Tafeeli at the office

Its been a month since I moved to my new job. A striking observation is that the 80/20 theory applies perfectly here. 20% of the staff end up doing 80% of the work while the other 80% are just overhead costs.

Other than the slow bureaucracy that you’d expect in such large institutions, there is a huge redundancy in the staff. I still recall my supervisor in my first orientation day after he was describing the business processes in our department saying:
“ok let me introduce you to the other staff members. Whenever you want to photocopy papers, go to person A. Whenever you want a person to type your correspondences in Arabic, give your instructions to person B. For correspondences in English, talk to person C. Whenever you need any access to the projects in the archives, go talk to person D. Person E is the guy to talk to if you want to have access to the minutes of meetings for all previous DCM meetings. Since our printers don’t support collated printing, you can talk to person F and he’ll do necessary arrangements for printing collated papers and reports….” And the list goes on and on.

It is really silly to see that there is a person dedicated for each one of those specific tasks rather than one or two. Personally, I prefer to do all those tasks by myself rather than learn to be dependent on others.

As time passes, I slowly began to understand the justification behind such awkward job descriptions. Apparently, most of the above staff members have been working for 20+ years in the same institution and their resistance for change is considered extremely high when it comes to implementing new strategies, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes. and that’s why they are slowly delegating such routine tasks.

Or simply, it could be that their mental capacity is extremely handicapped that any attempts of resolving complex tasks can be damaging.

At the office, we have this tafeeli guy (explanation: tafeeli is Jordanian equivalence of saeedi in Egypt, hemsi in Syria and khaleeli in palestine) who is solely responsible for providing the stationary to our department. The problem with this guy is that he is never funny when he intends to be, and yet he can be extremely hilarious when he doesn’t mean it.
For example, one of his jokes is:
“an Indian met with a tafeeli (I find it extremely courageous that he makes fun of his own ppl) and the tafeeli asked the Indian: “how do you bury the dead?”. The Indian said: “we wash him, we burn him and then we disseminate his ashes.. What about you?”. The tafeeli said: “no we wash him, and then we bury him in the ground”. The Indian surprisingly say: “you don’t burn him?” and the tafeeli said: “no we just prepare for his meeting with God. God will burn him” ”

This gotta be the lamest joke I heard in years. Only 2 ppl laughed at it and I think it was one of those supportive yet sarcastic laughs.

2 days later, he cracked me up unintentionally. My computer screen was constantly malfunctioning giving all sorts of color gradients. It was so dysfunctional that the same blue color end up creating an artificial rainbow depending on its position on the screen. I approached the tafeeli guy to show him the problem so that he orders a new screen. He couldn’t refrain himself from enlightening me with his wisdom saying:
“At least change the beautiful desktop background picture. You don’t want them taking that with them when they change the screen.”