The wife has ocassionally mentioned that there are occassions where she thinks I might need some anger managment classes. Not because I throw things or break crap, but simply because I choose to generally not like most people and seem always to be on the verge of "going postal".
This is not something you would associate with someone who has had a very sucessful sales career and I personally think shes making it up but after 20 years, she might know me better than I do.
Now listen, its pretty simple, common sense goes along way in my book and I find that many people I interface with just choose to use that damn "its not my job" execuse or fail to utilize common sense. This keeps me on edge, especially when it affects me directly.
Case in point, my most recent expense report. I must digress a bit, before we were acquired by this new group, we had corporate cards so your travel expenses as well as entertainment expenses did not come directly from your pocket. You reconciled your report every month with your receipts and your VP approved it and off you went. Well the new group, apparently due to lack of common sense on some other sales guys, has decided that the abuse of the corporate card now dictates that we pay out of pocket, keep receipts and get re-imbursed. ( paying for the sins of others has a tendency to start the blood pressure rising, so I'm already peeved about this)
So anyway, last quarter I had to travel a bit and racked up some entertainment expenses and the sum was one that I wanted back pretty quick. So, I grind through the expense report, dig around find all the receipts, submit it to my VP in Portland and off it goes to "the girl" in AP also in Portland.
Typically 2 week turn around. Well, apparently, in June they changed forms. The mileage rates had changed or something. So, said "girl" sends me an email and lets me know she is rejecting this due to the old form and returning it to me.
Now, here is where I start to heat up. But, just to prove I know my wife is wrong, I call the girl in Portland, fall on my sword, apologize for being a buffoon and let her know I will send the new form to my boss ( right down the fkkking hall from her), and he will sign it and its all good.
She informs me that she has already delivered the entire report to the mail room for delivery back to Phoenix. Now, said form has all my original receipts, no receipts = no re-imbursment. So, I'm visualizing chimp the magical monkey who works in the mail room slinging my interoffice envelope around to be handed off to the DHL, or Fedex or whoever. Now, IMHO, this is a receipe for disaster. I had to send it to Phoenix distro to get mailed to Portland and now we are doing this in reverse. My common sense meter goes off and I start to get irate, I must have backspaced about 10 emails to this individual, none would have worked to my benefit, so in a sense i was managing my own anger.
But tell me folks, if you can send me an email telling me its screwed up, how hard would it be to send an email requesting just the new form? And if it has VP signature, perhaps we can let it slide this once? So, I call again "hey, what are the odds you can head down to the mail room and stop Chip from sending that back to Phoenix". Wait, here it comes..."well thats not really my job, and it was the wrong form and if I do it for you..."
I thanked her and hung up. Why? Because at the end of the day, she was correct. But, I'm confident if it was me, I would have contacted the individual and said, "hey, I'm going to hold this here and give you a few days to get the correct form with signatures to me."
So, you see, I don't need anger management classes. Though this event happened Tuesday and no package yet....
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