"Head...Shoulders...Knees and...SOCKS!"

While obsessively ironing name tags into most of Child’s clothing (as is required by his daycare), I was ruminating on something that happened at work today...

As required by our superiors, we all have to have a six month review with our supervisors. This has always been in place, but never really enforced, and they have now decided that it will be. So this week my little department of 5 (six including our supervisor) has been having meetings with the Bosslady to discuss our job performance. I discussed my review in my earlier post this week.

I mention this because one of my colleagues – the previously mentioned “X” – had hers today. And she came right into my cube afterwards to ask me if I had said told the Bosslady that X hadn’t been doing a key piece of paperwork. X mentioned that she had 3 negative things, and this was one of them. I didn’t lie – I told her yes – sort of. I then explained what I had said and why.

She seemed to be ok with this, and asked that next time something like this happens, for me to tell her directly before going to our supervisor. This is fine, and I shall, but there is a reason why I didn’t. One is because when this first became a problem for other colleagues who didn’t want to say anything to her for a variety of reasons. Then when it became a problem for me, X was out of the office for a few days, by the time she returned from her trip, I had already moved on. But I also know that if the tables were turned (and they have been in the past) she would not hesitate to go right to the Bosslady. X would also probably not have taken this well. I should mention at this point that both X is ranked one above me on the food chain, but she is not my supervisor.

So I feel like perhaps I should discuss this with X further. I know that she is going through an unhappy phase with work these days, and I certainly don’t want to add to that. But what gets frustrating is that she makes everything about her, and will then project her issues on me. For example, I’m working on our backlog (as is one of my job requirements), and this is about her because she brought in most of those materials but never did anything about them, so I’m making her look bad. Um…I’m just doing my job???

Will I say something to X tomorrow? We’ll have to see if I can figure out what to say. I just really want to avoid a further confrontation.