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June 28, 2006
They May Like You Better When You're Gone
Adyin at Snail's Tales has an abnormally interesting and very humorous post about being asked to peer review an article in a subfield of research in which he no longer participates. It reminded me of a quite unrelated event in my own life.
About two years after I had left a large company to work for a small one, I got a phone call from my previous administrative assistant who was still employed by that big company. She asked me what she should do with a new signature authorization delegation form that had arrived from the office of the corporate controller. The covering letter said I was to sign it and have my boss sign it. These forms set the dollar level on contracts, purchase orders and other business matters that managers can sign on their own authority. Well, almost on their own authority. The form she described was clearly intended to reset my signature authority levels. It had my name and previous title as well as other identifying information on it. The most interesting part of all was that it reset my signature authority levels to nearly twice as high as it had been when I actually worked there!
I told her to sign it for me and bump it up to my old boss for his final approval. After all, her forgery of my signature had been one of my official signatures anyway. I also took the occasion to ask her to put in a travel request for a "business trip" to Rio for me along with a million dollar cash advance toward associated travel expenses. My old boss thought it was all very funny but for some unknown reason refused to approve either my new signature authorization levels or my trip to Rio. Perhaps my recommended signature authority levels were higher than his were. But somehow, I do think he may have regarded the "business trip" to Rio as a high priority and took it himself. I'm not completely sure about that.
Thinking of the proposed trip to Rio reminded me of another interesting episode at that same big company. Before out division's business really took off, we often worked under very restrictive budgets. On one occasion, a very senior manager in our division called all of us underlings together to outline the dire situation. He was particularly clear that business travel would be very restricted and that he personally would approve, or disapprove, all travel requests. We had better have a "damn good reason." I remember him saying quite specifically that he would be particularly wary of travel requests that combined business travel with personal vacations. Then he added as if it were an afterthought, "Please make sure that your requests are submitted early enough for my assistant to telex them to me in Europe because I will be conducting business reviews in our Paris, Munich and Milan offices next week and then my wife and I will be enjoying a two week vacation in Italy." No one laughed, at least not until he was back in his office.
By the way, a few years later returned to the same division of that big company. But it took me nearly five years the second time around before my signature authority reached those levels recommended by the corporate controller's office during the time I worked elsewhere.
Posted by Duane Smith at June 28, 2006 9:49 AM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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