Recently, I wrote about how the University of Not-Bielefeld had set up a centralized system for registering when you were on sick leave (i.e., sick for more than three days in a row). The general idea was that instead of simply informing your boss about being sick, you filled in a form, sent it to a central e-mail address (sickleave@uni-not-bielefeld.de), AND informed your boss about it. Given central admin’s reputation for conceiving inefficient, barely thought-out solutions to non-existent problems, what could possibly go wrong, right?
Well, in the past few weeks, I too had the pleasure of using this system for the first time and was lightly admonished for not having included my status group (roughly civil servant, employee, admin, or student) in the subject line of the e-mail. The problem, you see, is that all these e-mails from all these different groups of people are sent to the same, single e-mail address to be handled separately by separate admin types for each separate status group. (Still with me?) By not also including information that is already present on the form itself, I was causing them extra work and therefore slowing the entire process down.
Not wanting to be too blunt about it, but who cares on either count?
They designed the system and my role in the the whole undertaking is to get better as quickly as possible, which, last time I checked, is almost certainly independent of the time it takes them to process my paperwork. Nevertheless, because I was still apparently suffering from some delirium, I actually wrote back apologizing that I didn’t know this because the form only says (without exclamation marks) to include the name of my department in the subject line and suggesting that maybe they could add these instructions for the future? (And God only knows how often central admin likes to amend each and every form here at the University.)
The answer, of course, was classic admin: there was no way that you could know this, but please do it in the future anyway.
Now, I’m no admin type, but, just off the top of my head, here are three possible solutions to this self-created “problem”:
- change the form,
- create separate e-mail addresses for each status group, or
- train the staff there to enter what is presumably the same information into the same central database regardless of which status group the person belong to.
But no. Leave it to admin to choose possibly the least efficient of all solutions: inform each and every person in the University individually and retroactively about what they should have done and should do in the future.
And they’re worried about me slowing the entire process down?
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