Petty annoying things

"Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things." - Unknown (possibly a sibling of mine)

I need to complain about work...

I was assigned a new project a month or two ago. Which, even though my work load was not light at the time, I took to be a compliment. In fact I am quite excited to be taking on this new project and starting it up from scratch so that I can make sure that all the mistakes made on my previous project don't get made again.

To the project was also assigned a graduate who has been having some training in primary equipment. Now by the term graduate I mean his graduation ceremony took place within the last 12 months. By this definition I would Not be a graduate as I already have over a year and a half experience. Either way both of us are termed as Engineers-in-Training by the company.

So according to the project paperwork, I am the project engineer reporting to the Principal Projects Director and he is the primary equipment engineer who is being supervised by the Chief design engineer. The project is my responsibility.

As things have run, Mr Graduate has had less other work on his plate and so he has been taking a bash at writing up the preliminary project reports. Except.... he has never written any such reports before. I, on the other hand, have many many revisions of writing such reports on my other big project that I spent a good portion of last year writing and working and rewriting and revising.

To be crude, I know my sh!t when it comes to this stuff.

You would think that Mr Graduate would do the math and figure that if he is struggling he could come discuss MY project reports with ME. You would think...

Nooo way. For what ever reasons (sexism, racism, sizism, fattism, fascism, consumerism, I have an ego-ism) he sends (badly worded/badly spelt) emails to the big guns asking for help. I get pulled into the meeting and have to be berated that why is the content of the report so poor... This is of course the first time I am seeing the content.

Now I am not always the most pro-active. And I shouldn't have to stand behind him and watch him type for every moment while he works at the prelim design reports. But at least a heads up on the progress would be nice.

The charming soul is often pestering me for information.... and then emails suppliers without checking with me what we actually need from suppliers.

Another novel idea is taking old (pre-MSWord2007) reports and reusing them for the new report. Including all the bizarre and obscure and mostly broken formatting (numbering "page 137 of iii" - magic stuff)

It frustrates me so much because he keeps going above my head and employs pretty sloppy thinking. It irks me because for the laziness of reusing someone else’s report, he will spend a week fixing the report formatting until he gives up. It bothers me because this is my project and it feels like he is trying to take it away from me.

Time for being polite about this is running out....