undeterred has two managers

[undeterred]

which is nothing like having two mommies...

I work in a WI satellite office of a New York company. My supervisor and manager are in the New York office. Yesterday the manager of my local office assigned half of his assistant's job to me, since his assistant is going to reduce her hours and work from home due to health reasons.

I was rendered temporarily speechless. I don't report to him. He wasn't even interested in interviewing me when I got the job. I'm a computer tech, and his assistant is a secretary. While I could do the work, I don't think I should do it because I would have way too much to do and it would really take away my ability to focus on the things I was hired for. This was totally out of the blue, and unbeknownst to the people I actually report to.

So I documented the whole conversation. I emailed it to my supervisor and manager in New York and they will back me up. So much for resolving to stay out of the politics at my month old job. I'm in the middle of it now.

Good manager is a New York liberal. Generous, smart, funny.
Bad manager is a conservative and too cheap to hire another secretary.

[XemaSab]

1. Mmmm... yeah.

You see, we're putting the coversheets on all TPS reports now before they go out. Did you see the memo about this?

Yeah. If you could just go ahead and make sure you do that from now on, that will be great. And uh, I'll go ahead and make sure you get another copy of that memo mmm'k?

[Misunderestimator]

2. Wow... you did the right thing...

good for you not to be intimidated into such a situation. Unbelievable!

[XemaSab]

3. Hi. What's happening?

We need to talk about your TPS reports. Yeah. Did you get that memo?

Ah. Yeah. It's just we're putting new cover sheets on all the TPS reports before they go out now. So if you could go ahead and try to remember to do that from now on, that'd be great.

[Cyndee_Lou_Who]

4. That stinks. I hope it all works out for you...

[undeterred]

5. I and my two managers are new to the company

In fact the senior manager from New York has been there about 6 weeks. But he is a senior VP and has a lot of power, and everyone thinks very highly of him. And even though I am just a lowly tech (and he's actually a highly experienced network guy) he made the effort to get to know me when I spent a week in NY recently. He took me out to lunch and amazingly we talked about politics and everything under the sun. I ask him all the technical questions I'm afraid to ask some of the network guys because he is a great communicator and would never laugh at me! Anyway, he jumped right on this issue as soon as he knew about it.

The local manager is a star in the company however- his division is growing like wildfire and he makes a ton of money. So he has a lot of power. But he still didn't have the right to do this and I think the chain of command will be reasonably enforced despite his favored status. The weird thing is that even though I see him every day he has never bothered with me about anything. Never talked to me about the job or communicated with me at all till this. If he had, it might have been harder to resist what he was doing- but it was easy for me to see it for what it was because he is cold.

[Cyndee_Lou_Who]

6. Is he the kind of prick who will hold this against you?

I mean... hopefully the good guy in NY will nip this. But, I hope you don't have fallout of daily BS from the local prick.

[undeterred]

7. He'll probably just ignore me and that's fine

He's a businessman bullshitter type who pretends like he know more than he really does about everything.

He doesn't want to talk about the technical stuff in the office though, because he knows he can't pull it over on me.

Probably he won't make it personal as long as I do the things that really are my job that make a difference to him.

I'm so glad I made a strong connection with NY guy. As soon as we figured out we were both raving liberals I asked for time off to protest Bush in September- and joked that I would call him to come down and get me out of jail if I got arrested!