Following up on yesterday’s post concerning abusive relationships, I present to you a Heartwarming Christmas Tale. What follows is a slightly altered version of an email I sent to friends on December 20, 2005 regarding how things stood at my job for a certain religious organization that I won’t name (though its identity would be simple to figure out if you tried). I’ve edited the original email to tighten things up a bit and hide names but haven’t fiddled with the facts. Enjoy! (And in case anyone wonders, I’d been in this job for five months at this point and would resign two weeks later.)

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I have so damn much work with short deadlines right now, it makes my head spin.

So what have I spent 85% of my time doing for the past two weeks? Working to get the bishop’s Christmas card and party invitations out the door. No joke.

We’ve pushed out just over 3,000 cards and invites. Doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, right? This is something an administrative assistant would normally handle in short order. But the way [this organization] does it, it turns out to be such a major pain in the ass that each year the database administrator has to lead the project. This year, I’m the lucky DBA here. It’s a safe bet that next year it’ll be someone else.

I’ve been spending ~35 hours per week overseeing database queries and updates, mail merges, and envelope stuffing. Ridiculous.

The person ultimately responsible for this project is Brother D–, who is basically the bishop’s executive secretary. Generally speaking, a great guy, but…

He and I had gone back and forth several times on the list of employees prior to mailing that group of cards late last week. The last complaints he had about the employee list involved the addressing; specifically, quite a number of the envelopes were going to be addressed to, for instance, Mrs. Jane Doe.

But no, that just wouldn’t work for the bishop: they must be addressed using the husband’s name, so that Jane Doe’s card would go out to Mr. and Mrs. John Doe. Likewise, Mr. John Doe wasn’t sufficient if John was married.

He also had a problem with the fact that some employee records that I’d pulled from the human resource system used the “Ms.” prefix when he knew for certain that many of those women were married. Again, those cards had to be addressed to “Mr. and Mrs.” Worse, if Jane Doe is married to John Smith but had opted not to take her husband’s name, the cards must still be address to Mr. and Mrs. John Smith.

If I somehow needed a reminder that I’m working for one of the most conservative, change averse bureaucracies in the world, this would have been it.

So I had to spend a few hours in the office two weekends ago trying to determine where & how marital status and spouse names were stored in the human resources database. Updated those records in the Christmas card database and ran another report for Brother D.

That wasn’t enough, however, because we still had more than a dozen employees listed as Mrs. Jane Doe. Brother D demanded that we get their husbands’ names, even though these women had not provided spouse names to the HR dept. How should I go about getting that info that was none of my damn business? He responded that I’d have to call them. Yes, really. I told him that I didn’t think that appropriate, but he said it was necessary for proper addressing of formal correspondence from the bishop.

The other point to keep in mind is that I’ve tried my best to adopt an I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude about my job because it’s the only way I can make it through up there.

So, screw it! Last Wednesday I began making phone calls to colleagues I’d never met, starting each conversation with an apologetic explanation of what info I needed and why. The first three calls went smoothly. The fourth, a little less so. My intro was followed by three seconds of silence before the woman told me in a hushed and fairly annoyed voice, “My husband and I are separated.“

Bear in mind the earlier point regarding the conservatism of my employer, especially regarding its views on marriage.

I told Brother D later that I’d run into a thorny situation in asking co-workers for information that was none of my business and that I wasn’t going to make any more calls on the matter. I was shocked that he didn’t argue with me; instead, he made one last pass through the latest employee list, requested a handful of additional changes, then gave his blessing for the envelopes to be printed and the cards &invitations mailed.

Yesterday morning, Monday, I got a visit from our HR director who wanted me to explain the process for addressing the cards. It seems that one of the employees in his office had received her card over the weekend addressed to Mr. and Mrs. John Doe. That was a bit of a problem because “John” had died two years ago.

“Greetings from the bishop, who wishes to invite you and your dead, mouldering husband to a party! Merry Christmas!“

I pulled out one of the lists that the brother had edited and discovered the problem. The original record for this person had the card addressed to Mrs. John Doe (still not right in the view of most folks inhabiting a modern 21st century world, but considered proper according to the church’s Victorian era formality). So the brother ordered that her record be changed to the Mr. and Mrs. John Doe addressing.

Of course, if we had just addressed the damn things to the employees themselves without worrying about marital status, none of this would have happened. Whether employees decided to share the cards and party invitations with their spouses, well, that was no one else’s business but their own.

How much do you want to bet that it’s not the only embarrassing mistake for which I’m going to be read the riot act this week?

Today at the [org] offices is the Advent Day of Prayer, held in the church next door. That is to be followed by the Information Services department Christmas lunch. Would it shock you to learn that I called in sick today?