Thursday, May 05, 2005

Work Thought for the Month

I am in serious danger of losing what little and diminishing respect I have for one of my co-workers.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any particular reason, or have you finally discovered that other people are morons...

Stuart said...

Long one...

We have to divide up 3 days worth of presentations to attend, some of which are 1 hour long, others of which are 40 mins long.

One of us has taken it upon himself to timetable it and gave me the 4-5pm slot on 2 days. Fair enough - that's the way the cookie crumbles. However he's obsessed we all do the same amount of time, but when you're doing an unequal amount of 1 hr and 40 min slots the mathematics behind it are ridiculously complex and no-one is going to get exactly the same amount of time (some of us might do 20 mins more or less than the other guy).

Somehow he managed to do it. But then the team doing the 4-5pm slot on Monday cancelled, so he has taken it upon himself to retimetable the whole thing so it is "fair" and we are all doing exactly the same amount of time.

The revised timetable has me working from 11-12, and then from 12:30-2pm. Now the 40 mins long ones are in a different building to the 1 hr ones, and with the potential to overrun I mentioned the other 2 guys think I might not get a lunch break. They want to stick with the original timetable with me not doing the 4-5pm slot, but the timetabler is whinging this is "unfair".

It's a whole powerplay thing - the other 2 guys aren't too happy he did all this timetabling without them. And to be honest the rest of the staff don't give a fig as long as any one of us turns up for every presentation.

Anonymous said...

Ah, the endless cycle of bureaucracy...

This seems to be a bit over anal to me. It's only his idea of 'fair' after all. Some people might consider it fairer if you all just did an equal number of 1hr and 40min shifts, or alternated between the two, rather than just looking at the exact number of minutes people are putting in altogether.

You got landed with two hour-long slots, which you could've complained about and said "That's not fair! Why don't I get a 40min one? Wahhh!" But like the swell guy you are, you agreed to do them. You just got lucky that one of them was cancelled. Someone else's might get cancelled another time. It all works out about equal in the end. Jeez Louise! Good luck in keeping your patience in the future!

Stuart said...

In all fairness it is quite amusing to watch his temper tantrums.

A: "Well I don't mind doing an extra hour rather than rewrite the entire timetable and make it look like we don't know what we're doing."

B: "Oh yeah - make yourself look good in front of the bosses."

A: "Ok, how about we leave it so that Stuart does one less hour than the rest of us then?"

B: "But that's not fair - he's doing less than us."

Cue much ranting and then him pointing at the one guy in the Office who hasn't said anything in the conversation and blaming him for turning everyone against him, shouting "I'm going out to lunch then - I have nothing more to say", limping Kevin-the-teenager-style to the door and leaving before returning 2 seconds later to get his sandwiches which he's forgotten in a tirade.

Priceless. Yet worrying for a 30 something male.