The printer they have at my tutoring center is frustratingly unreliable. Which is bad, because we only have one printy to print out grade reports and worksheets for members. If that printer decides to take a vacation, everybody is screwed.
One day my boss asked me if I could help her fix a paper jam. I said sure, figuring I could score some brownie points with the boss by fixing the printer (I am trying to get promoted). Well, I wasn’t prepared for this type of job- somehow the printer turned an 8 1/2 by 11 inch piece of paper into about a handful’s worth of confetti. Tiny bits of paper EVERYWHERE in the guts of the printer. My boss had to take it to a service center to get fixed, I guess the only way to get rid of all the paper is to take the thing COMPLETELY APART, suffice to say we were without a printer for a couple of days.
I disagree on the smartness of the person you were talking about.
I’ve posted on this before…
When I joined the workforce, I was amazed at how stupid and clueless people were. They couldn’t seem to improvise, read instructions, follow directions, figure things out and so on.
I walked around wondering how these morons functioned.
Then I had a revelation. THEY were the smart ones and I’M the moron!
How so?
In my first review, I received a paltry raise. I brought up all the things I did that no-one else was able to do. The reaction of my boss was ‘Um, ok’ and he was unmoved.
The revelation hit me…the things other people had trouble figuring out were low-level-who-cares sorts of things! While I was busy feeling superior smirking at their stupidity they were smirking behind my back at being such a stooge.
It is ok and even beneficial to your career to be ‘incompetent’ at things that do not matter but super-competent at things that do matter. I took this to heart and my pay has gone up considerably since then. It is amazing how many people are around that will step up to the plate to handle these tasks. I’m sure I get smirked at but my career is moving up because I am good at the ‘important stuff’.
In your situation, this guy managed to get you to do a low-level, thankless task. You are calling him dumb? Maybe he is…or maybe he is smarter than you think.
The task itself wasn’t menial low-level stuff, but it was nonessential and could have easily waited until the next morning. Not recognizing it as a next-morning task, that was the stupid part.
I rarely have to produce photocopies but when I do I can count on at least 30 minutes of lost productivity. We just bought the mother of all photocopiers. This thing could power a space station IF IT EVER WORKED. Fucking thing is always jamming or cycling through a power saving mode. I don’t think I have ever had an experience with this copier that didn’t leave me wanting to kill my landlord (sorry, entirely different hostility).
I rarely have to produce photocopies but when I do I can count on at least 30 minutes of lost productivity. We just bought the mother of all photocopiers. This thing could power a space station IF IT EVER WORKED. Fucking thing is always jamming or cycling through a power saving mode. I don’t think I have ever had an experience with this copier that didn’t leave me wanting to kill my landlord (sorry, entirely different hostility).
Our POS printer at work is a combination printer, photocopier, and fax machine. As everyone working in offices can guess, it does all of these things badly. It has an automatic feeder that doesn’t work. It has multiple paper trays that it won’t take paper from. It has a bypass manual feed that no one can figure out. It has lots of memory for documents that it may or may not get around to printing. It is such a workhorse of modern office equipment - it would take about five other machines to screw up our documents like this one does all on its own.
