My fiance started working for a genetics laboratory last year and her role was advertised as assistant manager - since the previous manager left for greener pastures a while ago, the state of the laboratory was disorganized and part of her job would be fixing the mess.
But it quickly became apparent that the real source of dumbness and disorganization at the laboratory was not the lack of a manager, but the owners: The laboratory is owned by a couple in the early 70s which are genetic mediciners. Especially the female mediciner has a bipolor disorder and is a pain to work with, hence I will cal her ancient shedragon in the future.
The workflow SHOULD look like this: Somebody goes to the doctor, who sends a sample and a description of the symptoms to the lab. The lab recieves the sample, my fiance coordinates the analysis and the result is given to the mediciners who are adding medical expertise and sending it back the to doctor.
Unfortunately, the mediciners cannot resist to meddle with the lab, but have no leadership, business or genetic analysis skills.
Which leads to a plethora off wtfs, here are my favorites:
- The lab manager was fired because he tried to establish workflows, which was disliked by the owners because they felt they knew better how to run everything.
- Different symptoms require different analysis techniques but the wrong analysis was often ordered. My fiance tried to fix this, but was stalled by the ancient shedragon mediciner, because most of the errors where caused by her, and she disliked to be corrected. This costs a lot of money and time.
-The shedragon forbade talking in the lab because people need to work, not to talk.
- They tried to hire a new secretary but the person hired was fired on day 3 because they disliked that she asked questions about her job and even talked to the lab to understand the workflow.
- Now the man tries to make office work, but he is a terrible secretary so a lot of deadlines are missed and customers are scared away.
- They have to save money, so my fiance was ordered to find replacements for lab equipment like gloves, which cost ~10€ per month. She was forced to spend a week on the issue.
- All work needs to be entered into home grown database which needs around a minute to process even the smallest change. My fiance often spends ~2 hours a day waiting on the database. For bonus wtf: the database backend is a filemaker database on a server.
- The computers are the best macs money can buy, but they refuse to spend money on new chairs, which is unfortunate because the chairs are so damaged that they are unstable.