Da dragon in the stationery cupboard

More or less, every workplace has a dragon, and if you can’t name the one in your office is because you have not realised who is yet (don’t worry – it is still your first week there)

My dragon is a 62 year old creature and among a few things is responsible for stationary … nooooo she freaks out if you spell it with an a – it should with an e.

Since I am doing the payroll, I know this is not true but otherwise you would have been forgiven for thinking that the correlation between her bonus and pennies saved on stationery is 1.

Very unfortunate for me, the dragon’s gossip bitch is my line manager (male but behaves like an old dear when it comes to gossip) so I have to be careful what I say – not here though :)

Both of them have been with the company since like it started and one of the reason, I think, why we had move into a smaller office, one floor up, was to separate these two.

Today, I was doing the P60s + covering letter. (For you non-UK readers & actually the for UK readers too, P60 is the employee copy of the taxed earnings. The UK tax year goes from 6 April to 5 April). In total I printed around 130 returns and did a mail merger for the covering letter. When I was about half way through stuffing the letter + P60 in the A4 envelope, I saw that the address field was wrong.

I, ahem, had missed out the first line of the address and now I was kind of in the shit. I had reprint the letters, on (soo expensive) headed paper and tear up a lot of envelopes.

I kept quiet and took a stack of headed paper and reprinted the letters and sorted them in with the P60. Now I had go down to the dragon get a box of A4 envelopes. Immediate when I took out the box, the dragon questioned me. Could I not take the smaller sized envelope? Me thinking: There is no fucking way I am sitting folding the 130 letters & forms (2 folds for each letter) – the job was boring enough as it was. So I had to take a stand and the dragon winced – LITERALLY when she realised that I had to use the bigger sized envelopes. This is the stingiest company I have ever worked for.

Under my desk was all those opened envelopes and when my manager (he sides with the dragon when it comes to this issue “What do you mean you want to order new stationery for the new employee? Use the stationery that the employee that left had”) was in the loo, I rolled them up and put them in my bin and also managed to shred all those letters with the wrong address without being found out. Ah – it was a great feeling – job satisfaction *hehe*