Users and Spongebob

I had a minor incident at work today. Two weeks ago, a recruiter approached me about creating some posters for her new hire orientations. Just a week before that, she wanted me to create a flyer and a business card. Yesterday (when I was out of the office, sick), she left a post-it on my monitor asking me for an ETA on the materials she had requested. When I opened my inbox this morning, I found an email from her asking me to make changes on the flyer that I had already created for her, a question about another flyer that she had asked me to make (a request she had made in passing, the details for which I never received), and news about the merchandising acrylics that she had asked me to order for her. Okay. Enough was enough. I composed an email stating that I would not be able to get the items to her until next week. I also suggested that, in the future - if the need was urgent - she consider using our graphic designer, a vendor who does great work. I noted that this is someone we use when creative demands exceed our ability to produce. It was a very polite email, which was hard to affect because I was now fairly certain that this woman was officially harrassing me.

What upset me about this incident was that she seemed to think that I had all the time in the world to devote to her projects, as though I were her employee. I wanted to tell her, "My paycheck comes out of Marketing's budget; and until that changes, I can offer you only occassional support." But we don't always get to say what we want to; rather, we say what we have to to keep relationships intact. Anyway....

Rather than reply to me, she leaves my manager a voicemail. An hour later, I walk into my manager's office and she tells me about this voicemail. She plays it for me. In the voicemail, the recruiter says that she is going to talk to our region president and our finance manager to determine if her department would be able to pay for the designer. Interpretation: I'm telling on you.

I showed my manager the email I sent, which my manager agreed was kind and helpful. I then explained that I felt the recruiter was taking inappropriate advantage of our team's generous offer to provide marketing support to our partners. ("Generous" because we are desperately understaffed.) My manager sends the recruiter a vitriolic email from my computer, making sure to copy herself and the recruiter's manager. (I have so many issues with this approach I don't even know where to start!) All I know is that I am bound to have something unpleasant from the recruiter in my inbox on Monday. It appears as though I'll have to go to the recruiter's office to speak with her face-to-face. It's nice to know I'll be starting next week on such a positive note!

I'm watching Spongebob. It's the episode where Plankton teaches Spongebob how to be more assertive. At the end of the episode, Spongebob says,

"You used me . . . for land development! That wasn't nice."

I guess nobody likes feeling used, not even animated sea sponges.