Just a really quick one

Just to say how much I've really gained from peoples comments on here, it's helped me loads!  Having a great (but busy) week, I'll write again next week!

Enjoy the rest of your week guys and have an amazing weekend!!

x

Things are heading in the right direction!

Lena’s like my new best friend.  When she comes in in the morning, she smiles. And she went out of her way to ask me to have a good evening. Seriously. This is an improvement.

We had a meeting yesterday and went through the submissions she’s got coming up which were pretty full-on, to be honest.  She’s not quite as organised as I would like so it was difficult to figure out what submission was at what stage so I suggested we build a proper log where we could track and monitor things.  I’ve been working on that the past week while she works on getting the submission done this week which I’ve asked to check before it goes out.

I’m feeling weird about it all, though.  Like I’ve gone behind my bosses back. Am I being paranoid? 

Unfortunately, when I wrote last week I forgot that Jeremy was going to be away for our Monday meeting this week and I didn’t really want to open the Can O’ Worms on the submissions and Lena’s workload without him.  Still, Telepathic Kate asked me if everything was okay with the sort of expression that implied she knows things might not.

While I was kind of desperate to tell her what had been going on – just to get it off my chest if anything – I said everything was fine and felt guilty instead. Still, if things improve over the next week with Lena, then the suggestions I’d like to make about the submissions may be better received.  Fingers crossed.

In my day-to-day stuff, things have been quieter as Jeremy’s been away in Scotland since Monday doing some intensive work with one of our higher-profile clients.  Thinking about it,  I’ve always had an irrational fear of organising travel before all this – whether it’s booking train tickets to Bournemouth or a flight to Abu Dhabi, I always get burning angst when I press ‘Buy’ that I’m ordering them on the wrong day or the time’s in 12h rather than 24h clock.  There’s always a faint slick of sweat on my mouse when I’ve finished, I can tell you.

But when I organised Jeremy’s flights and pick-up to Glasgow, I was so distracted by the stuff going on with Lena that I pressed ‘Buy’, prepared the itinerary and collating the travel pack without so much as batting an eyelid!  In fact, I’d say that organising travel without being a sweaty freak-pot has quickly become one of my favourite things to do at work!  Every cloud and all that, I suppose!

In other news: one of the friendlier designers is having birthday drinks after work on Friday and has invited me along.  I actually, for more reasons than one, cannot wait...

So what happened last week...

I spent a week last Friday afternoon checking through the earlier pitch documentation and my stomach sank with each file.  These documents are to get shortlisted for projects, rather than devised for presentation to a client – that’s the next stage.  So while the Directors sign off the documents, they don’t have time to read them all the way through, especially if there are a few to go out at short notice. 

I think the policy needs to change based on what I saw and will be one of the things I talk to Kate and Jeremy about next Monday at our weekly catch-up.

So with that rattling around my head and the fact that I was going to have it out with Lena, I bet you can imagine just how restful my weekend was – oh! What a Sunday night I had J.

Anyway: Monday.

Lena arrived a few minutes after me full of beans and slightly baffled that I still wanted to meet.

“I thought it was just last week,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’d still like to meet.  We need to go over a few things”

She shrugged. “Fine,” she said making me think that maybe it really was just me!

The coffee shop’s just a few metres away from the studio.  I ordered the coffees from the counter and my hands were so sweaty with nerves I left little damp paw-prints on the glass.

I had had plenty of time to think about what I was going to say, and the feedback from people on here was really helpful. [THANK YOU!]  I had made a decision to address the performance issue only at this stage.

I kept it short and focused entirely on the submission.  I had taken a couple of her submissions with me and showed her the errors.  I tried to be as sensitive as possible – no-one likes criticism and Lena’s proven herself to be quite unpredictable at the very least.  I asked her why she thought she’d made those mistakes and a torrent of emotion poured out.

What I gleaned from nearly thirty minutes of tearful exposition was that apparently, the PA before me had originally done the submissions but had found them too much (haha! Not so perfect after all, eh Outgoing PA!) so they had been passed onto Lena.  While she’d liked this responsibility at first, she started to resent it when she realised the amount of work it involved – especially when she was stuck in the office and the PA was leaving on time.

I sympathised and told her I would do what I could to resolve this issue as it wasn’t right for her to be overloaded. 

But I also told her gently that it would be healthier for all involved that she talk to me if she’s feeling overwhelmed rather than act out. 

She smiled.

I smiled.

Basically, the meeting finished with us all but hugging: I draw the line with physical intimacy at work.

Next steps:

• Speak to Directors about resolving the workload issue and meet again with Lena tomorrow morning to review the upcoming submission list.
• I’ve decided to leave the behaviour issues for now and see how things go - I’ve done a quick Back-To-Work catch-up note on her absence through sickness (some ambiguous stomach thing).
Result: I feel much, much, much happier with the situation. And Lena even made me a cup of tea this afternoon.

I just hope this is the end of it.

So this is what happened...

I’m sorry – I had to cut off on the Lena update there as I was minuting all afternoon after lunch and have been so busy that I haven’t been able to write until now!

So, the email from Lena sent at 10:45pm on Monday night said:

She’s very sorry, but she won’t be able to meet as she’s not well and is taking today as sick.

Can you believe that?

And now it’s Friday and we’re supposed to be having our meeting and she’s still off sick!

I guess, though, while this is a bit ridiculous, I have to face reality: this is no longer just a bit of conflict, this is a performance issue.

Which raises a whole other question: do I have a duty to report it to my bosses? Or should I wait and try and resolve it first?  If I tell them, am I a tittle-tattle?  Should I at least try and figure out what the Dickens is going on with my Proj-Co before landing her in it with the Big Cheeses?

One lovely commentor last week suggested that perhaps Lena had applied for my job and not got it which was why she was being difficult.  Is that it?  Or is she just not getting the right support in her current role? I mean I was stuck here until ten doing that documentation – does that happen with Lena a lot? Not the poor quality, but being stuck on her own in the office until late because, at her level, that’s not on at all.

Or is there something else going on underneath it all. Maybe something’s going on in her personal life...

I’ve moved our meeting to Monday at 11am, but which aspects to I tackle first?  And should I even be mentioning the personality issues and just focus on the performance?

Wow – who would’ve thought I’d have SO many questions this soon in!

On a good note:  with all the other crap, I’m not stressing my butt off about being a good PA.  I’m just getting on with it and Jeremy and Kate appear more than happy – indeed, Kate’s talk went down really well and she bought me a muffin to thank you for all my help.  Every cloud and all that!  Thank HEAVENS for good bosses...

I am actually going to scream!!!!!

Last week, after I wrote, I thought to myself: maybe I’m making more out of this than it really is. Maybe I’m projecting my anxieties onto her when actually; she’s just one of those people I don’t naturally gel with straight away. Maybe it’s... ME! (ha ha, as IF, I’m perfect!)

And then, as I began to think that maybe I didn’t need to talk to her after all, that actually, it would all blow over and we’d soon be dancing through meadows full of mutual respect, she left me with no other option.

Yesterday was pretty quiet in the office so when she asked to leave early to make some appointment, as a gesture of goodwill I said that if she’d done everything, that was fine.  She said she was just waiting on some final bits for a submission for a potential job which would then need to be printed and sent out.  It was quiet and, because I’m an AMAZING boss, I said I’d do it for her.

Stupid, stupid me because I was sweating and panicking over HER job until TEN O’CLOCK last night!

I’m still steamed as I write this, but she basically landed me right in it.  Lena had done such a poor job (misspelt the potential client’s name and even used the wrong one on several occasions, duplicated chunks of text, low res images... the works!) that I needed to rework the whole thing.

I mean, even without the current economic climate, I’m keen for our company to look professional, high-quality and definitely the sort of people you want to work with.  Not one that lets chimps work on its pitch documentation.  But maybe that’s just me?

And, because I couldn’t get it in the post and the deadline was noon today, I had to – in all this torrential rain and wind – go all the way across London to hand deliver it myself before work THIS MORNING because the courier couldn’t confirm a midday delivery when I rang them last night.

At 10:30 last night, as I switched off my lonely lamp, an email whizzed out of my account to Lena saying that instead of us meeting on Thursday – our specified Big Talk Meeting - we needed to go and have a coffee as soon as she was in.

So... when I got in this morning after my hellish journey in, there was an email sitting in my inbox, sent at 10:45pm last night from Lena ...