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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Having to do the work of lazy, incompetent colleagues who've been there since the dawn of time and who earn 2-3 times what I do.
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I worked in 3 agencies so far and this is by far the worst part. Because it's easy to get tenure, difficult to fire people, and easy to sue - managers are reluctant to discipline poor performers. I worked in an office where the admin assistant was verbally abusive and took her role as the "time keeper" to mean that it was up to her whether or not you go comp time, if you could swap out your AWS day, shift your work hours by an hour, etc. She never provided actual secretarial services to the group, she just guarded her little piece of territory and could be heard yelling at her target of the hour from several cubes down.

My next office, the admin assistant was much kinder - never yelled - but she could not format a word document or do basic data entry. She started 40 years ago and never fully embraced the computer revolution. I ended up spending 20-30% of my time on admin tasks because she was "incapable" of doing it - I tried to show her how to use Word, she did fine when I was watching, but when I stopped looking over her shoulder half the document would come back in errors. She refused to attend Word training. So I realized it's not that she can't; she won't and she's totally comfortable just collecting a paycheck while reading the paper at her desk and chatting with her friends.

But my new agency has contracted out the admin positions and we have much better staff now - the one we have even uses excel to project budget numbers! The challenge I'm facing here is that my direct supervisors don't want to manage people - they do it because that's how you advance yourself, but they don't actually enjoy or want to manage people. It's fine most days but frustrating to know they won't go to bat for their employees on anything. [/quote]

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