I work in a doctor’s office, and the only thing I just cannot do is to go out to the waiting room and announce that the doctor is running late and the patients waiting may want to reschedule if they can’t wait longer. I have a huge phobia of public speaking, and I just can’t do it. I’ve been asked to do it a couple of times and both times I’ve been able to convince one of the receptionists to do it. If my supervisor ever just flat out told me that I HAD to do it, I might just walk out rather than do it. I just can’t do it.
Oh yeah. Been there, done that. They just stop showing up. I consider going to small claims court but the filing fees tend to eat into the balance due. I tend to cut them off before it gets too big a bill as well and try to get 50% deposits on very large projects. Then there are the rubber checks…
I have, however, stopped falling for the oh-just-do-this-small-thing-and-we’ll-pay-you-for-both trap.
I’m a programmer. The first place I worked (for 8+years), we did all our programming in C. Then I got a different job where we used C++, and I picked up most of the important parts of it on the fly, but since I never really sat down and learned it front to back, there are some parts of C++ that I have no idea how to use at all. Different types of casting? Template classes? Overloaded operators? I know they exist, but damned if I know how to use them…
Fortunately I have now gotten yet a different, much better, job, in which everything is in C again.