When I
started working at the NGO, it was the first time I was exposed to an actual
office environment. As a cab driver, the only paper work I had was a work
sheet. This as the name implies, was a single sheet of paper on which we
recorded all the jobs we undertook, the time it took, the kilometres covered,
and how much was paid. At the end of the shift, all we had to do was hand in
the work sheet, signed vouchers, and any cash collected during the shift.
The NGO on the other hand, had mountains of different documents. These myriad documents were handled by equally many and diverse staff. Whereas I had been used to a simple organizational structure at the taxi company, it took a while to even start understanding the NGO. There were so many people most of whom had rather complex titles. They were so complex that most had been reduced to acronyms for ease of memory and also pronunciation.
As I have mentioned before, I was driver cum janitor. Consequently, I had to clean all the offices. On some days, I would get a bit overwhelmed and thus be unable to clean some of the offices properly. There was a particular time when I didn't get to clean one of the offices and my supervisor was trying to point out which one it was. She blurted out,”You didn't clean the OSMs office!” I could not immediately tell which office she was talking about and so I asked her which one she meant. “The one next to the SGSMs office!” she answered. That really complicated matters for me and I ended up more confused than before.
I was to later learn that OSM stood for Operations Support Manager, while SGSM was short for Sponsorship and Grants Support Manager. I also came to know that my immediate supervisor’s acronym ESC stood for Executive Support Coordinator. The country director was simply referred to as the CD and years later when I became freer with the director, I claimed the same acronym for myself. I used to tell people that our organization had only two CDs. These were the country director, and the country driver. Fortunately for me, our then director was not an insecure type and she took the joke lightly.
The complexity of names in that organization was not restricted to job titles. It also affected the names of documents and computer software. GL stood for General Ledger while PO was short for Program Outline.
Some common documents shared acronyms and one had to specify the particular one they meant. A particularly ambiguous abbreviation was PPM. It denoted regularly used documents in two different departments. PPM stood for Programs and Projects Modules in the program department. It also stood for Personnel Policy Manual in the Human Resource department. Fortunately for us however, the programs version of PPM was referred to as PPM Ndugu, probably in honour of the Tanzanian comrade who designed it. This greatly helped us in differentiating the two.
When I joined the organization, there was constant talk of a CSP that was about to expire. I didn't know what a CSP was and so I was rather apprehensive about its anticipated expiration. I had to find out what it was so as not to be caught off-guard. I was relieved to learn that CSP simply meant Country Strategic Plan, and it ran for five years before a new one was made. The anxiety created by that particular CSP stemmed from the fact that the regional office that was supposed to approve it had been constantly rejecting it while demanding that major changes be made to it. Eventually however – And relievingly so – we got our brand new CSP.
