One time, someone offered me $30/hr to translate 7000 words of atrocious French, over the Victoria Day long weekend. And this was a translation agency, so it’s not like they had the excuse of not knowing how ludicrous that was. Once I passed on that, she tried to browbeat me into taking it. OH, THAT COULD HAPPEN.
As a new hire at an insurance company, I got asked by a 20something investment analyst to make like seven corrections in a letter I was writing to some regulatory agency…one. per. draft.
I said, “Wouldn’t it have saved us both time and effort for you to point all these things out at once?”
She gave me a look like I’d just whizzed on her shoes and said something self-righteous. We never did get along after that.
Not kidding at all in the slightest.
I’ve already got a bug up my ass about this, because rather than just sending the invoice to the customer, we’re essentially acting like an ad-hoc accounting department for them by breaking up the spreadsheet into cost centres, project responsibilities, contact persons, department sectors etc. etc. These details aren’t fixed either, they change nearly every month so we have to send off the invoice, then wait about a fortnight for a list of corrections to come back from them (which they don’t compile and send at once, oh no. They send them all one at a time, then bitch when we send them an updated invoice and they haven’t sent us all of the corrections yet).
But because they’re one of the company’s biggest clients in this state, we have to make nice. Thankfully our boss realises how ridiculous this is and hopefully he will go back to the client and (nicely) explain how much extra work we’re doing just for them and either a) increase our revenue accordingly or b) tell them to knock it the hell off.
Try using this instead
“Could you give me an estimate to modify this code you’ve never looked at before to do something I’ve only halfassed described?”
“Ten years.”
“TEN YEARS?”
“Well, that’s a high estimate. I’ll probably bring it down once I actually look at the problem.”
I may have posted this before; bear with me…
One university that I used to teach at fired all of us adjunct faculty teaching Freshman Composition and repaced us with grad student TAs.
Insanity #1: these were raw grad students, with little-to-no teaching experience. Needless to say, the classes were a little less than what the students (and their parents) had anticipated from this univeristy.
Insanity #2: grad students are only allowed to work X hours per ten week quarter. They used up X by the end of Week Seven. So all classes, office hours, grading, finals, and writing center consultations were cancelled.
Insanity #3: no pro-rated tuition was returned to the students to make up for the two weeks of class that they paid for but never got.
The insane request that has direct bearing on me: About a week into Insanity #1, I got a call from the department secretary: Would I be interested in coming in on the weekend and teaching the TAs how to teach the class?
Hmmm…Come in on my own time, uncompensated, to teach the people who you replaced me with how to do the job that you fired me from? Boy, let me think about that one.
I could fill a page with insane requests, but I’ll just post yesterday’s.
The boss stops by my cubicle and comments that he’s concerned about how much time I’m spending on project management chores instead of on software design. So, he requested that I meet in his office to discuss it. (Time in meeting <> time doing real work).
In the meeting, we discussed how I need to come up with a new metric to track progress because we’re so far behind. (Time spend tracking new metric <> time doing real work).
That ought to work.
What I meant, I suppose, is that once people start wanting to manipulate grid data dynamically, they want a database, not a spreadsheet. Case in point - Sierra Indigo’s response above - I’m not intimately familiar with the vlookup function, but I’ll bet the same thing can be done far easier and more reliably with some kind of query, if the data was in Access tables, rather than an Excel spreadsheet.
There’s a story of a student who went to a master of kenjutsu, and asked how long will it take to master the sword?
“Three years”, replied the master.
“That’s too long”, said the student. “I can’t be away from my family for that long. How long will it take if I work twice as hard?”
“Ten years.”
“I don’t get it. I say I work twice as hard; you tell me it will take three times longer. Let me be clear - I will work day and night. No effort will be too much. How long then?”
“Twenty years. A student in so much hurry takes longer.”
Regards,
Shodan