Please share your insane requests at work.

I could really use some perspective.

I found out Friday that our VP expects a full suite of client and member communications no later than Tuesday. We just decided on a vendor Thursday - this is a completely new product in a line of business that isn’t even three years old. I’m a little panicked, since this will involve at least three brochures, a specialty folder, modeling, SOWs, etc. And that’s just client stuff. Member stuff will include a welcome kit (including informational pieces - I work in insurance - so I need rights & responsibilities according to regulatory guidelines, reorder information, full benefit package), plus ancillary disease-management materials, customized for us and our vendor.

I’m taking a breather from my work for a few minutes to ask for others’ stories about their insane work requests. This is batshiat crazy. I’m actually quite ticked, but since being mad won’t get me out of the responsibility, I’m trying to manage that so I can channel it more productively.

I keep reminding myself that when I was freelancing, I’d churn this shit out no problem. Plus, if I pull it off well, it’ll look really good one me, but if I don’t, I’m toast. On top of it, I have a toddler now, which makes it considerably more difficult to work on weekends.

I actually started tearing up in my boss’s office Friday when I was told of this project. She was very supportive and calmed me down, helped me plan and helped me map our resources to get this done, but this whole project is a nail in the coffin for this job right now. And we’ve lost more than half hour team in the last year due to these types of drive-by tactics with big projects.

So, words of advice, support, condemnation, commiseration?

EDITED TO ADD: I should mention - I also work on four other products and I’m the only person working on beneficiary and client marketing and positioning for this particular business line. I guess what I’m looking for is really someone to say, “Shit - that sounds nuts! Finish it and get out!” Because that’s the way I’m leaning right now. I don’t need this kind of crap at this point in my life.

I dunno. Just keep surfing message boards. :smiley:

I can share an insane request that did end up in me “getting out”.

I was working for a not-for-profit feral cat TNR (trap/neuter/release) organization. I was the only paid employee, although I supervised several volunteers. The President/owner of the organization was a retired doctor (that is spelled G-O-D). When I finally quit, I had been working for him for 18 months without one single day off. My day never started later than 8am, and sometimes as early as 5. I never got home before 8, and was often out trapping in the middle of the night. In addition to TNR, we had a shelter full of cats and kittens I was responsible for - getting them to spay/neuter surgery, giving their shots, feeding, cleaning, etc. Dr. Boss was unable to say “no” to anyone who brought in a cat or kitten, so I would often come in to find that he had admitted a sick cat. Then it was my fault that half the shelter got sick; I obviously wasn’t cleaning properly. There were several cats in the shelter that weren’t adoptable - they were vicious. They couldn’t be handled without gloves. Yet I had to clean their cages daily. I was also responsible for trapping cats - sometimes in not-so-good sections of town in the middle of the night. Dr. Boss would take requests for trapping and it was my job to do it - and he would not turn down a request even when I was backlogged. I was also expected to try to get the people I was trapping for to donate money, even though he never mentioned it to them when they called for help.

18 months.

At about 15 months I gave notice. When he asked me what he could do to keep me, I told him I had to have one day off a week. My father in law was very ill and I needed to spend some time with him and I just needed some time off. Ok - you will get every Friday off.

The next Friday there was an “emergency”. The next week was business as usual; I never got a day off.

Thanksgiving morning I came in to clean the shelter (about 40 cats at the time). I found a letter in my message box - I was being officially reprimanded for not being successful in trapping a certain cat before she had her kittens.

Two weeks later, on my birthday, I had come in to clean the shelter (most of the volunteers had quit due to the antics of Dr. Boss and his gold-digging girlfriend). As I was loading my car with cats to take for surgery, Dr. Boss called me in and informed me that I wasn’t getting enough trapping done. I asked him what part of my duties he wanted me to give up to free up more time for trapping. His reply? “Maybe you need to start getting up earlier in the morning.”

That is the only job I have ever quit without giving notice. I told him to kiss my ass, handed him the keys and walked out.

Good for you! Our company gives a lot of lip service to being “family friendly” and all that work-life balance crap, but when it comes down to it, few entities actually give a rat’s backside. At my work, leaving at 5 p.m. as I do is considered leaving early, so I better have my laptop on my way out the door. And coming in at 9 a.m., as I do, is getting in late, so I better work through lunch. This is expected of everyone - even our SVP and Senior Directors work these hours (and many more - they’re sending e-mails at all hours of the night - 2:30 am, 4 a.m., etc.), so it’s largely cultural. But it’s a load of BS. If I have so much to do I can’t do it while I’m there, I think I need to assess how I’m working or get help. And since I’ve assessed how I’m working out the wazoo, and my boss thinks I’m overloaded, too, I think I need help, but the likelihood of me getting it is zero to none.

I’ve never been reprimanded (just the opposite), but I know that leaving “early” to spend time with my family may prevent me from getting a promotion in the future. At this point, I’m doing my time to get some really good things under my belt, then I might start freelancing again.

Yo’u’ve just got to communicate your needs clearly. If it hurts your chances for a promotion, so what? You’ve got a very limited lifespan at this job if it keeps going in the same direction (and it more likely) anyway.

Demand new staff, a salary to make it worthwhile, some other form of adequate compensation, or start polishing the resume.

I worked at a little cafe for a very small college this summer. First the manager quit, leaving me and one other employee by ourselves. Then the other employee left, leaving me by myself. We had an overall dining supervisor for the college, but she also left. I ran the cafe by myself, everything, for three weeks. For minimum wage. It sucked.

I caught some grief a while back because an item I billed was questioned.

I had to go out to a Navy ship and get underway on it to do crew training, and it was a requirement that everyone on board wear steel-toed shoes, same as when I was in. Since I no longer had my boondockers, I went to Sears, bought some Timberland work boots for about $95, and submitted the expense to my company.

The powers that be went nuts, and they didn’t pay until I showed the requirement that the shoes be worn, and also showed that this price was actually very reasonable for boots of this kind. I argued to my boss that I didn’t want to wear cheap shoes sixteen hours a day on steel decks and ladders.

I had to visit that ship and others about a dozen times, and had more than a month of underway time overall - all on the same pair of boots.

I got my $95, but I heard about this for months. It really wasn’t fair.

There’s a lot of times we take photographs of incidents at work so we have a record if we later need it. We use digital now (and don’t get me started with the stupidity I’ve run into on that) but we used to use polaroids. My boss decided we were using too much polaroid film and told me we had to cut back on taking pictures. I said fine and asked him what situations he didn’t want us to take pictures of. He said the unimportant ones. So I asked him which ones were unimportant. He said the ones we didn’t need pictures of.

He kept trying to tell me I should use my judgement but I wasn’t falling for this - this man was notorious for Monday morning quarterbacking and telling you your judgement had been wrong.

So I kept insisting he set a policy on when we did not need to take pictures of something. Under the pressure of my questioning, his dim wattage brain finally sputtered to life and he announced that we only needed pictures for the small minority of cases in which somebody started legal action so I should only take pictures in those incidents.

And that was that. He has set a policy and it was my job to carry it out. I tried to explain to him how time worked and point out that it was impossible for me to know when an incident was occurring if anyone was going to start a legal action six months later but he didn’t want to hear it. He had stated a perfect policy; he could leave all the work to me and then wait six months to see whether or not I had guessed right and complain that I wasn’t following his policy.

I mentioned above that we eventually switched from polaroids to digital. This same idiot was around when we made the switch. He told us all that we had bought a bunch of expensive digital cameras but that it was a good investment because we would save money on film in the long run. So from this point on we were only supposed to use the digital cameras. Then two weeks later he submitted his annual purchase order for a year’s supply of polaroid film. When it arrived, we asked him why he had bought all this film when we were supposed to only be using the digital cameras. So he told us that we should take digital and polaroid pictures until all the polaroid film was used up.

I thought it was pretty insane when management sent a bunch of office staff to a striking sister plant, 300 miles away,to scab on an assembly line. Yeah, you wouldn’t have wanted to buy any of the freezers we put together that week.

My two cents worth: Fail to meet the deadline. There is no real reward for meeting irrational demands at work. Do as much as you can in a reasonable amount of time. Then stop. When asked for a report, give them what you have done. Make no apologies. The worst they can do is fire you, in which case (DUH) the work won’t get done. So, if they think it through, they will end up giving you more time.

I have never experienced success in a work situation where this was necessary. :smiley:

I was once notified that we were legally obligated to complete a certain major project by January 1. This was communicated to me during the second week of February. And by that, I do not mean February of the year before.

My favorite is the major project I completed by dint of many weeks of working nights and weekends, due to scope creep and a manager who could not seem to say No. We were about to begin phase two, and I insisted on written documentation, signed by the managers, of what the system would do, and what it would not be expected to do. We sat in meetings for almost a week, everyone signed, I got started designing.

I finished the design and mocked up a bunch of screens to demonstrate the flow of the system and the look-and-feel of the user interface (the first of the deliverables). All the screens had almost nothing behind them - the modules were written to always handle a standard set of inputs. No edits, almost no branching - just stubs.

The users loved it. Then they said, “Well, it seems that the system is pretty much done. Good - now you can deliver all the things we agreed the system would not have to do, and we aren’t signing off on the first deliverable unless you commit to doing so.”

And my manager agreed. His advice when I mentioned that there was no possible way I could meet the deadline deserves to live forever, or at least to have been branded into his forehead with a woodburning tool -

“You will just have to type faster.”

Literally, as I returned to my desk, my hands shaking in mingled frustration and horror at the prospect of my life for the next three months, the phone rang. It was a recruiter for my present job.

They tried to hit the deadlines without me. It didn’t happen

Regards,
Shodan

I did a technical writing contract for a place one time. It was in the downtown of a large city. I lived and had my home office in a small town outside of the city. Most everything could be e-mailed back and forth, however, and the telephone would help a lot too, so the contract stated that I’d be working out of my home office. I was assigned an engineer at the client’s as a contact. I should point out that the contract did state that one meeting a week at the client’s was needed: Fridays, for an hour, starting at 11:00 a.m. So I’m there once a week for an hour-long late morning meeting. Entirely doable.

So I started work. But almost as soon as I did, the Big Boss at the client’s asked that I come in on a Monday, for a meeting at 9:00 a.m. Well, okay. I drove two hours through horrendous rush-hour traffic, paid an outrageous sum to park, and attended the meeting. It lasted about an hour, but could I take some time with Contact Engineer? And after that, could I meet with some of the other staff? And then meet with this guy, and then review these specs, and then… By the time I left, it was the end of the business day. Time to drive two hours home, again through horrendous rush hour traffic.

These “come in for a 9:00 a.m. meeting” days became all-day matters; and what’s worse, they started becoming more and more frequent. Finally, I was there every day, from 8 or 9 to 5 or 6. While I had not negotiated mileage and parking into the contract (I was only to be there for an hour one day a week, remember), I was starting to feel that I should have–I was spending a lot of money on gas and parking. Not to mention four unpaid hours a day of commuting.

That wasn’t all, though. The contract stated that the contact engineer would be “knowledgeable about the project.” But Contact Engineer had little knowledge of the project. She tried to bring herself up to speed on the project specs, but while she did that, she was pretty much useless to me. I asked for a different Contact Engineer. Nope, said Big Boss; it can’t be done. You’re stuck with her.

I did try to point out that we weren’t exactly following the terms of the contract, but when I seemed to be heading that way in a conversation, Big Boss suddenly had a meeting or a phone call or something that prevented him from continuing our conversation.

So I kept working. The contract stated that I would submit a time report weekly, by e-mail, at the end of the week. No problem; I was used to submitting weekly reports to clients. But then, Big Boss decided he wanted a daily time report, in hardcopy, and personally handed to him at the end of every day. If he didn’t get one; well, I obviously hadn’t been working for him that day, and wouldn’t get paid for it.

That did it. Neither all-day, every-day attendance at his office nor a hardcopy time report submitted daily was in our contract. A knowledgeable engineer was–but the contact engineer wasn’t knowledgeable at all, though in fairness, she was trying to get there. There were a number of other ways Big Boss breached our contract terms, and while I had made reasonable efforts to accommodate them and tried to bring the contract back on track, there is only so much I’m willing to put up with. I exercised the escape clause we had in our contract.

He went ballistic. He threatened not to pay my invoices. He looked for every way he could to avoid paying them. He threatened legal action, but it was only a threat; he knew damn well he had breached the contract terms and I had done my best to live up to them, from not billing for gas and parking expenses (since they weren’t in the contract), up to and including following the provisions of the escape clause to the letter. In the end, and (I heard later) on the advice of his lawyer, he paid my final bill. I sweated out the remaining time that I was contractually obligated to stay under the terms of the escape clause (I sometimes wonder why he didn’t breach yet another term and simply throw me out?), and was never so glad to get out of a client’s as I was on that last day.

I think I need to send my boss a thank you note. Or possibly flowers. She would never let anyone treat her employees this way. In fact, she’s had several talks with another manager and informed him that he’s not allowed to assign work to us without her approval.

I’ve gotten some odd requests at other jobs though. Back in my newspaper days, the Copy Desk was scrambling to rearrange the paper one night to accommodate some late-breaking news stories. The managing editor, who had gone home several hours earlier, called my direct line to chat:

Editor: Soooo, what’s going on over there? Anything interesting?
Me: Yeah, we’re actually reworking page one at the moment. It’s kind of hectic right now.
Editor: Oh, OK. (pause) Do you want to say hi to my cat?
Me: (blinks) Umm … I’m really busy.
Editor (whining): But she’ll be so disappointed!
Me (thinks “well, tell Fluffy to pop a Prozac and get over it!”): Sorry, [news editor] needs to talk to me. Gotta go. (click)

Just one of the many incidents that prompted me to leave that job.

OOO! Can I play?

We’re going live with a new database at the end of this month (really! This time we mean it! Forget the last 12 months where we said we were going live at the end of each of them, too) Part of my job is to train the Engineers on how to use the new interface to create their datasheets. These are the same datasheets that I currently create for them. But this new handy-dandy interface will cut out that pesky, unnecessary Tech Writer (TW) by allowing the Engineers to become highly paid typists on their own, thus cutting me out of my own job. And did I mention that the interface tries to put multiple differently shaped square pegs into a round hole that, in order to fit them all, could swallow Cleaveland? And in doing so, is so broad as to be, well, I don’t even have a word for it.

But seriously… They want me to train the Engineers on how to use this interface to put the information in, click a button, and have the PDF pop out the other side, all ready to send to the customer. One problem? None of the Engineering side wants to be doing this. It’s what they hire TWs for. They also recognize that I’m not a glorified typist, and that they don’t want to be writers and it’s a waste of their time (not to mention $$$ since I don’t make half as much as the Engineers do) to do this themselves.

I’m asked to create a 1 hour training that covers not ‘how’ to do the job, but where to find the fields within this new interface. It’s expected to be an ‘informal’ training with about 6-10 people. So… I write it up, and knowing the people it’ll be given to, write to them.

Last week, they decided that instead of having another 2 weeks before I deliver it, they want it sooner. Ok. I’ll buy that. The problem is, Group A wants it delivered after we go live so Group B can’t pick it apart ahead of time, and Group B wants it delivered ASAP so they can. I’m going to be stuck in the middle. And now there are 26 people coming. And not all of them are Engineers anymore. Yep. They added people to the class who won’t know what the fields mean. And I can’t teach that part because I’m not an Engineer, nor do I play one on TV.

Then they talked about having me make it a FOUR hour training. And giving it the following day! While I was off-site at a Training of my own (taking, as opposed to giving) that they all approved IN WRITING before I could go. Sorry… My time machine is busted. Can’t do it. And I can’t seem to find the magic wand that will make a 1 hour into a 4 hour in less than 10 hours. I suppose I could give the same training on repeat cycle until the 4 hours are up, but I think they’d realize what I was up to when we started the third round.

After about a 40 email flurry, we decide on a 1.5 hour training (emails included things like trying to coordinate the schedules of India, CA, CO, and PA, too) This is actually not bad, since I don’t have to modify anything. I just add a longer Q&A to the end. But it took so much time and aggravation just to get through all the, “let’s make it 4 hours!”, “no! 2 two hours!”, “11:00 - 1:00!” “NO! My people need to eat!” “Well, my people need to sleep!”

On to the next problem. I gave the reviewers the materials weeks ago. They call them reviewers because they’re supposed to review the materials! Go figure. When I go by their desks, they’re still setting in the same spot with the same amount of dust buildup and no fingerprints. sigh Not one person had even looked at it other than me as of Friday, so I grabbed a guy to use as a g.p. and delivered it to him. Good idea to try it out ahead of time or I’d have been torn apart by rabid managers.

So, I’m supposed to give this training on Tuesday to 26 people scattered across the globe, to a mixed audience, no longer ‘informal’, with unreviewed materials, in 1.5 hours, in front of warring “factions” that might or might not happily shoot the messenger, using Netmeeting, an overcrowded conference room, a speakerphone, and an overhead projector.

If you hear from me Wednesday, I survived. If not, someone call 911.

That must have felt incredible. I’ve never been in that bad a situation, but I can imagine it would be an amazing feeling.

The unreasonable one for me was when I worked as a bookkeeper type in a facilities department. I understand what the bosses were trying to do–get me exposed to different kinds of work to see what I could do. I learned basic CAD drawing and stuff, which was fine since it’s computer skills.

But then they decided that they didn’t have drawings of the systems in one of the large labs and I should take a stab at this. I’m talking scale drawings of HVAC/ductwork/pipes/electrical/I don’t know what all since did I mention I’m a bookkeeping type??

I appreciated the confidence in my abilities but this was too much. I liked my job in general but it was one of the things that made me transfer into another department. It’s the one thing I feel like I didn’t succeed at and that I regret, but I honestly couldn’t do the task.

I am currently working (well, not right this second, obviously, though I should) on a gigantic translation for the end of the month. A few days ago, when I still had about 100 pages to go (I have it down to 70 now and expect to get through a dozen or so more today), my boss e-mailed me to ask if I’d like another 6600 words for the same due date.

deep breath

NO.

Also, Hamish used to have a job in which he worked alone in a store and had the following requirements, which I promise I am not making up:

  1. Clean the entire store during your shift.
  2. Do not leave the cash register during your shift.

Don’t be so negative - all you need is a really, really long broom.

Regards,
Shodan

My last job, I did a bunch of QA work for an absolutely horrible game. It was an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Grand Theft Auto. There were a bunch of other games trying to copy that formula, so to make their stand out, the developers looked at what made the GTA series so succesful, and with piercing insight, they managed to strip away all of the useless froth that was dragging that game franchise down, and focus on what made it really popular. They got rid of fripperies like open-ended gaming, immersive enviroments, varied mission structure, and clever writing, and put all their attention into expanding the real draw of the game: killing as many uniformed police officers as humanly possible.

Okay, that’s wasn’t quite the motivation, but it sure felt like it. See, they wanted to have a gritty “urban” type game, but they weren’t competent enough to do more than a half-assed third person shooter, with the player in the role of a gangbanger. And since clever gameplay, story telling, or even moderatly advanced AI, was completely beyond them, what they made was a game where an endless horde of cops come running straight at you, firing their guns, until you shoot them.

But that wasn’t the really stupid part. The really stupid part was that the developers were so lazy, they couldn’t be bothered with actually creating any art for the game. If they wanted a level in a supermarket, instead of paying an artist to draw a library of textures to create the store shelves, they sent a guy out to a real supermarket to take pictures of the store shelves, which were scanned into the game. Which meant that if you went into the store level in the game, the shelves were covered with easily identifiable trademarked brands. Which in theory would get us sued, although that wasn’t really a concern, because Sony and MicroSoft would never have given us permission to publish a game for their hardware with so many glaring IP violations in the game. The problem was, getting these guys to change anything was like pulling teeth, and they could never get it through their skulls that, if we told them that they had to get rid of all the trademark images in one part of the game, then we were probably going to make the same requests for all the trademarked images in every other part of the game. But they never took the hint, continuing to add new copyright infringements in every new build, even as they were removing the old copyright infringements we’d already flagged. And they kept trying to “game” it by skirting as close as they could to infringement without going over the line. Except that they were idiots, so every attempt to get as close to the line as possible ended up way the hell over on the other side of it.

Examples include a Coca-Cola machine, clearly labeled as such. When told they had to remove the Coca-Cola name from the machine, they sent back a build where the machine just said, “Cola.” In that distincting, swoopy red-and-white font that is instantly recognizable to almost anyone, anywhere in the world, as being the Coca-Cola trademark.

One level included a picture, for no discernable reason, of Yoda holding a sign reading, “Will levitate X-Wing for weed.”

The level where your gangsta character goes back to his tenement apartment allows you to break into a number of other apartments in the area.* All of these apartments (which are inhabited by black people) are filled with 40 oz. bottles and empty Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets.

But the best (meaning, of course, worst) bug was the Console Bug. They had a level set in a mall, and the mall had a videogame store in it. In the store was one of those kiosks where they have a console set up so that customers can try out new games. And in the kiosk was a Playstation 2. Looked just like one, too, because as usual, they had simply take a picture of one and scanned it into the game. Now, Sony has this list of requirements that a game has to adhere to in order to be released as a PS2 game. Most of them are technical things, but one of the requirements is that you can’t have any actual Sony products in the game itself, unless you’ve properly licensed them. So you can’t show a PS2 in an actual PS2 game. Plus, we were also going to release the game for the XBox, and if Sony doesn’t want you to have a PS2 in their games, you can imagine how MicroSoft feels about it! The issue was bugged, and a few weeks later, it came back fixed. Their fix? They took the name, “PlayStation 2” off the side of the console.

Clearly, this wasn’t sufficient. We sent the bug back, insisting that the entire console had to be removed, or replaced with original art. A few weeks later, we get the second fix. They changed the PS2’s dimensions, so that it was square instead of rectangular. Except, since they used photographed textures to create it, it’s still pretty clearly a PS2. We send the bug back, again, insisting that they remove the console, or change it so that it’s not recognizable as a real game console. Their third fix? They write on the console, in the same blue-purple font that Sony uses to label their PS2s, “GamePube.” That’s right, not only have they not fixed the art, they’ve now dragged Nintendo into the mess. We finally got it fixed when the lead suggested they make it look like someone broke into the kiosk and stole whatever was inside, which would look more “ghetto.” That suggestion they took to heart, and the console was finally removed. About four months after it had first been logged as a bug.

We ended up having to open up a seperate database just to keep track of the copyright and trademark violations. The joke around the office was that we were going to release it as “Grand Theft Intellectual Property.” The other joke (because the game was so horribly buggy) was that we would just release whatever broke-ass version of the game that was currently in test, bundle it with a copy of the bug database we used, and call it, “Sim Game Tester.” We ended up releasing it as 25 to Life. As I recall, we actually turned a profit on it, thanks to the Jack Thompson-fueled media hype over our “cop killer sim.” Thanks, Jack! Without you, the game might have been one of the biggest flops in the company’s history!

[sub]*You don’t actually burglarize them, or anything interesting or creative like that. The incredibly straight forward, “Start and point A and walk to point B” level path included going through a few other people’s apartments. Since your character lives in the apartment complex, and is trying to get back to his own apartment, one has to wonder if breaking and entering is simply a requisite part of his daily commute home. How else does he get around the 12 foot security fence inexplicably walling off three of the apartment buildings in the complex?[/sub]