I have a certain challenging coworker who I work with on a regular basis and manages to consistently just be a pain in my you know what. This person is oddly nitpicky and often comes off as dissatisfied or impatient even in response to totally innocuous questions. Here’s what they did today.
We’re hiring a bunch of interns at my company. The interns aren’t actually going to be hired by my company, they’re going to be payrolled through a staffing agency as temps. Because reasons.
Normally when we do this we don’t give people offer letters, the staffing agency does. But my coworker for whatever reason decided the interns would think it’s weird to get offer letters from the temp agency instead of my company, so they and one other person worked on creating an “opportunity letter” template that’s on our letterhead but says the interns will be contracted through the staffing agency.
I’m the one sending out the offer letters, which this coworker is reviewing before sending out. At one point this coworker thought that to make things look official I should print out the opportunity letters, have each department manager that’s hiring an intern physically sign their intern’s letter, and scan that and send it to the intern. We don’t even do that with full-time employees!
I nicely said that would create a bottleneck and since this coworker wants the opportunity letters to go out ASAP, I’ll just type the manager’s name in handwriting font above the regular font as a “signature,” since lots of companies do that. This was acceptable.
I did the first one yesterday, filled out the template as provided to me, and sent it to my coworker to review. I got this response:
It looks fine, with two exceptions: first, the size of the font (26) on (manager)’s “signature” looked too large for the page, so I adjusted that downward and reattached.
Second, I noticed there’s not a reference to what time of day the intern should report on their first day (we did 9 am in each of the last years). The student would probably appreciate it if we inserted the time of day on May 29th. I didn’t do so in the rev, but please go ahead and add it to the end of the sentence that begins, “On May 29…”
Ok fine whatever, adjust the handwriting font size if you’re so concerned about it. BUT YOU WROTE THE TEMPLATE. WHY DIDN’T YOU PUT A START TIME ON THERE IF YOU WANTED A START TIME TO BE ON THERE?
Le sigh.