Thursday, April 5, 2012

FILES FULL OF SURPRISES

I thought following in the footsteps of an office manager who held the position for 8 years would be a challenge.  After all, I have never worked in this field before and there are a lot of very technical components to the work.  Plus she handled many things for the business that I have not had experience with.

What I did not expect was to walk into such a disorganized mess.  In part it was messy and dirty because no one had been doing the job or sitting at her desk for over 2 months.  There were over 700 e-mails in the inbox!

 I finally found a way to get onto Quickbooks because I noticed a handwritten notation at the bottom of a phone list and it turned out to be the password.  There are things tacked to the wall with push pins which make no sense and don't appear to be important - one was dated from 2008.

But the files.  OMG the files.  Pretty much each file I open has stuff that relates to the label and also a bunch of stuff which doesn't.  There are files full of mixed subjects with dates running from 2003 to the present.  And these are the files in the desk - I haven't even started going through the 4 other file drawers in the office.  The customer files seem to be in good shape, but the cabinet hasn't been purged since 2007.  So there is a project.

Today the owner and the project manager were out on an emergency call and they parked in a place where they needed to use their flashers, which ran the battery down.  They called AAA and found out that the previous office manager hadn't renewed the membership this year.  They missed another appointment while they were getting service for the truck!

I have been bemoaning the fact that I had so little to do at the hotel, and now I see project after project all lined up.  Kinda a good feeling!

4 comments:

knittergran said...

Yes---you know they need you!

smalltownme said...

Oh boy, what a mess. Good luck to you in getting it organized!

shrink on the couch said...

When you said all kinds of random things inside the files, I assumed you were talking about computer files. And I thought, someone didn't know how to locate the right directory when saving files. This person you are replacing must have had some serious issues.

Jenn @ Juggling Life said...

It sounds like you will whip that place into shape in no time!

You would love my email inbox for work--I empty it and file everything daily.