Ruined for Life: Phoenix Edition

Sadly, I doubt you can make someone blossom

One new aspect of this job is a new person in the Foreign Affairs Office. Let’s call her Sophia since I don’t want to use her “real English name.” She functions as the second in command as I think she’s the only other full timer. Whenever I make a request, I feel I’ve lost the lottery, big time, when the task falls to Sophia. Sophia’s first move is to find a way to convince you that you don’t need what you need. When that fails, she’ll do the job poorly in hopes the people she is hired to support stop needing her.  Though she’s been working for awhile, some coaching’s been needed to get her to put her name on emails.

At first I thought I’d avoid Sophia by sending my requests to Sophia’s boss and hoping either that woman or one of the part time student workers would handle that. Somehow Sophia got these requests and she always put her stamp of disinterest on the job. She’s terribly abrupt and careless. It doesn’t occur to her to bother to contact teachers with questions. So she got m 61 copies of a page that just said “Extensive Reading” and had nothing else on it. (The first page had an extra space and the header created a second page.) When another teacher called to report a broken toilet on Friday afternoon, Sophia told her she’d have to wait till Monday for repairs. Think that through Sophia. Do people do that? Of course, a second call up the chain resulted in a humane and logical call to a plumber who made the needed repairs.

My current plan was to give Sophia lots of work to do,  i.e. ordering copying so that other people would have to do the few more complex jobs.  This isn’t working as Sophia’s just ignored the copying to stick her thumb into other pies and muck them up.

I will say it’s wonderful to have such petty complaints after last semester with the sinking ship that is Coastline Community College’s Xiang Jiang High School program.

How I miss Rae. She worked here a couple years ago and started out fumbling along and in over her head. When her supervisor took some sick leave, Rae blossomed. She became competent, organized and responsible. A glorious transformation.