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I rarely vent about my job, because I love the work I do. The organization, I don't love. But only a few years til retirement so I will put up with such foolishness as the accounts payable department. I have an invoice, I code it with the required purchase order number and send to them. I followed all their directions. But they cannot tell me if it's been paid because, and I quote them "they don't handle purchase orders." WTF do they do all day?

In the workplace I find that many people are not competent or do they even care and this is what you get. You will just have to make the best of it as you're doing and remember Ariel is the beneficiary.

Well then. Who handles purchase orders?

Purchasing issues the purchase orders, A/P pays them. My issue is that I provided the necessary information to A/P, and they can't be bothered to try to help. If they can't look stuff up by p.o., they could have asked for more information, like vendor or amount. It frustrates me because the organization I work for sets a high bar for customer satisfaction, yet they don't recognize that employees can be customers too! Whatever. It's minor, and I agree, sometimes there are incompetent people in the workforce. I'm reminded of hearing George Morris say at a clinic I was auditing "I'm surrounded by incompetence!"

Ariel is not always appreciative of the mental torture I suffer for her benefit! LOL

PaulO wrote:
Ariel is not always appreciative of the mental torture I suffer for her benefit! LOL

That's a hoot and oh so true !!!

It could be worse.

A number of years ago, I was looking for a new job and being over 50 in the IT industry, the outlook wasn’t good. I finally landed a gig working for an elected official who was the head of a medium sized city’s (more than one million inhabitants) agency. I was to represent the agency’s needs to the city’s IT department. The elected official wasn’t too happy with the support he was getting so it was an adversarial relationship from the start. About two months in, I was asked to remain after a meeting regarding a multimillion dollar contract and several members of the IT department attempted to bully me into acquiescing with their methods. I wrote a long formal letter via my boss to the elected official I worked for laying out that the IT department was making a hash of contract law and weren’t amenable to following the usual procedures for contract administration. I also noted that the elected official was the only one who had signed said contract who was still associated with the city and if it got investigated, the elected official would be left holding the bag.

He forwarded my letter to the city attorney who assigned it to the assistant city attorney for contracts and I guess most of my accusations were substantiated because one member of the “bullies” promptly retired early, another got transferred to a dead end position and the junior member of the group never talked to me again if he could help it. I got called “incompetent” by the city’s department head of information technology but several years later, I was part of a procedure that eventually put him in the position of resigning in lieu of termination. Of course, I was officially a “whistle blower” and everything I did was examined under a microscope by city IT. But having been trained by successful participants of the Pentagon bureaucracy, I survived my six years and now collect $600 a month from the retirement fund. <G>

So my advice is don’t sweat the small stuff, keep your eye on the long term goal.