So, I’ve spent roughly twenty hours in meetings being driven by a particular stress-festing cow-orker here, regarding a certain task that, by mandate of federal law, we had to have done by Thursday of this week. Said employee has been pulling her, and my supervisor’s, hair out for a few months now about this MAAAAJOR task, continually stressing everyone out about HOW much work it’s going to be, and how many problems we’re going to have, and how the earth will stop spinning and the skies will darken and how doomed, in general, we are. Oh, and we could not start the process until this week, bue to oher constraints in the process itself (timing is everything).
I am the tech support person here (sysadmin, net admin, web admin, software developer, DBA, hardware purchasing and repair, security expert, support desk, software training, you name it). This is half of my core responsibilities. The other part? Doing the tech work to keep us compliant with the federal regulations, and navigating those murky waters.
This has been a hellion month for anyone in tech support, especially in the academic environment (where I work), where staff are usually untrained and overloaded, and the vast number of machines we don’t control (student notebooks and machines in dorm rooms) cause problems for us on the scale of legend. But, i digress.
A month and a half ago, I told this cow-orker, and her supervisor, and her supervisor’s supervisor (who happens to be my supervisor too), and their supervisor, in yet-another-meeting-called-about-this-process-because-stress-kitten-vented-to-the-administration-about-how-screwed-we-were, that regardless of how much time and effort it took to get done, none of the time and effort would be hers… zero, zip-in-a-can, and that I was personally responsible for making sure that things were done in due time. This seemed to appease her, and I thought it was jsut another case of an overburdened cow-orker not wanting another last minute project to fall into their lap.
I’ve since been in three meetings to clarify where we stand, and that things would be completed in due time.
Now, today, the time was ripe for working on the project. I’d done key-in tests earlier to figure out how much work were were talking about, and so I was certain that I’d have enough time. To add to this, I’d been offered the assistance of three other employees who were rescheduled at the stress-kitten cow-orkers’ request to make sure I had enough help. I declined the help of all of these though, because honestly, there wasn’t enough work to worry about making it a management project. One of the people did end up helping me to avoid dying of boredom though, and her help is always much appreciated.
So, how long did this massive project, this Herculean task, this Gordian knot of data entry take?
47 minutes.
Less than a third of what I’d predicted as an outside number.
So, Stress-cadet… this pit’s for you.
Maybe sometimes, in the grand scheme of things, hand-wringing and worry-mongering is the best you can offer, and might even have a valid role to play. This wasn’t one of those times, and were the other half-dozen times you’ve interjected your personal stress-driven monkeywrenching into my work environment.
Sometimes, however, worry-mongering is the least productive thing you could offer, and causes more harm than good.
And sometimes, you really just need to learn to shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down, and do the fucking work.
