Remember that moment as a kid when you first saw Bambi and learned that really valuable lesson?

No, not the cold hard shock of Bambi’s mother’s death

But when our beloved ‘itto grey bunny teases Bambi saying, “He doesn’t walk very good, does he?”

but what did Thumper’s father tell him that morning?

“If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all”

And when Thumper grew up and got a job in the 21st Century I’m sure his dad would still say the same thing.

 Here’s the clip

Now, in every company the assistant is widely understood to be the lowest rung of the corporate ladder and with my new found position come new…challenges. The unfortunate part of turnover, especially taking over for someone who was doing their job poorly is that there will be some severe gaps in communication and working style until everyone gets used to a new system. I understand that friction is inevitable during the transition period but as difficult as some situations can be, I believe that patience and effective communication are extremely undervalued virtues. I work in a clean, efficient and precise manner so despite popular belief I am still very tolerant and patient to those who may not exactly share my beliefs but on days like today, I need to be reminded of the wisdom a fluffy cartoon animalia bestowed upon me so many years ago.

Now, I understand the difficult position that vendors are put in but to frankly trashing a client (yes – the lowly assistant is very much, still a client) no matter what the situation via internal communication or otherwise is simply bad practice. This was what I woke up to Monday morning that the controller on the vendor side had sent to my boss.

Let’s observe….

Good morning,

I wanted to thank you for your assistance with clearing up the invoices that are outstanding. Below, I have provided the email chain for your information, as it appears that Su is indicating that if everything is not received by the 16th and processed that we will not receive payment.  I hope that this will not be the case as it does appear these invoices were emailed and would like to work through all outstanding invoices. 

Mind you, we (meaning I) have been auditing outstanding accounts dating back to 2010 for 3 months and the delay was because their accounting department couldn’t get their billing straight.

This was the internal email between Controller and Collections Manager that was forwarded on to my boss…

Good morning Controller,

Su is New only 4 months in the department – She may be surprised at the amount of open invoices never taken care of when she took over for the old assistant “BUT” if she read any of the emails the staff accountant and I …sent… her she shouldn’t be surprised.  SORRY – in the 5 years I have been working with the company I never had a problem – once their director and assisant left – the invoices just piled up.

I’m surprise she is now emailing the staff accountant and handling payments. BUT I’m sure it had to do with our VP and their director- Thanks VP! 

I’m just happy we are  at the end of a nightmare.

Kind regards,

Collections manager

I won’t even begin to go into how grammatically, this makes absolutely no sense. Your first language is English. Don’t offend me with this nonsense.

Anyway, clearly this internal chain was intentionally forwarded to my boss by their controller as if idle gossip and finger pointing is going to prompt my boss to…what? Fire me for doing their job?

So, what did my boss do?

He simply corrected some serious errors mentioned in the collection’s manager’s email and blasted it to their VP, CEO and the rest of our team. Once my project manager got a hold of the email, she was outraged and she called their VP immediately who had no idea this was going on and was completely embarrassed apologizing profusely. My project manager called me about 30 minutes later  to let me know that everyone on our team was addressing the utterly ridiculous accusations and it wasn’t being overlooked by anyone on our side in case I had suspected that it was just being swept under the rug.

She’s also kind of awesome.

Unfortunately the collections manager and controller weren’t able to accomplish what they had initially intended which I’m still not entire sure what that is but the moral of the story is if you’re going to talk shit about someone, especially a client, do NOT email.

…just walk over to your co-worker’s cubicle like everyone else