Another glorious day in middle management
My office now is a building site. Or at least it feels like that. But strangely enough, this is about the least annoying thing that’s happened to me and it seems rather a fitting end to the day I’ve had. Right now 3 people are working on the floor tiles of the office, or rather one is happily hacking up the floor and the other two are watching him. He is using a large nail and a hammer…on concrete. It is bone shaking, palm crunching, ear piercing work and it continues despite the fact that I have a Centre to run.
But I don’t really have a Centre to run, I’m just in charge while the boss is away. Even the phrase “my office” is optimistic at best. I don’t really have an office despite being given a room. The room is question has been used as the tea room, the conference room, the group office, the TV room, the drop-in centre and all round general hang area for all the lab attendants and lecturers and it shows no sign of changing functionality despite the fact that both me (the deputy) and the Centre’s secretary cum directors executive assistant cum office manager have been unceremoniously turfed out from the cool and calm of the directors office. I have an extra problem, Yaya the secretary cum office manager, also acts as the general information and registration centre of the Centre so there is a constant stream of general public and students who come to visit her. Whereas this would be annoying enough in a general context, this is the central African context and I am white. Call me cranky but I’ve had to put up with two years of people staring and pointing at me in the streets, talking about me in a language I don’t understand and otherwise getting in my face…I’ll be damned if I have to spend my working day feeling like the new attraction at the zoo. I had one guy the other day, come in to see Yaya who was out of the office at the time, take up a chair opposite me and just sit there staring at me as I tried to work. If that wasn’t bad enough he starts to try and chat me up. Day by day I can feel myself getting angrier and shorter with people.
But the animal-in-a-zoo phenomenon is not the only source of frustration. My boss is singularly unsympathetic, he doesn’t seem to see the race issue or the gender issue, for as much as I would like not to believe it, I somehow doubt visitors would treat me as a substitute secretary or chat-up item if I was a guy. He simply says “this is Africa, we don’t have many resources or space, what would you have me do?” There are of course, a few white people working in the University and even a few, like me, in management. They, however, all have their own offices, office assistants, couches and water cooler. I am left with no printer, using my own laptop in a room which is more of a social club than an office – lacking as it does, such essentials as drawer, shelves, paper, pens, chairs for visitors etc. My boss has also not thought through the consequences on my ability to exercise authority, of putting me to work in the reception area. It’s already quite tough for a women in management in Africa, even if she is European.
The issue of authority is getting worse, or at least I’m getting more and more frustrated as the weeks go by and I figure what I should be doing and trying to do it. Much of the management here are Tanzanian or have links with Tz. My boss is also Tanzanian. The result is that I can break my head to understand an issue and run around to try and sort it with little results, whereas he can it get solved with one call on his Tz network. Ok, so that’s not so bad, at least the problems get solved. But today I ended up playing secretary for one of my Heads of department. I was so angry, I couldn’t see straight. It had to do with an annex to be attached to a contract for a client. I had written the contract, as he pleaded that he had never done one before (as if I had suddenly had a law training!) and asked him to supply a soft copy of the annexes needed, which he had produced and I only had in hard copy. They need to be modified before I could attach them to the contract. Last evening I asked him about it and he said it couldn’t find the soft copies and that maybe it was on Yaya’s computer. I told him it wasn’t my problem if he lost his data and that I still needed the soft copy.
This morning when the client appeared unexpectedly for the contract signing, he was still faffing about looking for this non existent soft copy. So I just decided it was quicker to rewrite the thing, which I did with barely concealed contempt. The Head then encouraged me to sign the contract, which I wasn’t at all sure I should do since it was on behalf of the university. I went to check with the Vice Rector who told me that I certainly shouldn’t and that she would sign. There was a rush on the contract in order to release money to buy equipment for a project which was the responsibility of the Head of dept, yet it was me running around campus trying to find out where to bring the now-signed contract!! As a result, a felt a bizarre mixture of anger and depression…coupled with a strong desire for a strong drink. And it wasn’t even lunchtime!
Later in the day I get the short shrift from the guy in Internet services, because I dared follow up an issue he “had been discussing over email with the director”. To add to my glorious day in middle management, I spent most of the afternoon trailing about town with the secretary cum office manager, trying to help her sort out travel arrangements for the director’s upcoming trip to NYC. The director, by the way, is going to a conference in New York on behalf of the Rector of the university. We aim to have a similar conference in our university later this year but an African regionally rather than internationally focused conference. We are to draw inspiration from the international western-focused version of the conference. Of course its not the director who is charged with organising the conference, it’s me and right now I’m not feeling too inspired!
So now I have returned to find my borrowed office has become a building site, when all they are supposed to be doing is replacing a few floor tiles. They are coming back tomorrow with some concrete. God help me! I’m off to the server room for some peace and quiet…
But I don’t really have a Centre to run, I’m just in charge while the boss is away. Even the phrase “my office” is optimistic at best. I don’t really have an office despite being given a room. The room is question has been used as the tea room, the conference room, the group office, the TV room, the drop-in centre and all round general hang area for all the lab attendants and lecturers and it shows no sign of changing functionality despite the fact that both me (the deputy) and the Centre’s secretary cum directors executive assistant cum office manager have been unceremoniously turfed out from the cool and calm of the directors office. I have an extra problem, Yaya the secretary cum office manager, also acts as the general information and registration centre of the Centre so there is a constant stream of general public and students who come to visit her. Whereas this would be annoying enough in a general context, this is the central African context and I am white. Call me cranky but I’ve had to put up with two years of people staring and pointing at me in the streets, talking about me in a language I don’t understand and otherwise getting in my face…I’ll be damned if I have to spend my working day feeling like the new attraction at the zoo. I had one guy the other day, come in to see Yaya who was out of the office at the time, take up a chair opposite me and just sit there staring at me as I tried to work. If that wasn’t bad enough he starts to try and chat me up. Day by day I can feel myself getting angrier and shorter with people.
But the animal-in-a-zoo phenomenon is not the only source of frustration. My boss is singularly unsympathetic, he doesn’t seem to see the race issue or the gender issue, for as much as I would like not to believe it, I somehow doubt visitors would treat me as a substitute secretary or chat-up item if I was a guy. He simply says “this is Africa, we don’t have many resources or space, what would you have me do?” There are of course, a few white people working in the University and even a few, like me, in management. They, however, all have their own offices, office assistants, couches and water cooler. I am left with no printer, using my own laptop in a room which is more of a social club than an office – lacking as it does, such essentials as drawer, shelves, paper, pens, chairs for visitors etc. My boss has also not thought through the consequences on my ability to exercise authority, of putting me to work in the reception area. It’s already quite tough for a women in management in Africa, even if she is European.
The issue of authority is getting worse, or at least I’m getting more and more frustrated as the weeks go by and I figure what I should be doing and trying to do it. Much of the management here are Tanzanian or have links with Tz. My boss is also Tanzanian. The result is that I can break my head to understand an issue and run around to try and sort it with little results, whereas he can it get solved with one call on his Tz network. Ok, so that’s not so bad, at least the problems get solved. But today I ended up playing secretary for one of my Heads of department. I was so angry, I couldn’t see straight. It had to do with an annex to be attached to a contract for a client. I had written the contract, as he pleaded that he had never done one before (as if I had suddenly had a law training!) and asked him to supply a soft copy of the annexes needed, which he had produced and I only had in hard copy. They need to be modified before I could attach them to the contract. Last evening I asked him about it and he said it couldn’t find the soft copies and that maybe it was on Yaya’s computer. I told him it wasn’t my problem if he lost his data and that I still needed the soft copy.
This morning when the client appeared unexpectedly for the contract signing, he was still faffing about looking for this non existent soft copy. So I just decided it was quicker to rewrite the thing, which I did with barely concealed contempt. The Head then encouraged me to sign the contract, which I wasn’t at all sure I should do since it was on behalf of the university. I went to check with the Vice Rector who told me that I certainly shouldn’t and that she would sign. There was a rush on the contract in order to release money to buy equipment for a project which was the responsibility of the Head of dept, yet it was me running around campus trying to find out where to bring the now-signed contract!! As a result, a felt a bizarre mixture of anger and depression…coupled with a strong desire for a strong drink. And it wasn’t even lunchtime!
Later in the day I get the short shrift from the guy in Internet services, because I dared follow up an issue he “had been discussing over email with the director”. To add to my glorious day in middle management, I spent most of the afternoon trailing about town with the secretary cum office manager, trying to help her sort out travel arrangements for the director’s upcoming trip to NYC. The director, by the way, is going to a conference in New York on behalf of the Rector of the university. We aim to have a similar conference in our university later this year but an African regionally rather than internationally focused conference. We are to draw inspiration from the international western-focused version of the conference. Of course its not the director who is charged with organising the conference, it’s me and right now I’m not feeling too inspired!
So now I have returned to find my borrowed office has become a building site, when all they are supposed to be doing is replacing a few floor tiles. They are coming back tomorrow with some concrete. God help me! I’m off to the server room for some peace and quiet…
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