The devil is in the details

Assistant (n):

One that assists; a helper. (Thanks to dictionary.com)

A small part of me really wants to send that definition to one of the administrative assistants for our lab. As a result of our recent expansion, we have hired two new administrative assistants, bringing the grand total to four. Originally there was one person in charge of financial matters and one person in charge of everything else. "Everything else" eventually got to be too much for one person to handle, so the original person became more of a personal assistant to our boss and another person was given the job of the rest of the random crap of lab details. I don't want to be mean, but I really have yet to be impressed by the new assistant's overwhelming intellect. She's nice and all, but she often makes me want to scream.

One of my favorite person's jobs is to be in charge of the lab email list. Since this change occured, the number of random emails sent to the lab has increased drastically. Some tidbits:
"There is a puddle of water on the floor and I almost slipped and fell. Be careful."
Varying emails letting us in on her hours...when she will or won't be in the office for either part of the day or an hour or so. Honestly, I'm not sure that our need for her is that desperate or that we wouldn't figure out how to get things done without her.

And my personal favorite (which we receive almost once a week):
"I'm free this afternoon and available to help out with any work that you might have."
While that might be a really considerate email to send in an office setting, it is borderline offensive (nyah, nyah, nyah I have no work today and you do) in the lab. I, and many others, am thisclose to sending her an email with a list of experiments I would like her to do.

There was also a little incident where I asked her to order some radioactivity for me (another her jobs) and somehow she managed to really mess up the order. (Long story short: chromium does not equal iodine. Any questions, ask Bob.)

Today's issue:
Yet another one of her jobs is to do some work on graphics/figures for papers for the boss. She is supposed to take graphs and re-size and re-format them. Today we had a lengthy email conversation that went something like this:

From Me to Her: Here are the figures.
From Her to Me: The boss wants these changes. Can you change them?
(My thought..why can't you?)
From Me to Her: Here are the new figures.
From Her to Me: You forgot one change.
From Me to Her: Here are the new figures. I remade them in a different computer program this time to make them more easily editable.
From Her to Me: Sorry to bother you, but I still can't edit the figures.

I opened the file. I re-sized the graphs and sent them back. (By re-sized I meant grabbed the little rectangles in the corners and re-sized, which you didn't need any special software to do. Glad to know that she tried.) She then proceeded to send the reformatted files to the entire lab (instead of just the boss) and then sent another email a minute later asking everyone to disregard the first. For the second time since we've been working on the paper.

Blech.

posted by Immunegirl @ 8:33 PM