been a mistake. One of you is wrong. 

-Okay.

-Okay.

The rest of the day went as expected...  shitty.  

Resilience

"Resilience: The physical property of a material that can return to its original shape or position after deformation that does not exceed its elastic limit." 


This could also describe her daily moods and voice, both of which can stretch with almost unlimited elasticity, to rebound within seconds.  And while with voice it can be expected, how she does this with her mood, is beyond me. Because any normal person will need a certain amount of time to come back to normal after an argument, but not her.  She will go berserk without a reason and when she realizes she's losing the argument she' ll end it with a pretentious smile and the word "kisses".    This leaves you wondering whether it's worth arguing with her at all. Besides... she entirely lacks the ability to listen to anyone but herself.  


Have you ever thought that being polite has nothing to do with what you say but how you say it?  Well, try to imagine someone's face after she's immersed her tongue in a squeezed half lemon, add squinted eyes to the already sour face, stretch your imagination a bit and try a squealing voice with a little staccato, picture her tiny little existence with hands on the sides palms facing outwards and make this person say anything you want.  Will it sound polite to you? 
That's her, when she asks people to do work.  


She thinks recycling has to do solely with paper and that the more paper you consume the more you contribute to the bank's recycling program. She entirely failed to realize the whole concept!