It's a foregone conclusion that everyone makes mistakes, right? We all make them. Big ones, small ones, understandable ones, stupid ones... We're human, therefore we make mistakes. What I will never understand is why we constantly seek to shelter others from their own errors. I firmly believe that we can improve ourselves based on the mistakes we make, so long as we focus on how the mistake was made and how best to avoid repeating it. It seems, however, that my perspective is something of a minority.
I try my best to be calm and professional in the face of errors by my coworkers. A sort of "treat them as you would be treated" mentality that means I do my best not to blow up in their faces when they do things I consider spectacularly stupid. There are times, however, when the errors one is faced with would drive a saint to drink. Today was one such error.
In an effort to clean up our system and remove the credentials of people no longer employed by the company, an employee in my location went through and deleted old log-in information. Normally, I would be singing the praises of someone taking the initiative to do his or her job, but in this instance efficiency ended up costing the company money. How, you ask?
She didn't just delete old former employees. She deleted anyone she didn't immediately recognize. Including several people who happen to still work there.
Yes, that includes me.
Now my job is mainly administrative: I process paperwork, help with inventory tracking, and handle the store's accounts. By deleting me from the system, she made it so that I couldn't log into a terminal. I couldn't log in to the programs I needed to do my job. I couldn't get reports. I couldn't view or access accounts. Essentially, as far as the computer system was concerned, I no longer existed. I'd been replaced by another employee who happened to have the same initials. After nearly two hours waiting on hold with tech support, I finally learned that they couldn't fix it. It had to be fixed at the store level.
So I nagged every single person in the store with the authority to do so until someone finally caved and fixed it. It helped that my incessant nagging just happened to coincide with a store visit from one of our district leads...who was more than happy to throw the closest manager under the bus and force him to deal with me.
In case you are unaware, I am not a fun person to try to handle when I'm angry. In fact, I would say volatile is an adequate representation of my state of being when things like this happen. I digress, however. The problem was solved, I was given back my credentials, and we all went merrily on our way. Or, at least, they did. I finally managed to get some work done.
I suppose you could say the moral of the story is that everyone is capable of making mistakes. Instead of exploding into some kind of tirade, calm and professionalism will handle even the worst situations.