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People expecting you to do THEIR work

SheHateMe

SheHateMe

Diamond Member
Today, I received a call from a faculty member having an issue with a document that claimed it would be around 1,200 pages to print out. I went up to troubleshoot the software setup to see if maybe something was going wrong. But no, the problem was that the actual document was FUBAR, everything was wrong...the format, the spacing, the fields....everything. I kindly explain to the person that the issue seems to be the document and asked if they received it from someone else. Perhaps, the document was messed up when being passed through emails or something like that.

She tells me that she got it from her boss and that this is an official internal document being shared among employees that was so fucked up that I was sure it had been done by someone taking a computer class in grade school. How does something so unprofessional go out? The document was not even usable, the data was screwed up....I had a hard time figuring out what was what....even worse, this employee could not use it, they did not understand it either and they could not print.

I (kindly) tell the employee to see if someone can get it fixed or she would have to manually fix it herself. I showed her the techniques she could use to clean it up and to check back with me if she had more questions. I did my job. I am tech support....not fix-my-work support. This document had over 800 fields of data.

She proceeds to call me atleast 5 times this morning asking for help with the document. Each time I go back, it is unchanged (absolutely no editing had been done)...same questions being asked ("show me that again"). What she was looking for was for me to go through and fix everything for her. In the end, she gets frustrated and basically says that it is "too much work" and that she was going to forget about it. She had an attitude, too.


I don't think I was in the wrong. Yes, I could have fixed that whole thing....but it would have been outside of my job duties...and I would have wasted time not being in the office to help people with actual tech issues.
 
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Over the years I find it that being "nice" and going "up and beyond and being helpful" almost ALWAYS = "shooting my own foot".

People are shitty
 
Stupid and shitty.

Every time I went up to answer one of her frantic calls, she says "do you want to sit in my spot so you can work on it?"

NO. I already know what you're trying to do, lady.
 
Sounds like the work should actually go back to the source of the document. Whoever put it together should fix it.
 
I don't know. She told me she got it from someone else and then said that she doesn't know how to use the program very well so she wanted to print it out.....
 
sixone said:
I'm not buying that for a second. More likely that she knows she can't show it to her boss.
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Things I've seen produced and created by upper management over the years would probably confirm that it's most likely her boss (mind you I with many high end people at fortune 500 companies).

Hand over most pathetic document to lowest of the low, get them to make it "professional" and when others see it and blame game starts ALL fingers point at the "fixer".

Oldest trick in the corporate book.

Heck, bigger the company, more stupidity and BS I see from the "upper management" folks.

But I love it, it's a great comedy.

I find that your average McDonald worker works harder and produces better quality work that these idiots.......no joke

It's really sad, but the only thing that keeps me sane is laughter.
 
SheHateMe said:
I don't know. She told me she got it from someone else and then said that she doesn't know how to use the program very well so she wanted to print it out.....
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Apparently.

Pics of said woman so we can determine if she gets a free pass and you should do her work.
 
Vdubchaos said:
Over the years I find it that being "nice" and going "up and beyond and being helpful" almost ALWAYS = "shooting my own foot".

People are shitty
Click to expand...

I have actually found being a nice guy who's always willing to do a little extra saved me a couple of times when the hammer fell at work.
 
Kilim said:
I have actually found being a nice guy who's always willing to do a little extra saved me a couple of times when the hammer fell at work.
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I'm sure it could and does here and there. No question about that.

But ti could've also been a simple decision that had NOTHING to do with any of that.
 
Just say no. Passive people are just as bad as retards that should instead be working on a farm picking berries with a toothpick. Don't enable this behavior.
 
I hate that. "But I want you to do it for me."

I usually go ahead and do it for them anyway, but reformatting a 1200 page document for somebody who's not in your department or direct-report chain is waaaay above and beyond. There are people who get paid to do that crap.
 
I just play stupid these days.

"Sorry, I just work on these big zillion dollar SANs... I don't know anything about PCs or desktop applications anymore..."
 
Well, I hope she got her stuff fixed. I talked to my boss just to see if I was in the right. More often than not, people will call us about this stuff and not any real tech issues and when they don't get the results they want, they complain to our boss via email and he never checks in with us about it so it just makes us look bad.
 
SheHateMe said:
I don't think I was in the wrong. Yes, I could have fixed that whole thing....but it would have been outside of my job duties...and I would have wasted time not being in the office to help people with actual tech issues.
Click to expand...

From the cynics view - you're not wrong, and if you simply fixed it, it would set a precedent - in the future, she'll just ask you to do it again. If your boss asks you to fix it, then that's a different story. I could see you fixing it if it was a few pages long and a reasonably quick fix, but 1200 pages with 800 data fields can be a real project if you're not an expert at text manipulation programs.

I run into this stuff all the time. I have a couple hundred people across a few sites and while most are good, there's always a select few who want to label anything technology-related under "IT" and assign responsibility to anyone other than themselves, when it's really their own responsibility to push through and solve the issue. And they're the ones who create friction with you, your superiors, and the people around you. It's frustrating. I hear ya. Hang in there.
 
Kaido said:
I run into this stuff all the time. I have a couple hundred people across a few sites and while most are good, there's always a select few who want to label anything technology-related under "IT" and assign responsibility to anyone other than themselves, when it's really their own responsibility to push through and solve the issue.
Click to expand...

Exactly.

My job is to maintain the tools you use to do YOUR job.
 
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