There Ain't No Devil, It's Just God When He's Drunk

Okay, I know that a few days ago (quite possibly yesterday), I was going on about my loathing of reception work. Well, I have been doing that particular job for over a week, so now it's Friday. I finish up, get ready to leave, and notice that I have a missed call on my cell phone. Oh look, a voice mail. It's from the temp agency saying that my services at Baillie Gifford (yes, I'm saying it now) will no longer be needed. So the whole bus ride home I'm thinking in my head of what possibly went wrong. I know that they do in fact still need another receptionist for another two weeks. I thought I was doing well at the job- hell today I even made and ENTIRE list of ALL the employees and who their secretaries were so that I could connect the person on the line to someone else if the person they were after was busy. Was it because I was online all the time? No, the other secretaries were freaking buying jewellery on e-bay all the time and looking at pictures. I really couldn't figure it out.

Then I get home and read my email (since I am not allowed gmail access from Fascist I mean Baillie Gifford) to find an e-mail from the temp agency. Apparently, while they thought I was ‘lovely’, I was apparently ‘a bit too quiet for the role and lacked initiative.’

HOLD UP!

The quiet thing I can understand. True, I am not very vocally dominant and don’t talk to strangers in a loud, obnoxious, voice. Nor do I sit around all day talking in a voice that all the people waiting in the waiting room can hear, thus inviting them against their will into the conversation of how delicious your Marks and Spencers two for £10 meal was last night. Fine. I’m okay with being on the quiet side.

BUT LACKED INITIATIVE??!?!?!?

I’m sorry that I haven’t failed enough at life to be a receptionist at Baillie Gifford for the past 16 years. I’m sorry that I don’t have all 600 employees memorised and know all their job titles, their team members, and who to direct an enquiry towards for personal pensions. But does that mean I lacked INITIATIVE?!?!
I asked questions about things I didn’t understand- did you hear me ever repeating a question? NO, because I learned from it the first time. I think that looks like initiative.

FOR G** Flipping Mother F***ing sake, I spent an hour TYPING UP ALL THE EMPLOYEES AND THEIR SECRETARIES so that I would know who to send a caller to in the event that the person they were after was in a meeting. INITIATIVE!

It’s not my fault that the computer system, logged in as a temp, won’t let me place room bookings or book taxis, but I still do all the work for it for YOU to enter into the computer system. Maybe you should FIX THE TEMP SETTINGS so that I could actually help out.

All this said and done, I think I did FREAKING GREAT my first week because I sent everyone to the people they asked for, learned how to use a switchboard within the hour, booked taxis even though I couldn’t enter them in the database, and only asked for help when I really needed it after not being able to find the information myself with the means I was given.

Baillie Gifford, I hope that this current financial crisis destroys your company, because obviously a company like yourselves should not be allowed to succeed when you fail to see the amount of initiative from your staff (AND TEMPS!!!)