Thursday, May 17, 2007

What's Worse -- Terminal Indecision or Common Incompetence?

I blew a gasket yesterday. Unfortunately, I didn't fire the salvos in the appropriate direction at Eeyore; I had the yoga mantra going of "have to spend every day with her for the next five weeks" and so I went down to the office and had my nuclear meltdown with OFL and his compadres. I went out to go collect The Boy and our Beloved Blonde as it was getting dark and stormy, and by the time I made it back I realized that Eeyore was completely incapable of correcting the mess she had made (of our school's online public face). So I sat down, googled the home page and printed the cache of it so I would get it right. And then I spent 45 minutes FIXING IT FOR HER. And I (and our Beloved Patient Blonde) missed Rick Riordan's presentation to do it. Eeyore was at my elbow for the first fifteen minutes or so until I gave her the job of fixing the original page she had meant to update when she screwed up the main one... and that (what should have taken three to five minutes copy and paste max) took her until I was nearly done rebuilding and relinking the entire front page from scratch. Eeyore suffers from terminal indecision -- she is virtually incapable of making a clear decision and then acting upon it. And thus anything left to her gets mired in an absolute miasma of waiting for someone else to get sick of waiting for her to do it -- and then do it for her. I had thought upon taking the job that this was partially because of the "my way or the highway and get the fuck OUT of my way" atmosphere of last year. Unfortunately, it appears I was drastically mistaken. There is a lot of announcing that things should change and that things are wrong -- but no follow-through, no action, no effort to DO anything other than moan and whine and point out ways that everyone else should do things. I have been kicking myself all day today thinking that I should have left her to stew in her own fetid mess yesterday (which would have gone very publicly into today). It might have been better long-term for me to have left her to deal with it and have to admit she fucked it up and couldn't fix it on her own. I just couldn't stand the utter incompetence ... and I really felt that it made everyone (including me) look bad. Thinking it through, I'm pretty certain of two things: one, this will happen again, and two, next time I will suddenly have many, MANY important things to do which will prevent me from bailing her ass out of whatever publicly leaky boat she has blown holes in.

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