Going through one now. Advice welcome.

Love my job, love my coworkers -- city government. The folks "downtown" are semi clueless about how hard we work, how hard it is to find good people for the low compensation, but we make do and they usually don't get in our way.

Enter "Cruella" who was hired last May. She moves along the paperwork for our spending allotments (to purchase everything from office supplies to vehicles). Or at least, that's what she's supposed to do. Things move incredibly slowly now and she berates us if we don't give her a full page description of practically every dime we spend.

In the last 6 weeks I've responded to almost 100 emails from her asking for irrelevant information; she won't approve money for item X (whose price changes hourly) until she knows the item's cost for the day of the request. What difference does that make?? I'm not buying today, I'm trying to get the spending allotment in place so that I can make purchases next week. And on and on and on -- that's just the tip of the iceberg.

We've all been treated & spoken to as though we're either completely incompetent or complete criminals trying to pull a fast one, or both. Her predecessor turned things around the same day, often in one hour; she left a couple of my requests sitting on her desk for 2 weeks (her boss was out on medical leave), and the only reason we can imagine is so that she can prove to us who's in charge. She's not in our chain of command but is clearly the keeper of the bottleneck.

I hate to do it but I'm applying elsewhere. I'm too old to play politics with someone on a power trip.