Somtimes I can be unresonable, but not today.

Sometimes I work in an office. The company is family owned and run by a group of festive Italians. Papa bear runs the joint while his two bear princesses handle the admin angle and the bear prince handles our sales department. We employ a small staff of service guys who handle our residential and commercial accounts and 2 additional office slaves. That's where I come in.

I was hired as an office assistant, which apparently means that whatever the bear princesses don't want to do falls in my lap. They've got five kids between them ranging from five to sixteen so you can probably imagine the amount of distractions they're surrounded by. My second, and probably most important, purpose is to provide a constant presence in the office so when the phones ring or on the odd chance a random customer walks in someone is there to provide service or take a message.

I used to work there Monday thru Friday nine to five and it was glorious. The economy tanked and our business which mostly deals with the high end of an at home luxury suddenly stopped being so prosperous. Thankfully this is where working for a family comes in handy. Instead of cutting the jobs of myself and the other office slave they offered us a job share. We would split time in the office, her on Monday and Tuesday and me on Thursday and Friday and alternating Wednesdays.

The salary cut wasn't fun (hence my 2nd job: more on that later) but I got to keep my health insurance so I never really complained. The biggest pain about the job share has actually been sharing the job. Office Slave #2 and I didn't actually do the same job before so once the switch happened we had to learn different aspects of each others jobs so certain tasks were not ignore for 2 or 3 days a week. This was kind of hairy in the beginning but for the most part everything seems to be working like clockwork now, except for one thing.

Office Slave #2 is not skilled with a stapler.

Now, if you're like me that statement probably comes as a shock to you. Operating a stapler is probably something that doesn't rank in your mind as something tricky. If I handed you two sheets of notebook paper that I had scrawled on for the sake of a prop, a stapler and asked you to staple them together it would probably look something like this.

I would take the papers and stapler back from you and aside from that fact that I'd just given someone the tools to do a menial task I could have done myself I probably wouldn't remember the whole event an hour later. This would not be the case with Office Slave #2. Ever week when I get back to the desk that we now share I am faced with piles and piles of papers that I can't leisurely leaf through because they look like this.

WHY?
I've yet to find a way to articulate the lack of common sense that this small action screams. Every time I come back to work and have to sift through a stack of "stapled" papers my brain leaks out of my ears a little. I've thought about leaving Office Slave #2 a note but nothing professional comes to mind.

Did this post bring up the trauma of some sever lack of common sense in your life? Tell me about it!