My girlfriend told me a story yesterday that I thought was pretty interesting and slightly sad, so I thought I'd share it with you. Her company had hired a part-timer to come in and do some filing for them. She no longer works for them because, after a few weeks on the job, they discovered that she had trouble with alphabetizing. Her job was to FILE. Can you imagine the chaos this seemingly little shortcoming caused the company? After terminating the girl's employment, the company had to get one of the full-time girls to go back through every file this other girl potentially touched and check to see if things were filed correctly. This task took nearly a full work week to complete. Who knows how long it took this new girl to catch up on her regular work after that? And now the company is so gun-shy that they hadn't replaced the girl, so their filing had backed up for two months. They ended up having a little "filing party" to catch up, making everyone in the department complete filing tasks for a few hours yesterday. At least there was food involved. (Can I just say, I LOVE my part-time file clerk! She rocks!)
Work ethic = Do your job well or move along so someone else can do it well--and find something that you will do well!
Sounds like my friend's worker was trained by the same people your company's workers were!
Posted by: jessteronimo | June 18, 2009 at 10:41 PM
How's this for a filing story? The real estate company that laid me off on May 8 (officially due to the economy; unofficially due to refinancing their properties for 5 times the original mortgage amount over the last 3 years and distributing the large excess of cash to the partners and now those properties are worth less than the original values,) assigned people to file who were hired to answer phones. 80% of those people did not know how to alphabetize. The company never saw any problem with the fact that invoices and files were often lost and only found by accident. Go figure.
Posted by: Marianne | June 18, 2009 at 07:55 AM
Hey, I will take the filing clerk job if they are hiring?
Posted by: Simon So | June 15, 2009 at 03:54 PM