Work Ethic

Now, I know the American workforce has a general reputation of being a bunch of lazy slackers, always trying to cut corners at their jobs, but for some reason it bugs me when I see an actual example right before my eyes. Maybe my job isn't the most exciting thing in the world, and maybe it isn't exactly what I pictured myself doing at this point in time, but I still strive to be professional, for god's sake. I must say, there's nothing worse than a smarmy receptionist who should start answering the phones at 8:30 AM, but wanders in anywhere between 8:45 and 9:20 AM, takes upwards of an hour and 45 minute lunch break, and sometimes feels the need to leave before 5:00 PM! The icing on the cake is that she constantly complains about having nothing to do, but when someone does give her a project of some sort, she doesn't seem to have any idea under the sun how to accomplish it. (She once asked me "what's the command to make the words go up and down on the page instead of across the page?"and, if you can believe it, didn't know how to copy a file from a floppy disk to the hard drive.&#41 And the the phone! She lets it ring 5 or 6 times before she puts her personal call on hold and deigns to answer it. If someone brings mail to the outgoing mailbox after 4:00 PM she just lets it sit there until the next night instead of dropping it in a mailbox on her way home. She takes things off of my desk while I'm away from it, not asking me first, but telling me that she did so via a Post-It note ("I took your Guardian." "I took your scissors." etc.&#41 Tonight she left the office at 4:40 PM, and locked the main doors behind her, leaving my Fed-Ex package sitting on the front counter! Since the Fed-Ex people don't have an office key, I'm guessing that my overnight package would have turned into a two-day package had I not happened to have walked by and seen it still sitting there. Feh.