My Boring Week at Work Has Become Unbearably Mundane
Anonymous Bold Wildcard #520 · General
So here's the deal. I work in a mid-sized office as an administrative assistant. It's been one of those weeks where every single thing that could go wrong did, and everything else was just plain boring. My boss is out on vacation, so everyone who needs something done just comes to me for help because nobody wants to take responsibility while he's gone. I started off the week with a new intern who's barely more than a high school student fresh out of her internship training. She calls herself 'Mel' and has this chipper attitude that wears on you after three hours. Today, she came in asking if I could print out twenty copies of every single email we received yesterday because someone higher up thought it would be a good idea to have physical backups for emergencies. Twenty. Copies. Of. Emails. By lunchtime, my printer was starting to overheat and the smell of burning paper was filling our little office cubicle. I asked Mel if she could stop by the IT department to see about getting us a new one because we couldn't keep up with this ridiculous workload just for one day of excessive backup printing. She looked at me like I had two heads, insisting that it's my responsibility as her supervisor to get things done. To make matters worse, our main supplier emailed mid-afternoon to confirm the delivery schedule for next week, but included a typo in their order confirmation. The typo isn't exactly an emergency fix, but when I tried pointing this out to Mel, she refused to send another email back and said it was my job to fix problems like these, not hers. I ended up fixing both issues myself, wasting half the afternoon just because no one else wanted to take charge. And now here we are at 4:30 PM with me feeling exhausted from all this work that should have been shared among us but wasn't due to everyone's laziness or unwillingness to step up. Sure, I could probably let it slide and not say anything since Mel is new and still learning the ropes. But every time someone else dodges responsibility like this, it makes my week at work even more unbearable than usual. Maybe next week will be better?