I have been struggling with this since before the Christmas break. Our administrative assitant is 79 years old. She is a great person, but her memory lapses are really starting to affect her work. At first it was just small things like having to keep asking me for phone numbers, addresses, and dates over and over. It has ballooned to far worse. Last month she forgot to send a $10,000 check to our mail house so the newsletters didn't mail out in time. When I spoke to the accounting department the woman in charge said she wouldn't trust our secretary with a check and that our secretary has gone down to her to ask if it is okay to send out checks that are months old. I went back to look at some of our check requests and when they were authorized to go out by one of us and when our secretary mailed them. I figure we have sent people double payments about six times since September. It's a lot of money and because of our deadlines with the publications, we can't afford for things to go out late. The one incident that has me convinced that she can no longer do her job anymore was yesterday she asked me how to use a computer disk. The woman has used them many times before and now she wants to know "how do I get stuff off of this thing."

I have spoken to her and she knows that things aren't right, but I feel that our surpervisor should know what is going on and speak to her. I just don't want to be the "bad" guy who says she's too old to work anymore. I don't want to be mean about it, but we are talking about thouands of dollars that are being mismanaged, many hours of time to fix problems, and having to take time to "train" her on things she already knew how to do.

Any suggestions on how to handle this?