NORMAL LIFE: She Wants A Screwdriver, Not A Hammer!

In England, if the boss asks you to make a cup of tea, you fucking make a cup of tea without question. Similarly, if the boss says jump, you bloody jump! This isn't sucking up to the boss, this is merely his way of exerting his authority; after all, having worked his way up in the firm, he has 'earnt' certain rights and one of them happens to be bossing you, his underling, around. Hence that's why he is called the 'boss'.

Fortunately, a lot of bosses avoid this overtly insensitive approach, but an incident in the office this week made we look at a very close colleague - who I like very much - and wonder: who the fuck do you think you are?!

In the absence of a General Manager (he quit last summer and, even now, hasn't been replaced), I was preparing my Goals & Objectives together with my peers. We told each of our colleagues what we thought should be done this year, together with a brief idea of how it could be completed. Without a boss, it was a very good exercise, just to make sure that our tasks were aligned to an ever elusive strategy.

The colleague I have an issue with today suggest producing a bi-annual newsletter summarising the team's achievements. With alot of negativity in the organisation, any attempt at highlighting the positive elements by means of internal marketing could be beneficial. My colleague pointed out that she would need a certain type of software to do this. Not caring what the software was, I asked her how much the software cost. She said it would cost €1,000. I scoffed, much to her dismay. We don't have money to fritter away on a newsletter which, let's face it, would only be produced twice a year.

I suggested that we collect images, create the text and use Microsoft Word, later converting the final layout to PDF format; whilst not ideally nor wholly professional, the result is sometimes pretty impressive and, even if it's not, you can always tweak the original Word document to improve the final PDF layout. My colleague refused to listen to my suggestion, barking: 'If I was a screwdriver, I want a screwdriver, not a hammer!' I simply respond: 'Well, sweetie, all we can afford is a hammer!' And do you know what she did? She removed the task from her goals for the year!

She doesn't need a screwdriver nor a hammer, just a slap to knock some sense into her!