And now a rant
Every day I'm forced to wonder how people cope once they've been hired on permanently where I work. Between Thursday and Friday, for example, I had to wait for an answer to a simple question. Why? Apparently, the manager decided to wage a political war with her counterpart in New Jersey. This is worth a full rant right here...
OK, so it's Friday. A day in which my ESFJ manager wants to take one of the departments out for lunch, all at one time. She had cleared this with her counterpart's boss the day before, but hadn't bothered to tell the counterpart about the fact that all the work would be shifted to New Jersey from the office I work in. She did this because she thinks the other person hates her, because the underlings in that department like my manager better. Uhmkay.
So, counterpart gets furious and mentions that she had the department working on other projects, and would have liked to have been consulted first before having a couple of hours of extra phone calls shifted in her direction. Personal note: not an irrational request at all. Apparently she had a confrontation with my manager, who then decided to wage political war. In fact, she spent half the day on Friday trying to figure out how to get counterpart in trouble without getting counterpart's team in trouble with her.
Greeeeeeeaaaaaaaat! Isn't it wonderful when other people have nothing better to do with their time? Also this makes me distinctly uncomfortable-- clearly this means that if you do anything that might offend her, she is willing to go behind your back and stab away. I've already seen the irrationality when she blew up at me for using the phrase, "Figured I'd send this directly to you since I hadn't heard anything since Monday..." in an e-mail where I was requesting information on Thursday, four days after the original request, because it was "bad teamwork."
I also wonder what the reality of the whole story with this political situation is. I'm sure her version of "demoralization because the team doesn't like the new manager," is rather overstated, as is, the "bad morale," and "her team loves me" is a bit of an exaggeration. I'm willing to bet what actually happened is that ESFJ hated this person for some "perceived" snub that really never existed, and has decided to enjoy power trips flexing her political muscle. What probably happened in this case, was that the lady on the other end actually did have the team working on other projects, didn't find out until the last minute that a bunch of calls were headed in her direction, since her top manager didn't bother to communicate that she'd given ESFJ consent to take that department out for lunch until the last minute. This probably caused a huge inconvenience for counterpart, and she vocalized her disgust and upset with ESFJ. This prompted ESFJ to seek revenge instead of an alternate solution, like, say, taking half the department out for lunch the first day, and the other half the next.
But then again, why bother with taking other people's projects and workloads into consideration? And why handle it rationally, instead of seeking revenge? I think this hedges on some other basic problem, which is that ESFJ hates her job, and is willing to do anything else besides ferrying e-mails back and forth, which is a big part of why she was even brought in from Jersey in the first place.
Oy vey. Shame that real work gets shunted to the side in favor of this sort of insanity! But then again, I'm just an INTP, so what the hell do I know?
