Do They Do It On Purpose?

Do people irritate me on purpose? Are they trying to make their point that I am demanding and a perfectionist? Is it too much to ask to do your job decently and in order? Are you wondering what on earth I'm talking about??

A couple of weeks ago, I let my 3rd office helper go. Actually, Mr. Happy fired her for me...I'm not sure I would have been entirely pleasant during the process. She told Mr. Happy that she enjoyed working for him...notice she didn't say "Jaj" or "You and Jaj"... anyway, she wasn't very bright. Not very bright at all. When I interviewed her, she assured me that if I needed anything from a file, she could find it. Um, no, she couldn't. And now I can't find anything she's filed either. I let our bookkeeper go in May because she wasn't doing things how we needed them done, plus she charged $26.00/hour. We weren't getting our money's worth. So I tried to train the other assistant in all things bookkeeping. It just wasn't working out. She would put the Invoice Number in the Amount Due spot...use commas instead of decimals...little things that have a big impact. Whenever I pointed out her mistakes to her, she would giggle and say, "Oh! Not as many mistakes as last week!" I was wasting my time going through all of her entries and pulling out ones that were wrong and it was making me very frustrated and angry towards her.

Now that I'm back to doing everything myself, I am no longer frustrated. I still have the occasional bouts of anger...like today...when she was still working for me I had to ask her not to file things upsidedown. One wouldn't think that one would have to be told something so simplistic as to lay papers on top of each other facing the same direction, but apparently one does.

It takes a special kind of stupid to consistently file papers upsidedown and to be so inconsistent in office procedures. Or else she just did it to irritate the snot out of me. Which definitely worked. Because I am now snotless.

What Is It?

So I'm sitting here, reading Catherine's wonderful news, when Thumbelina comes running into my office yelling, "Mom! I made something for you!" She is playing with PlayDoh. As she thrusts a yellow gob of doh into my hand she asks me, "What is it?" What is it indeed. To a three-year-old it could be anything.

I tentatively answered, "A candy?"

Disgustedly, she looked at me, took the shape of Play Doh back, and said, "I go make you a diamond." Aha, it was a square!

The next thing I know, Thumbelina is back, giving me a diamond-shaped piece of Play Doh and asks, "What is it?"

Smiling, I answered, "A diamond!"

I can almost see her rolling her eyes as she answers, "No!" And then she rolls it into a ball and says, "It's a circle."

Well of course it is. Next time I'm just going to say, "It's a quadrilateral."