Today’s Red Swingline Award
True story: I get an email from one of my talent. He’s working at one of my very favorite clients, a model client who always treats both temporary staff and permanent staff with courtesy and friendliness. He’s doing a great job there, and I keep hearing about how much they like him, so with all that said, I can only assume the following incident was the result of a simple miscommunication.
On this particular day, my talent has a problem. You see, he arrived at work this morning to discover that the office where he had been sitting didn’t have any of his stuff in it, and he didn’t know why. He wandered around the office for some time, looking for someone in office services, until he was told that he had been moved from his office to a cubicle at the intersection of the two busiest hallways in the suite. He spends half his day writing, but now he’s listening to countless overheard conversations as people pass his desk. He tries to conduct phone calls with clients, only to discover that the ambient noise prevents the clients from hearing him properly.
Upon arriving at his new workspace, he began unpacking his things and discovered that one of them- a picture frame containing a photo of his girlfriend- had been broken.
Once I calmed him down a bit (he seemed a little frazzled from the whole experience; I would be too) I advised him to start using headphones to address the noise problem- he’s afraid it’s rude but I figure it’s more rude to not get your work done, no? And I emailed his supervisors to let them know that the headphones were my idea.
And now I’m going to get him a Red Swingline stapler.