This must be Hoboken Tuesday, March 05, 2013

  

It is Tuesday, this must be Hoboken.

I sweat every time I come to this place these days, wondering what might happen next.

A sunny, but cool day, I drove in from Jersey City, rather than walked. My leg doesn’t work as well as it used to since the accident last Summer, and I feel older than I did this time last year, when I fought to keep the editorship in Bayonne rather than move it north.

But Cecilia has always been a weak link in the scheme, something they here did not consider when they browbeat her predecessors. So, her leaving allowed them to replace her with Beth, buy Beth is a political person, and has been finding ways to cheat, claiming she does more than she does, and not telling management what she does and does not do.

This came to roost this week when people needed to do her job while she is away on vacation, only to discover some of the details of her scheming.

Essentially, she makes it seem like she does more than she does, editing my work late even when she gets it in a timely fashion, collecting work by email from various sources such as city hall. But instead of drawing over the electronic files that Ann in Bayonne types in (Cecilia used the conduit to get the materials north) Beth has not, complaining that the system when used from Hoboken was too slow. So, she retyped the things into the Hoboken computer using what Ann printed out – unbeknownst to anyone except me.

I said nothing, partly because after all the budget cutting management has done over the last year, discovering this may make them think they don’t need Ann.

Beth’s ability to make herself look more competent than she is may well bring a demise to Ann’s job when all this explodes. Beth makes extra money by doing other people’s school work, an unethical but extremely profitable endeavor since she is smart enough to make it work. But she also makes mistakes, something that has become more evident over the last few weeks since things she is supposed to get in haven’t been getting in.

Her taking a vacation this week and being out of contact raised the fundamental question about how she got the files from Ann’s computer in Bayonne to her own in Hoboken. Lucha came down to Bayonne to figure it out, and I told her Beth had a link on her computer similar to the one I use to move materials north to Hoboken – except for one small detail. Management gave Beth a new computer three weeks ago which did not have the link on it. Beth apparently didn’t notice. And since she is out of contact until her return on Thursday, Beth is unaware of the fact that at least part of her scheme has been uncovered. What comes of all this remains a mystery, but I expect the worst.

 

 

 

 


email to Al Sullivan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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