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Them: "We need to identify exactly what substance is in this chemical injection line. Many years ago it used to be 'x' but we think it may have been repurposed in the meantime."
Me: "Sure, I'll grab a sample and send it to the big lab"
Them: "No, we need to know now. It's going in a report for the government that has to be submitted tomorrow morning."
Me: "...."
I'm sat in a shipping container converted into a lab with a pH meter and a densitometer.
Can’t really compete with many of the above, but:
a few years ago I had a business trip to northern Sakhalin island in Russia (in the beforetimes when Russia was bad but not that bad).
Anyway, got the flight tickets, Visas, etc sorted out but needed one more bit of paper, the Border Guard Permit, to get up north. No problem, says CPY, we’ll have it waiting for you in Yuznho-Sakhalinsk, the local capital.
Duly arrived there, no permit.
Days two and three, still no permit.
Right, says CPY, we can’t have you hanging around here, get on the plane and we’ll hand you your permit when you land.
Now, bearing in mind you can go to jail for not having the right paperwork in Russia, that was a big fat no from me. Sure enough, the permit turned up the following day, but gee whizz what were they even thinking?
15:40, sales wants a part cnc plasma cut, fabricated, welded and on a pallet ready for collection at 16:30, eh no…….
Unreasonable expectations?
Depends who the customer is …. And
If it’s physically possible ( most things are , just some people waste more time moaning about how it can’t be done than actually doing it ).
Rarely to I get asked/told to do anything that is individually unreasonable, but all too often in schools stuff just piles up and you regularly get a straw/camel’s back interface because SLT haven’t fully grasped the bigger picture of what any individual teacher has to do at any given point in the year (especially around exam or assessment periods).
That's the same problem with being a GP. No one request is particularly unreasonable, it's just that the volume of them are.
Then we're so over-loaded doing other people's work for them, that we don't have the time to do our own work.
In secondary care we don’t have so much of that with clinical work (though we do occasionally have to remind passing surgical registrars/tertiary specialty consultants that consultant intensivist =/= their house officer) but my mate had a governance role and was rung at 2200 one night to be asked to prepare a report for the CEO to present at some meeting the next morning.
I’d have been applying Prior’s First Rule, personally.
I’m going to go with Great Barrier Reef.
Congratulations, you win a piece of bleached coral!