Hey guys, I thought I'd enter @chr7is weekly Blue Monday contest and share with people what I had to endure yesterday. This is just my little vent of the week and it is not meant to insult anyone in anyway! Sorry for the long post!

Well, lets get to it.

Let us talk about Monday’s and the expected frustration that usually comes with it.

I consider myself a good friend of @chr7is and for those of you who don’t know, I happen to work for his sister health and safety company – we have joint offices and thus I see him on a weekly basis when he pops in to come handle some admin related work.

Now my Monday’s are usually very hectic. I’m what you call a glorified admin lady. My job description consists of doing– well mostly everything. I work from Monday to Friday 08:00 -16:30. For me a Monday can mean the difference between working overtime and not having to work overtime. For a very long time I had to handle everything in the office, from quotes to answering client’s enquiries, to providing our consultants with the needed information so that they can service our client’s efficiently etc. The list practically goes on and on. To keep it short and sweet, I was overworked and stressed out like hell for almost a year and a half

The tasks I had to complete started getting too much and with time I found myself working most of the evenings to catch up and on weekends as well. It actually got to a point where I wanted to break down and cry- it seems stupid I guess, but I was also going through a difficult time in my life. I even entertained the thought of quitting my job –yikes.

Then after about a year and a half another lady joined our company. Let us call her lady ‘a’ for the sake of privacy. Lady ‘a’ was appointed to help me in the office, and I was grateful as hell for the extra hand. Things started looking up and lady ‘a’ was a big help. I delegated a quarter of my work to her and with time she started learning the ropes.

A year later she quit.

I was yet again on my own, back to square one, knowing that with time I would have to train another lady all over again. Needless to say I did not think she would come in the form of my boss’s wife.

Let us refer to her as lady ‘b’. Now lady ‘b’ wasn’t as efficient and swift – if I could put it like that- as lady ‘a’. Our entire company consists of family or either friends of family that get hired, and only a few people here and there are actually hired because of their skills and so forth.

Sadly lady ‘b’ was not one of them. But I could not mention this and it’s not in my nature to kick someone from behind. I just can’t do that. So I sucked it up and painstakingly taught her our entire system, who reports to who, what to do in certain situations, who to contact, all of those things.

Lady ‘b’ is trying to learn and I can appreciate that, but she has a long way to go. So what happened this Monday blew me away. Lady ‘b’ and myself were called into a meeting early in the morning by our two CEO’s and we were explained that the ‘flow’ of our company had to change – in other words, certain tasks had to be re-delegated to more experienced personnel. Tasks that lady ‘b’ handled and that I had overseen. She was basically told that they were more comfortable with me handling this and that due to my experience in the field and that I had a better understanding of what was right and what was wrong.

Now the problem is we are only two admin ladies in the office. So what you take away from the one lady the other one will have to do on top of all their other tasks. This was utterly ridiculous for me, because I was basically expected to pick up everything that I had done before and make it work.

What I can’t understand is, why waste my time training employee after employee, only for management to come forward and blame them for being inexperienced and not fit to handle a task.

How do you expect your employees to gain experience when you don’t allow them to grow, and how can you expect me to handle basically everything again and still be happy about it.

Needless to say my Monday morning went from ‘okay’ to ‘fucking stressed out’ in under an hour and a half. I honestly hope this new ‘flow of the company’ does not get implemented, because then I will absolutely lose it. I believe that we can only really move forward as a company if we start hiring people with the right qualifications, and stop pushing one person to be efficient in everything.

So tell me, was your Monday as exciting?

Chopelina