…and myself. Talk about making me look bad. I was tasked to write the feasibility study to upgrade our bank to a higher classification. Schedules were all set and agreed to. I had the first half of January to finish it. And then our president calls me on new year’s day, asking how it was coming along. I just e-mailed her the other day that I HAD STARTED working on it. Well, she wanted it done sooner. So we met yesterday morning. She looked at my outline, said she’d handle the second part which was the internal workings and plan proper. I could handle the first half (market study and other externals.) We agreed to meet in two days. Well she called again last night saying she was through with her half and wanted to meet this morning.
Type A people want everybody to be like them. Unfortunately, they tend to get what they want.
Workaholics also have the popular understanding of the work ethic on their side. And one does not Pit the work ethic unless one wants to be flamed skinless. I know this from experience.
The worst are the ones that work hard but not smart. They look good because they are spining their wheels off getting nowhere fast and you look like a slacker because you stop to figure what needs to be done first and make actual progress.
I can get behind this Pitting. There is a corollary to it - morning people. Somewhere along the line we got the idea as a society that the only valid experience is being a morning person - being an evening or night person means you’re a lazy slacker. It doesn’t matter if you work from 10 am until 8 pm, you’re a lazy slacker because you didn’t start at 8 am.
Sympathy level… 0.
In relation to early morning people. I once worked where once in a great while the morning fog was terrible or it was raining like a mofo. In addition there was hideous morning traffic at 8am. Now wait till 8:30 or so and the traffic would almost be gone.
So, I could be right on time everyday, even those bad days or I could say screw this and wait about 30 minutes. At the very least the bad traffic would be gone. And quite often not only would the traffic be gone but the heavy fog would be better or the rain had passed.
The boss finally told me I needed to get there at 8am every day. I told him I would do that, but if I did I’d hit the door every day on the minute 8 hours later. He knew I stayed late often late if shit needed to be done and would even piddle with work at home/on weekends.
If I had to come in a bit late on a bad day at the very least I’d stay that amount of time before I left to keep it kosher. I much preferred that to risking life, limb, and financial loss to meet some arbitrary get there time.
I never heard another word about it.
I thought this was going to be about the TV show.
I find a lot of “workaholics” are actually just making a big show about shit everyone else is just doing, plus they spend a lot of time focusing on small matters better left to more junior staff. I automatically assume that anyone who boasts about how many hours they put in is probaby: not very good at their job and doesn’t have anything worthwhile to go home to.
Yup - boasting about how many hours you spend at work means that you’re not very efficient, doesn’t it?
Maybe you’re in the wrong country, try moving to Spain.
My experience has been that as a morning person, I need to wait until everybody else wakes up before I can communicate with them and not with their zombie, I’m expected to be chirpy during company dinners (one advantage of being a contractor is that I can now skip those - yay!), and people who come in to work at 10 or 11am have the gall to toss potshots at me (who arrived at 8am, per contract) for leaving at 5pm (the hour listed on the contract) rather than “showing my dedication by staying until 7 or 8pm” (which btw happens to be when they leave, but also when their 8 hours finish).
I have to say, I love working in a culture where at 10 AM the response to “is A here yet?” will be “What? At 10 after midnight?!” and at 4 PM the response to “Is B still here?” will be “What? at 4 at night?!” – and both A and B will be judged on the work they perform, not the hours they keep.
Back when I was a team manager, I always told the people I managed “I expect you to be here from 10 AM to 4 PM, or let me know ahead of time that you’ll be Out of Office. I don’t care when you get the rest of your work done.”
I wish I lived in a culture where people were judged on the quality of their work, too, not how many more hours you put in or when you roll in in the morning. I usually do temp office work, and just about every job I do could be done from 10 am until 6 pm, but that is never, ever an option for me. I would never complain about the 8 am crowd leaving at 4 pm; I just wish 10 am to 6 pm was an option, too.
How many more decades before workers finally finish Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia? Talk about a laid back lifestyle!
Kidding aside, I subscribe with coming early and leaving on-the-dot, though my bio-clock favors slow mornings and lots of thinking in the evening. My work is routine for the most part, and I find I can finish the crucial tasks in the morning. My basic career strategy is not to let my ambitions overtake my abilities, you see. My boss is smart enough to know this so I’m assigned other things now and then. When things get too thick, I just snark off things like, “whoever said you could have only one raise each year?”
Unpitable. Tight Butthole, Bro!
That will depend on whether the work on the high-speed train’s underground tracks manage to bring it down and it has to be started anew… (there’s been a lot of yelling and fist-shaking about the choice to make those go so close to the Sagrada Familia, but the last time I was in Barcelona, the “no AVE! Preserve the Temple!” signs had been replaced with “no double-decker tourist buses! They make noise!” ones :rolleyes:… there’s actually less traffic in the area now that the only buses allowed to park there are the double-deckers)
Or maybe Gaudi’s work is so awesome it really takes that long. 
Nah, it’s not his work alone, nor did he ever intend it to be. One of the things he’s (in)famous for is a tendency to either not draw plans until very late in the game, draw only partials, or hide them. One of his first jobs, the Botines house in León, was renovated at one point; there were no plans, and the workers went crazy figuring out which of the ultra-thin columns strewn all over the place were needed for support and which were not. When the job was almost finished, the plans were discovered - hidden inside a visibly-hollow sculpture which protrudes above the main door :smack:.
Gaudí never intended the Sagrada Familia to be “his”: he saw it as being like a cathedral in taking a long time and many hands to be built; he left enough defined for others to know which areas were supposed to be decorated according to which themes, but for many of them there are no specific, detailed designs available. At one point, available plans ran out. There were some sculptures needed (“here goes the Passion”) but there were no details. The resulting internal fight within the Patronato (the Foundation which manages the construction) lasted decades: half of them wanted to hire sculptors who’d copy Gaudí’s style as much as possible, the other half wanted to hire sculptors who’d respect the ideas but work in their own style. The second side eventually won; thus, some of the sculptures are in a very delicate, detailed style, others can only be called “blocky”… but this is all part of what happens when you have a work that involves multiple authors and multiple generations.
You know, unless it is causing a direct problem for me or I have overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I tend to assume that people are taking care of their shit in whatever way works best for them. But not all of us who are at work a lot–or who are very busy while we are there–and just somehow chronically inefficient. Some of us have a lot of shit to do, and it’s just time consuming. If your life isn’t organized that way, fine. Doesn’t mean your doing anything wrong. But I’m not doing anything wrong, either.
Are you fully torqued right now?
Let’s get weird!