Hell is Other People's Responsibilities

My full time job this summer is as a project coordinator at a Canadian based, NASDAQ listed oil and gas company specializing in projects in Russia. It was originally meant to be a legal research type job (a lot of securities work) but since the company is actually quite small and the execs are pretty overloaded they were more than happy to "promote" me to my current station and delegate a whole bunch of responsibility onto me.

The bosses just left for Moscow on Monday to check out some project sites and sign some contracts or whatever it is people do on Transatlantic business trips. Meanwhile they had left a couple of loose ends untied in their rush and since I'm the most senior person at the office (the company's headcount is REALLY small) they became my problem. Main issue is that they promised one guy who some money before they left.

The money was going to be put into a new account for him to take care of his expenses on a trip that was going to benefit the company. Unfortunately, despite his promises the President of our company didn't make ANY arrangements to get the guy his funds and just told me to take care of it. Fine. Tuesday I spent the afternoon at the bank working out the details for a new business account. This was more difficult than it should have been because two of the people who were supposed to have signing authority on the account weren't around and although I was acting as their agent I couldn't sign for them. At least I remembered that we could get a free iPod Nano because we were switching an old account from Scotiabank to TD. I know I already have one but I want that iPod.

The next day there were supposed to be funds in the new account. Of course, it wasn't that simple and I started learning about all the nitpicky administrative do's and dont's of the commercial banking industry. We can't do a direct wire transfer until we finalize some details on the account. We can transfer from your existing TD account to the new one but not without the signatures of the signing officers. (Oops they're in Russia.)

So I've got the guy calling me every hour asking where his money is. I'm calling Russia and New York where our financial guy operates (or at least pretends to: The guy is an incompetent prick) all day. I was on the phone all day and straightened out everything that could be fixed on my end.

And then it dawned on me: I'm not at the bottom of this company's food chain... I'll let the receptionist handle all of this bullshit! I gave her instructions for what to do and whom to call, and pretended to be really really busy with other more important matters. And now I have time to post on my blog!