I don’t want to give any specific details since the inciting incident that inspired this post was work-related, but man, fuck these people in the ass with a rusty hammer (and not the handle end).
When something is so fucking vital that your entire future is riding on it (or the future of your organization, whatever), and you need my help, can you try not waiting until the day before you need said thing to bring it up?
This isn’t an isolated incident, but a fucking epidemic. So many times a problem that would have been pretty minor and easy to handle had it been addressed, say, a week or two earlier, snowballs into this gigantic emergency because the person waits until the last few minutes before the deadline to begin working on something they should have been done with ages ago (and almost certainly had plenty of free time to do it in).
If your procrastination only hurts yourself, then you can wallow in it all you want. You deserve it and I don’t give a shit. But when you rely on the support of others and you know it, you’re a selfish fucking prick for waiting until the last minute to start and then rushing everyone around you to fix your fucking “emergency” situation that wouldn’t have been an emergency at all if you weren’t such a self-absorbed prick.
Oh god, yes. Then they turn into stress puppies until you can’t help but feel the frenzy. I hate work procrastinators. I SAW you chatting all day, and now you expect me to put myself out for you? Bitch please.
I get this shit from callers all the time, especially on Fridays. Claimants who call in a report at 7pm on a Friday night to tell us about the car accident they had on Monday, then get pissed when we say they can’t get a pre-paid rental car reservation until next Monday. Dude, the business day is OVER. If you had called us on, oh I dunno, the date of the accident or the 3 days since, you could have it already. Is there anything else I can do for you today? No? Have a wonderful weekend! :rolleyes:
The endemic ineptitude of our clients helped build our business. We’ve saved jobs, departments, and possibly entire country programmes. Saving necks yields lots of gratitude and referrals.
But it’s still frustrating as all hell, especially the emergency emails sent by clients who know we’re on vacation. Some necks can’t be saved.
I work in a business with absolute deadlines: a story that airs at 5:08:30 must be ready then, ‘floating’ a story at this level of business is unacceptable.
However the beauty of our work is 98% of the time, after your story airs you have nothing more to do with it - gas the truck, drop the tapes, go home and have a cold one.
You know, it’s interesting how this made me think of academics. Deadlines like that are very rare in academia - it seems like the norm throughout my school career was that teachers were extremely lenient about accepting late assignments. Some would accept atrociously late work with no penalties, others would apply marginal penalties (like marking an assignment off 5 points for every week it’s late - so you could still theoretically get an A-/B+ on a 2-week late assignment!), others would apply stricter penalties, but very few were absolute about their deadlines and actually held their ground over it.
Granted, academic deadlines may be somewhat artificial and not as important as real-world deadlines, but it creates a procrastination habit/mentality that sticks with people through adulthood (and as someone who has worked in an academic environment, I’ve seen that the teachers are often just as bad as students when it comes to waiting until the last minute on things). So yeah, I blame teachers and academia at least partially for this epidemic.
I work as a regulatory lawyer. Quite often, clients pay my firm’s horrendously high per-hour rate for my services specifically to drag our client’s asses out of the wringer that failure to move quickly on something landed them in.
If people did their job on time, they would not have to pay me. The cost to me is, of course, that almost everything I do is a gut-churning last-minute emergency for someone, and the clients expect instant responsiveness at pretty well all times.
Meet a professor who not only has absolute deadlines, but sticks to them. Do the students throw a fit? Do they tell me that all their other professors are more lenient? Yup and yup. Is this my problem? Nope.
I mostly teach freshmen, by the way, so they get their wake-up call pretty early. They are warned repeatedly, on the syllabus and in class. They don’t believe me until after the first assignment due date.
I teach a graduate workshop in the summer, and just today handed a grad student his arse on a platter because he thought he could flaunt a due date. Sorry, dude, but that ship has sailed.
My office-mate, a 30 year veteran, is the same way; he will let them freak out next to his desk, then ask blandly, ‘So, is that how you plan to approach your boss when you get out into the real world?’
Where I get frustrated is when I have to depend on a colleague if we’re conducting workshops and things – this guy never, ever has information, room assignments, or equipment ready in a timely manner for those of us working under him.
So, yeah, those professors** Rigamarole** mentioned are out there, and at least some of their colleagues find them annoying as fuck, too.
I get this all the time. It’s the hallmark of the person with unreasonable expectations. Folks who have a custom Linux distro on their box that hasn’t been upgraded in a decade (literally a decade does happen, it’s often less) all of a sudden NEED the new, standardized distro by tomorrow. All of their custom written apps simply HAVE to work flawlessly, too. Never mind the fact that it was written by a 10 year old kid, 2 Perl or 3 PHP revisions ago, and has absolute paths in it. It has to work.
Believe it or not, these same people usually balk at paying a penny for this work. When they do finally agree, they freak out that any downtime is required. They almost never agree to pay for a second server to be put up to prevent the downtime. Instead, they call support every 15 minutes to ask:
Customer: “Is it done yet, when will it be done?”
Support Tech: “The admin quoted you 2-3 hours, probably about that amount of time.”
Customer: “Is there anything I can do to speed this up?”
Support Tech: “Nope”
After the whole thing is done, they pester billing to give them a discount.
I like that, except when it’s a filing deadline for an asylum application, which, if not met, means someone is going to eventually be deported somewhere where people have already tried to kill him. That happened to me a couple of weeks ago - fault of group practice leader, but what am I going to do? He didn’t finish until after 6 pm, after which we had to assemble 7 copies of the thing with 60-some exhibits. It filled an entire box; I was here until almost midnight.
Boss said “thank you, you were a trooper” the next morning, and I told him “you’re welcome, but I hope not to make a habit of that.”
Well, I appreciate you and your office-mate’s hardassery because those bad habits really stick with people and unfortunately the “real world” suffers from it well after people get out of school. Of course, if you had been my teacher when I was a kid I probably would have complained as much as the next. I really believe that we have a cultural tolerance for laziness that hurts us all in the long run (and I almost can’t believe I just said that - especially since I’m working now and simultaneously posting to the Dope :p).
I’m not even sure how this would work. He was planning to wrap the due date around him like a mink stole and prance up and down the aisles of the classroom?
I’m starting to really get pissed about this behavior at work myself.
I work in the IT department, and the business has this horrible habit of not telling us things until it’s already late, or where it’s late enough that we can’t apply much in the way of controls to it, so that we do it well.
Combine that with some gutless managers who will NOT say no to the business nor negotiate a better deadline on our behalf, and you have the recipe for a department that’s continually behind the 8-ball, and where we’re always frazzled and doing something under a deadline.
I kinda do this to myself, although not by choice. The nature of our business is that we get a lot of local government business. Government business runs on weird yearly cycles, no two exactly alike (some education is involved). However, whenever their budgets come around, they have some of the dumbest rules about funds, have to try and close open orders at the end of the year, and are prone to suddenly drop in orders with a three weeks deadline and they MUST have it working by then.
This is pricy equipment. It gets ordered sometime after you ask. it arrives sometime after that. And this time of year is very busy and we have other work scheduled. We’re scheduled a month or more in advance. We do it if we can. But sometimes we face long distances and limited labor. Too bad, so sad.
The problem is I may have no choice. Factor in uncertain supply, the odd real emergency, and (my favorite) people who sit on an order we had ready a month ago until they suddenly need it NOW!.. and we can have a problem.
