Molasses, emphasis on the ass

Good morning, and welcome back to UOPTA on this fun-filled morning. I hope you had a lovely Bastille Day with all of the appropriate...accoutrement. I'm here, and I'm ready to tell a story that has been sitting on the "one day" list since I started this blog.

My friend Twilight told me recently that our former colleague Regina had started reading UOPTA from time to time. If you're reading this now, Regina, enjoy this trip down memory lane and welcome aboard. This is the story of Doris, and it pleases me to say that no names have been changed to protect anyone.

When Twilight and I started working in the academic advising office at UCSB together, we had not yet officially met. We knew some of the same people, but the biggest thing we had in common was our age. I had graduated college just six months prior to starting there, and Twi had a year or two on me. There were two other people in the same position as us. One was a very nice woman named Wendy who I couldn't say a single negative thing about. The other was Doris, and I don't have that problem with her. To say that this was "a clash of styles in the worst way possible" is an understatement. My now etched-in-stone friendship with Twilight was largely formed in the early years by our mutual displeasure for that woman, so I guess I'm somewhat thankful for her.

Doris had been working in that office for 30 years when I arrived. To put that in perspective, my very being didn't hit 30 years until six years after I stopped working there. A lot had changed in that time, and the use of computers was probably the most significant to that job. She was completely lost on these machines. You know those blonde jokes about putting white out on the screen? Well she actually put tape on her monitor to cover where something she wasn't supposed to click used to appear. Seriously. And no, she's not blonde.

Worse yet, she tried training some of the student workers on the programs. I'd hear her say, "Ok now, just click that little x thing in the box thingy there to make the other thing go away." "You mean close the window?" the confused and frustrated student would ask. I sat very close to her, and those interactions always made me want to pull my hair out.

There were many more things that had that same effect, let me assure you. This woman did everything slowly. EVERYTHING! Student would come in to make appointments, and here is how it went when they came to my desk:

Me: Hey, how's it going? Can I get your Perm number please?
Student: Sure, 4628492.Me: Great. Can I get your name?
Student: Yeah, Michael Hernandez.
Me: Ok, Michael, you're all set. See you then.

Pretty straightforward, no? No, actually, not with Doris at the helm. Here's how the same conversation would go with her playing the role of advisor:

Doris: (slowly enunciating every word) Are you an undergraduate in the College of Letters and Science?
Student: Yeah, I just want to make an appointment.
Doris: Can I please have the first six digits of your Perm number?
Student: Sure, 462-
Doris: Oh, oh, hold on there. 4...6...
Student: 28492
Doris: 2...8...what else now?
Student: 492. 4...9...2.
Doris: Ok, let's see here. Can you please spell your last name for me?
Student: Hernandez. H-e-r-n-
Doris: Oh, hold on now. H...

I shit you not. When we had a long line of students to help, I would usually help 3 or 4 in the time it took her to do the same exact thing with one.

Oh there's more, my friends. There were four of us up there, and we'd typically take turns answering the phones. The problem was the one of the four was super duper slow in doing this. I want to be clear - the slowness she exhibited had nothing to do with her age. She was only about 50, which is not near old enough to make people move like molasses. It was self-induced slowness on Doris' part. She didn't like picking up the phone receiver and talking into it, so she had a headset. No problem, right? Wrong. She didn't keep it plugged into the phone or even on her head. The phone would ring, and the three of us who had answered the last ten calls would sit and wait. After the third ring, Doris would start saying, "Ooh ooh, Doris, hold on," as she'd fumble to plug in the headset, put it on her head, then push a button to answer the phone. Normally this resulted in the voicemail getting the call before her.

When she did get the phone though, she answered it like this: "Letters and Science Doris!" Why? Because the Dean had asked us to say "Letters and Science" and then state our names. While most of us added a "this is" or "speaking" to our greetings, Doris took the decree quite literally, and it always made me laugh.

And yet there's more. Ladies and gentlemen of the UOPTA readership, please know that I'm being sincere here. Some of you may have some body issues and feel that your rear ends are a little on the big side. I would bet a nice sum of money that the ass of my largest-assed reader is only half the size of Doris'. Normally that wouldn't interfere in the workplace, but it did in this case. We had a hallway that we walked down every time we needed a student's record from the file room, and that ass made it impossible to go around her. It was kinda like an extra wide Lincoln Towncar taking up a lane and a half of a two-lane road. There was one difference though, and while infuriating at the time, it's quite comical to me now. If Doris noticed that someone was behind her and couldn't pass that ass, she'd try to speed up. For her, speeding up consisted of saying, "Ooh ooh, hold on now, ooh" and moving her arms twice as fast while her legs maintained the same rate. It was truly a site to behold. It got so frustrating that if I needed to go to the file room and she had already started to do the same, I just sat and waited for her to finish before even beginning down the path.

You know what? I just looked at my list of Doris-related things that I wanted to talk about, and I'm glad to say that there's a Part 2 in the future. This is just so much fun that I'm pleased as punch to be able to extend my shit-talking to another day. I realize that most of my complaints have had zero to do with her personality or anything seemingly beyond her control. That ends tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of today, gentle readers, and I'll see you back here soon.