The Consultant

As I was sitting at my desk today, working on God knows what drivel with no purpose or meaning, I was visited by The Consultant. Even before she arrived in my doorway, I knew she was in the vicinity, because I could hear her voice from several offices away. It's one of those voices that you hear with the hairs on the back of your neck rather than your ears. You sense it in the air, like moisture on a humid day. You smell it, like a skunk someone hit three blocks away. It's there, palpable, like heat, even though you can't actually see it.

Anyway, that voice--that voice tap-danced on the edge of my conscious mind as The Consultant explained the inner workings of the computer system to our MIS Director. I could hear her voice rising and falling, and I could hear the MIS Director repeatedly asking The Consultant to leave. Did she? Oh, no. The Consultant knows her work and is committed to doing it.

We're lucky to have The Consultant. We hired her to be a word processor. Little did we know that she had hidden depths of knowledge and expertise. Turns out The Consultant knows a lot about a lot. In fact, for any given topic, work assignment, dispute, profession, or assignment at our company, The Consultant is guaranteed to know more about the matter than any other employee. Regardless of that employee's training, experience, or level of education.

Take the computer network. The Consultant knows when it isn't working at optimal levels. Not only does she have ideas about how to get the most from the network, she has the skills to implement her ideas. Many times, our hardworking MIS Director has to spend hours of her expensive time, at the expense to the company of many hundreds of dollars in time, to unimplement the Consultant's ideas. The Consultant was unable to do the job herself, as she had forgotten which buttons she pushed. She was, however, able to hover around the real computer expert as she fixed the mistakes, offering helpful hints.

Another example is employee relations. The Consultant takes it upon herself to identify unsafe working conditions (the water fountain is leaking and the accumulating water might lead to black mold), employee underutilization (the receptionist has extra time when the phone isn't ringing, and could assist with some of The Consultant's actual assigned duties), and potential job actions (the Pit of Despair has been taking longer breaks than he should, which is leading to disgruntlement among the rest of the staff). In each of these, and innumerable other instances, The Consultant not only identified the problem, but took the necessary steps to rectify it, with nary a thought to how management might want to handle the issue.

My personal favorite, though, is when The Consultant gets to fill in for my secretary. Just the thought fills me with dread. Here are just some of the reasons why:

(1) The Consultant is required to answer my section's telephone and she is very hard of hearing;
(2) The Consultant likes to arrange meetings, and put them on my calendar, and then not tell me; and
(3) The Consultant uses her temporary position on my staff to order things for us, without consulting me, our budget, or our needs. If she can't find the supplies she thinks she needs (tape recorder, file folders, desk chair, computer monitor), she orders more. Last year, she ordered 20,000 of those metal butterfly clips. We have used about 100.

One time, while she was acting as my temporary secretary, The Consultant decided that she didn't know how to use the copier. So she called the copier company, arranged for a trainer to come and give an onsite training to her (at our cost), and then got the trainer to explain how to set the password function on the machine. As a result, when my real secretary returned from her vacation, none of us could use the copier. We thought it was broken. The Consultant, who by then had returned to her usual office, didn't bother to inform anyone about the fact that she had set a password on the machine. When we finally figured it out (one professional repair person and several hundred dollars later), she couldn't remember the password she had set.

So, as I sat at my desk, awaiting the impending and inevitable arrival of The Consultant, I contemplated how lucky we are to hae her on staff. In this age of outsourcing and off-shore labor, it's nice to have expertise in-house. Now, if only her transfer to the Duluth office would come through . . .