why do people not listen?

pontifex

Lifer
Dec 5, 2000
43,804
46
91
so a guy at work (he's actually some kind of financial advisor or something and isn't an employee of our company in the normal sense) comes up to me and says he needs a phone for the conference room. we have a phone in there already and it works ok for conference calls. its not the best, but it works. this guy is supposed to help use spend less money, not more, right? whatever...

i tell him that we (my boss and i) don't do anything with the phones, someone else does, and i tell him who it is.

and he says "well can you call your boss and ask him about the phone and tell him to call me." I don't even know where my boss is today (as usual).

uh...sure...turns out boss is off today because his wife's car broke down. so i tell him this and tell him again who takes care of the phone stuff.

I know my boss. if i had been able to get him on the phone he would have been like, wtf are you calling me about this? you know we don't handle the phones.


do you guys have people like this at your jobs?
 

Wapp

Golden Member
Jun 5, 2003
1,648
0
0
I'm a government contractor, I deal with people like this on a daily basis.
 

CrackRabbit

Lifer
Mar 30, 2001
16,642
62
91
Yes, all to well.
Example 1: Give a guy a procedure to follow to back something up to correct a mistake he made.
He doesn't follow the procedure and farks things up worse, calls back up and then blames me saying I told him to. I about got on a plane to go murder someone for that.

Example 2: Customer calls up and tells us that their admin dumb terminal is running slow. I suggest that they should check their comms and make sure they aren't on a lower speed backup line. 5 mintues later her supervisor is calling us demanding to know why they were on backup, she had not bothered to check anything just told her supervisor that I said they were on backup. :|
 

mooglekit

Senior member
Jul 1, 2003
616
0
0
Yes, most of the people I work are like this actually...maybe that's why it's so hard to get anything done. Hmm...
 

Demon-Xanth

Lifer
Feb 15, 2000
20,551
2
81
If someone asks you for something more than once, they're waiting for you to do it for them RIGHT NOW regardless of if it's even possible.
 

Demon-Xanth

Lifer
Feb 15, 2000
20,551
2
81
Translations:

"Can you do x"="Do x for me now."
"Would it be possible for...."="I want you to do x for me now."
"I need this right away"="I don't need this at all, but I want to make it look like you're holding things up."
"You're in charge of this project"="You don't really have authority, but if anything goes wrong you're at fault now instead of me."
"Can you do me a small favor?"="I would like a 1:1 scale of the roman colleseum built with marble quarried from the Alps by the end of the day"
"This shouldn't take too long"="You'll be working on this at your own funeral."
"I'm almost done"="I got started and the work I've done won't work at all so you'll have to trash everything and start over, but you can't so make it work anyways"
 

gwrober

Golden Member
Sep 3, 2005
1,293
0
0
Originally posted by: Wapp
I'm a government contractor, I deal with people like this on a daily basis.

Ugh. Me too, too many times. I recently left the tech support office for a network engineering position (same office) and it is soooo much better here...