Wouldn’t It Be Great If Everyone Just Did Their Jobs?

There are two things you should know about [Coworker]. One, he enjoys ruining other people’s vacations by texting and calling them constantly for sheer and utter nonsense like talking about his workday; and two, he likes to blame all of his shortcomings on me.

We have a grand total of five new interns starting on June first. I sent [Coworker] a budget report back in early March for interns at the insistence of his boss because he wasn’t showing any progress toward making one himself. Really, he didn’t know how and didn’t want to admit it.

In this report, I included the price for an external network license per person. I also laid out how many licenses we already had and who had each of these licenses to justify this expenditure. Several times, [Coworker] said he read it and it was “good stuff” but then asked me questions that were laid out clearly in charts and tables in the report.

I explained to him several times through March and April that he needed to send in a purchase order for every person he wished to hire, but I wasn’t about to hound him for it as these were not my interns and, therefore, not my problem. 

He decided to go on vacation the week that they started thrusting all their training and hiring paperwork onto me. No problem; we got it all sorted out and it was no issue… until we tried to start running the software that is essential to our company. That external software that he was supposed to buy seats for. None of them could do anything.

It felt so good sending him an email and a text message informing him that in the future he needed to purchase a new license for every person. And you bet that I copied his boss on both.