Office politics

Work anywhere for any length of time and you will eventually get sucked in to office politics to a greater or lesser degree no matter how hard you fight against it.

This week has been something of a nightmare because two people in my office team have got the hump with each other big time. Lots of bitching when the other is not around, running off to speak to senior management, formal complaints... and why? Er, well, the part-time permanent member of staff thinks that her supervisors are giving me, a lowly temp, responsibilities that should be given to her. Or something. She's paranoid that I am being groomed to take over from her. Or something. I am, of course, doing nothing of the sort. She is part-time and some new policies were dumped on us on a day when she wasn't there and I was so I had to try to work out how to implement said new policies. I didn't want to but I just happened to be the one who was there.

Part-time permanent staff member returns next week to discover that the lowly temp is trying to tell her how to do her job. At least, that is how she took it. I wasn't trying to tell her how to do her job - I was merely trying to explain these new policies that had been dumped on us and what we were expected to do. As far as she was concerned, this meant that lowly temp had been given preferential treatment because he knew all about the new policies before she did.

Ergo, rather than sit down with her immediate supervisor and say, "Look, I'm the permanent staff member here, he's just a temp, I should have been the first to know about these changes," and have a rational conversation about it, she's been bitching to all and sundry about the shoddy treatment she has suffered and bending the ears of senior managers and Human Resource personnel. Her supervisor, not surprisingly, is hugely incensed that she has complained to everybody about the situation but him. This has all led to an unbearably tense atmosphere in the office where we all work, she has lodged a formal complaint against her supervisor and is being generally shitty with me - lowly temp scum suffering delusions of grandeur who needs to be put firmly in his place before he ousts her and steals her job - and now nobody is talking to each other.

The thing is that I couldn't care less. All I want is to turn up, do whatever work is required of me, get paid and go home. I have no ambitions to oust anybody, consolidate my position, rise through the ranks by any means necessary. I just want to make a living so I can pay my rent and eat food. I don't give a flying fuck about the job beyond the fact that I need it to survive.

So this week has been horrible. I am renewing my efforts to find permanent work with a gusto. I need to get out of there and away from all the egos, the paranoia, the mind games, the petty machinations, the hidden agendas. Run, run, run away.

Oh, and the funniest part? They are creating a new post within the team that will be partially supervisory that will exist between part-time permanent member of staff and her current supervisor. As I have been there so long, they are very keen for me to apply for it. If I were to get it the remuneration would be considerably more than anybody else on the planet would currently give me to work for them. But I am becoming less and less keen on the idea of applying because A) the job itself will be a nightmare (and I know this because I am doing a lot of it already) and B) if the tensions within the team are not resolved then my jumping from being the lowly temp to part-time paranoid permanent member of staff's new supervisor will cause no end of hassle.

No, I must run, run, run away. Pass the job pages...