Personae (Part Un)
The Employee
I can't believe it's been over a month since I've started my job as a programme assistant for Furnish A Future (a programme of the Partnership for the Homeless) and I haven't even filled you in on any of it. Me and two other women run the programmatic side of this free furniture distribution warehouse for formerly homeless families and individuals. We schedule clients (to come and pick out furniture), donors (to arrange for free pickup of furniture), and drivers (to deliver the free furniture and pick up the donated stuff), keep the books, manage the office and staff and everything in between. Essentially, except for doing payroll for all the staff, we run this very simple, but complex programme that provides 100% free furniture to 2000 families a year (that's 167 families a month).
I love my job. It speaks to my anal retentive need to maintain order and structure in my otherwise chaotic existence. I can't control the flow of traffic on my way to work (I drive, by the way*; the office is 3 miles from my house in Brooklyn), but I can tell a donor that their furniture doesn't meet our requirements and compile a weekly report of all the clients we've seen and delivered to in the last five days and submit it to the Department of Homeless Services Office of Rehousing (with whom we have a financial contract to provide this service). Plus, I get to be instrumental in restoring the dignity of our formerly homeless clients, most of whom have been homeless for over a year. I really get to ham it up when I put on a show for the volunteers who hang out with us a couple times a month and provide slave labour for our under-staffed programme. They want to know the feel-good aspect of their toils and I give it to them. I give it to them good.
Oh, and the current Programme Coordinator is leaving the first week in September. Leaving in the first week of November is the other Programme Assistant as well. This leaves me with the most amount of office experience running the programme. Starting the first week in September will be the new Warehouse Manager, whose tasks none of us there really know, only that he will be the primary supervisor for the programme, though what aspect of the programme he will be intimately running is unknown to most of us. Either way, come November, I will be the only one on staff with the most amount of direct experience and knowledge of running the programme. I see this as a good thing for my stature within the organisation.
I should mention, too, that I was called into the principal's office late last week for "inappropriate" language usage in a personal email to the CEO of the Partnership. I gave him some friendly teasing about an editorial he submitted to The Times and received a rash of shit for it. Mind you, if I had critiqued him to his face, he would have, like so many other times, laughed it off. The HR Director called me in to ensure that I wasn't making a fool of myself with other co-workers, supervisors or professional contacts. The difference, I couldn't verbalise to him but can to you now, between my relationship with the CEO and other professional contacts, was that I had an informal relationship with my boss, whereas I have a formal relationships with professional contacts, thus I treat it differently.
Oh, well. Stupid lesson fucking learned.
To be continued in Personae Part Duex...
*as opposed to taking mass transit
I can't believe it's been over a month since I've started my job as a programme assistant for Furnish A Future (a programme of the Partnership for the Homeless) and I haven't even filled you in on any of it. Me and two other women run the programmatic side of this free furniture distribution warehouse for formerly homeless families and individuals. We schedule clients (to come and pick out furniture), donors (to arrange for free pickup of furniture), and drivers (to deliver the free furniture and pick up the donated stuff), keep the books, manage the office and staff and everything in between. Essentially, except for doing payroll for all the staff, we run this very simple, but complex programme that provides 100% free furniture to 2000 families a year (that's 167 families a month).
I love my job. It speaks to my anal retentive need to maintain order and structure in my otherwise chaotic existence. I can't control the flow of traffic on my way to work (I drive, by the way*; the office is 3 miles from my house in Brooklyn), but I can tell a donor that their furniture doesn't meet our requirements and compile a weekly report of all the clients we've seen and delivered to in the last five days and submit it to the Department of Homeless Services Office of Rehousing (with whom we have a financial contract to provide this service). Plus, I get to be instrumental in restoring the dignity of our formerly homeless clients, most of whom have been homeless for over a year. I really get to ham it up when I put on a show for the volunteers who hang out with us a couple times a month and provide slave labour for our under-staffed programme. They want to know the feel-good aspect of their toils and I give it to them. I give it to them good.
Oh, and the current Programme Coordinator is leaving the first week in September. Leaving in the first week of November is the other Programme Assistant as well. This leaves me with the most amount of office experience running the programme. Starting the first week in September will be the new Warehouse Manager, whose tasks none of us there really know, only that he will be the primary supervisor for the programme, though what aspect of the programme he will be intimately running is unknown to most of us. Either way, come November, I will be the only one on staff with the most amount of direct experience and knowledge of running the programme. I see this as a good thing for my stature within the organisation.
I should mention, too, that I was called into the principal's office late last week for "inappropriate" language usage in a personal email to the CEO of the Partnership. I gave him some friendly teasing about an editorial he submitted to The Times and received a rash of shit for it. Mind you, if I had critiqued him to his face, he would have, like so many other times, laughed it off. The HR Director called me in to ensure that I wasn't making a fool of myself with other co-workers, supervisors or professional contacts. The difference, I couldn't verbalise to him but can to you now, between my relationship with the CEO and other professional contacts, was that I had an informal relationship with my boss, whereas I have a formal relationships with professional contacts, thus I treat it differently.
Oh, well. Stupid lesson fucking learned.
To be continued in Personae Part Duex...
*as opposed to taking mass transit
posted by Ruth @ 20:22
3 Comments:
At 28/8/05 23:37 ,
Bijtje said...
driving a car in New York is somewhat mass transit too....
(i think anyway)
At 30/8/05 16:25 ,
they call me mellow yellow said...
God do you even know how many 'talking to's ' i got working at crapvergys about my emails. it became a joke!! and like you said if i hadda walked up to them and said what i wrote it woulda been no big deal. peopl commonly mistake writings for having some sorta of 'tone'. and the thing is..they seldomly do! go figure.
At 31/8/05 09:03 ,
Ruth said...
B.- By mass transit, I mean "public transportation," the sort where you ride a bus or train with several others crammed in the same vehicle.
Mellow- Well, that makes me feel a little better, and you're so right about emails having "tone" that isn't really there! That's been my experience!
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