Case of the Missing Newspapers

Part of my job is to save news paper articles that are about my organization to an electronic drive. We get the large local paper daily and the small papers from other local towns once a week. Our PR Director or someone in her office will go through all the papers and circle the ones they want saved then give them to me. For the large daily paper I can find the articles fairly easy online and simply save the page to the proper folder. The smaller papers though have to have the articles cut out and scanned to a PDF before the can be saved. It is a tedious and boring job and I tend to let the papers stack up quite a bit before I do anything with them as I can get through an entire months worth in a single afternoon if I need to. But when I go through them I make sure the articles are cut out neatly, that the name of the paper and the date are written on them so that when they are scanned it can be added to the file name and I take care to make sure to get all portions of an article as sometimes they cross over multiple pages.

So I have recently let the papers stack up a bit on my desk though sorted neatly into two piles, one for those I can look up electronically and ones I have to cut out. Whenever I get more papers, I sort them into these stacks to wait for me to go through them. Now I do admit that I should be doing these sooner and I spend a lot of time reading random things on the internet when I could be taking care of the papers, but as it has never been expressed to me that they are a priority I always figured that having the papers for the month done by the end of the month is fine.

Apparently that isn't actually the case. My stacks of news papers were on my desk upon arriving to work this morning. In fact they were there when I went to lunch. About an hour and a half after lunch though I noticed they were gone and asked my boss if she knew anything about it. She said that she didn't but that perhaps I should ask the lady who covered my lunch if she saw anyone take them. I called the lady and she told me that yes, she saw PR Director take the papers. And not only did she take them but apparently she made a big deal about doing so by making a lot of disapproving noises.

I don't like PR Director mainly because I don't think she likes me. For the most part she treats me as though I can't possibly have a brain in my head since I'm just an Admin Assistant. I've actually been quite worried for several months that she has been looking for excuses to have me fired.

I told my boss that PR Director is the one who took the papers and had I known she wasn't happy that they were not done yet I would have gladly set to working on them right away. My boss let me know that PR Director never said anything to her either, which she really should have if she was upset with how I was doing a particular job.

Later in the afternoon I had to put a letter on PR Director's desk for her signature and I see all the papers I had so neatly stacked on my desk in a huge mess of a pile on the floor. From what I could tell she went through all of them and ripped out the articles without the aid of scissors, even from the papers where the articles can be found online. I do hope she realized that sometimes in the papers articles get printed back to back but don't line up perfect so you have to be careful how you cut them out or you lose part of the article on the back side. But I suppose that isn't my problem anymore.

I will be rather ticked though if a pile of articles show up on my desk with a request to scan them into the system. I'm not positive but I don't think she actually knows how to use the scan feature of the copy machine. I'd like to be able to tell her that since she was obviously unhappy with how I was handling the papers that she is free to do them completely on her own and that includes the scanning. But I know I won't be able to.

Had to share this as it completely ruined my afternoon and has left me feeling like crying for the last two hours at least. The only consolation is that she can't fire me, only my boss can. And since I've not had a single bad review in the time I've been here they will have to give me a chance to improve upon any short comings before they can fire me.