Employee Fails

This is what went down at work today:

I arrived to my usual spot at the receptionist's desk, even though I am not the receptionist. I haven't even been trained on the phone system. Totally not my job description. I turned on the computer to find that someone had changed the blue wallpaper to a picture of a small black and white bunny. I don't mind bunnies, I really don't. I have one of my own. But as much as I adore fuzzy critters, I would never have one as the wallpaper of my computer and my place of employment, especially at the front desk. Maybe if I were holed up in an office upstairs and no one ever came up there, then I'd have a baby rabbit picture as my wallpaper, but the receptionist's desk? No way. This isn't a pet store.

I blame the change on the eleven year old girl who was working at my usual desk yesterday. I think she is the accountant's daughter. She was making labels on the computer for file folders. If indeed it was she who changed the background, she's pretty smart. My own parents don't know how to change their computer wallpaper without help.

Today my icicle fingers nearly broke off my hands. Employee X was talking to person Z in the lobby. Then Z started to leave, but was still talking while standing in the doorway. Forty-two pounds of cold air came rushing in. I wanted to say "If you are going to continue talking, then please step all the way inside the building and SHUT the door." But I am training to be a Spartan, and Spartan mothers used to leave their babies on the side of a mountain for three days to see if they were tough enough to survive. If a six pound infant can handle a little cold, I figured I could too.

After Employee X and person Z departed and finally shut the door, I got up and went to the copy machine so that I could lay hands on it. That last sentence makes it sound like I was praying for the copy machine, but I wasn't. I was trying to get warm. I should have been praying for the copy machine though, because an hour later the thing got possessed by the Devil.

I was printing off a lot of documents and putting them together for next week's lessons, when all of a sudden the demon copy machine decided to print at least 85 copies of the same document. I pushed every button that would seem helpful, like "Stop" or "Cancel" or "Clear", but all three of those buttons actually meant "make forty more copies". This copy incident is totally not my fault. I know some people accidentally press 110 when they actually just need 10 copies, but I did not do this. It's well known fact that all copy machines go berserk at least once a day. They are programmed to do so by paper companies like Dunder Mifflin. Because when you accidentally waste 84 sheets of paper on one document, you need another ream.

I am pretty sure I am giving my place of work a bad name, because I've got to be the worst fake-receptionist they've ever had. All these people that come in the front door ask me questions that I don't know the answers to. They ask to talk to staff members I've never even heard of. And at least once a day I give the same lame excuse "I don't actually work at the front desk." If I were actually hired to be a receptionist, I'd fire myself. But I'm not the receptionist, I'm a curriculum developer, which means I write instructional plans all day and occasionally call shoe stores asking for boxes so that middle school students can make dioramas of current events.

I'm going to go eat the Freschetta pizza that just came out of the oven now. It's been a hectic week.