Trickle down economics

I'm sure Reagan and his crew didn't have this exact situation in mind when they were making the case for their economic policy, but I experienced a Liberian twist on this concept today. Over the past couple of days I've been helping my department prepare its budget for the next fiscal year. I am not usually the go-to person for budgets/spreadsheets/numbers of any kind, but they need help and it's my job. Two days ago I was given some topline numbers to format into a table. I confirmed that it could be a basic table in Word, and I went about my business. The next day the directors were scrambling to break down their topline numbers and include more specific line items. So I ended up adding much more detail to the document. Today I made dozens of copies of this 6 page document (a feat in itself in a building without a copier that collates or staples) after helping to re-work some of the figures. Thinking we were in pretty good shape, I went to a lunch meeting with the other volunteers and our supervisor.

After lunch I walked back into the office to find the assistant beginning to slowly enter the information we had prepared into Excel. My boss explained to me we only need to fill out two simple worksheets. I took a quick look and saw 15 worksheets/tabs within this one Excel document. All of the information we had produced needed to be completely reformatted. I asked, "How could they give us this template today?" and learned it has been distributed last week, but no one seemed to put two and two together that we needed it for the budget. I asked, "Is this the first time we've used this template for the budget?" and learned, that no, we did it this way last year. I asked, "When is this due?" and learned the answer is first thing Tuesday morning (Monday is a holiday here) which means that I AM REBUILDING THE BUDGET FOR MY DEPARTMENT OVER THE WEEKEND BECAUSE NONE OF MY COLLEAGUES HAs A COMPUTER AT HOME OR 24 HOUR POWER!

I recognize that I should be grateful for the resources I have, and in reality it won't take over my weekend, but is it too much to ask to be given all of the information one needs to complete a project when that project is first assigned??? Liberian living at its best...