Slightly unreasonable or frankly absolutely bloody ludicrous work requests

I know of a bank in the process of outsourcing much of IT to an offshore company, with a substantial number of mandatory redundancies. Those being made redundant are expected to perform the migration, training and handover.

We got made redundant from an insurance company fraud team, as all the work was being off-shored to Philippines, this included HR, so we had to have “leaving interviews” where someone from Philippines called and asked us firstly, “why are we wanting to leave our jobs?”

“Because we are being made redundant and you’re taking them..?!”

When I worked in FE we had a scrote of a lad who almost never attended lessons and when he did he was stoned. Despite his non-attendance I wasn’t allowed to withdraw him from the course. Fast forward to the end of the year, I was asked to phone him on his holiday and have a ‘professional discussion’ with him to get him through his final assessment. My response of ‘but he’s not been here for 5 months so he won’t know anything’ was met with ‘well it’s your job to get him through’. I left very soon after.

Or the twit who failed to take into account the Christmas holidays when looking at when work came in for review and when work had to be reviewed and signed off by.  The looks around the table when you ask if I’m expected to work Christmas Day during the compulsory Christmas shutdown.

Reminds me of a mate, specialist calibrator, had arranged this holiday with his dying mother to go and see some island/nature reserve somewhere, needed permits and inoculations and all sorts of stuff sorting. Manager was well aware, as were the project. All booked 12+ months in advance. So for 3 weeks there would be absolutely NO calibration work carried out. So they planned around it. Senior management then pulled three months out of the program for some arbitrary reason. Mateys manager now has an issue. The revised timing for the main calibration activity is now at the same time as the holiday.

They ended up offering literally £10s of thousands for him to reschedule, they’d reorganize the trip etc etc. Except they couldn’t guarantee his mum would live long enough to see it. So an entire vehicle project (critical path) effectively shut down for a month.

His mum ended up getting treated and lived another 10+ years.

Excellent thread,much LOLZ .

had a little subcontract place down the road who was tooled up to do small/short/quick runs

We’ve got 2 of them, at slightly different levels. Both of the cheeky buggers used to work for us! Not that I’m jealous . . .

I once had a woman who sorted out work schedules and people diaries try to book me 2 consecutive days in Stirling and Southampton. Alphabetically close, geographically not so much. She didn’t find it funny when I enquired what time the helicopter would collect me from Stirling

Get that a lot. Most recent was service calls in Hull and Devon, iirc booked in the same day.

Some years ago I won a job to ‘edit’ a very large strategic review of a UNESCO world heritage site that was in grave danger of having its status revoked.

The government client had shortsightedly decimated the department with all of the corporate knowledge required to write it. Fortunately on my team I had some experts with great relationships with the people that had all the knowledge required to fill in the significant gaps. We set about the work and the client would send me across chapters written by various authors that the subject matter experts would laboriously correct and I would make read as if it was written by one person (the deadline was tight so we couldn’t wait to get the whole document). The client would then get it back and mess it all up again, time after time, regardless of the meetings we’d have to try and stop it happening. The graphic designer eventually went on strike and all the last minute changes were done in Indesign by a couple of phd ecologists over one massive weekend with zero experience. It was an absolute dog’s breakfast.

Then I stupidly won the next contract to deliver a public consultation process for the documents, including setting up an online consultation portal with an integrated survey. We were told we’d have two weeks to prepare it, which by the time the contracts were signed at their end was only one week.

Despite assurances that the survey would be short (we specified ten questions max to make it worthwhile) it turned into a pointlessly elaborate waste of time.

That job finished with me pulling a 32 hour work day through a massive storm whilst trying to look after a one month old and my wife. It’s nearly ten years ago and I’m nearly having a stroke reliving it now!

To save a whole load of words around the context, the recent work situation can basically be summarised as;

Management ask if I can basically deforest an area and sell the timber to make up for a late project delivery that is affecting projected income (because they basically failed to do any project management), I decline as not really in line with organisation or general good practice and will take longer than financial year to complete.

3 days later;
Can you stop doing that thing that makes one of our largest incomes, we forgot to backfill a basic role and need you to do that instead.

🤣🤣🤣

Hopefully out of this one soon. Great organisation but some oxygen thieving managers.

Back in my inhouse freelance days in the early 80s I’d been artworking on a SONY account project and had just finished a 24hr shift. (Midday to Midday with a paid break at an Indian restaurant for a couple of hours to recharge.

The artwork package had been completed and signed off internally and the client arrived to sign it off at the end of the day.

It was a hot day and as he bent over a very nice airbrushed background two big beads of sweat rolled down his nose and hit the uncovered artwork. He then compounded the problem by trying to wipe them away. Immediate trashing of the artwork.

I’d just got to bed when the girlfriend nudged me awake and said they needed me to go back in. They paid a lot to me each month so I went in and they told me the guy who had done the artwork was unavailable, could I retouch the background. I pointed out that I was a hack with an airbrush but they insisted. So it was another 6 hours work trying to get the background to look right. It didn’t but they signed it off anyway.

It was £75 an hour then due to the way my rates step-laddered every 8 hours. They paid up and never mentioned it again. That company had so much money to burn and then pass it all on to the client.

Those days are long gone now.

Some years ago I won a job to ‘edit’ a very large strategic review of a UNESCO world heritage site that was in grave danger of having its status revoked.

Would that be Liverpool waterfront? If so, you didn’t do a good job because it got chopped anyway. 😁

I regularly get urgent requests and looking back through email trails notice the original request was made several weeks/months before and it’s just been bounced around or sat on by someone before it gets to me. Years ago I’d have worked late or over a weekend to sort things, these days I just say not my problem and to plan better next time (unless I know if it doesn’t get done it’s going to cause an outage or big commercial issue).

I have fond recollection of one department of a large energy supplier going to the in house IT department I worked in for a rough cost on replacing the existing credit management system. The bottom line figure was around the £2m mark.

The deparment in question were adament it should cost less, pretty much kicked IT out the room and said they would go and buy something from a vendor themselves.

Two years and a whopping 14 million pound later the new system went live. The new system relied upon the existing system it was supposed to be replacing to work properly. It was overly complex, unsupportable and written in a language that most sane software houses stopped using a long time ago.

Idiots. Same idiots who outsourced everything and bought (another) crap system that doesn’t do everything they need it to.

During the first weeks of lockdown, my employer wanted me to revise pull up bars, dips bars etc for outdoor gyms to be copper for its antimicrobial properties.

When I explained that pure copper is very soft, very expensive, would oxidise & be stolen in an instant, she sent me a screen shot of eBay plumbing pipe.

Working there was a lot like being in Blackadder the 2nd.

Almost all of mine are the making of someone saying “I’ve found this system that we want, can you install it for me?” instead of “This is the problem I’m trying to solve, what can you find that fits the brief?”. People don’t understand that my little bit of IT doesn’t just involve installing stuff, it involves all the IG and Cybersecurity shenanigans as well. This being the NHS, we’re a little bit cagey about where our data goes, surprisingly enough, not that our management seem to understand that. And of course, I’m the bad guy when I say no and pick holes in the product they’ve hopefully not paid for yet…

Asked to get involved with a project that isn’t going well.

Pop head in, see potential nightmare in support model, make some polite suggestions about getting house in order so everyone knows who does what when things go live…..

Roll on 6 months – system still isn’t working, issues taking forever to get sorted as various internal and external teams pass stuff around ‘not us gov…’

Head of Dept  – Hi – can you take a look at why issues are taking so long to resolve?

Me – you didn’t do any of the things I suggested several months ago?

Head of Dept – Ok good to hear that – when are you going to get it fixed?

Me – Erm, its not my role to chase support tickets around for you

Head of Dept – So, I’ll tell the team you’ll be taking over…..

*sigh*

(this literally happened this  morning)

I’m a GP… my life is FULL of ridiculous requests..often from hospital consultants etc etc…

Something i’m really proud on perfecting is the idea of BOUNDARIES. I’m very comfortable saying “no, that’s not my role/job” to requests, withouth feeling like i’m letting someone down, or being the bad guy…

I’m forever being asked to “arrange this and send results back to them”, or “we’ve requested test X..please chase result and act on it”..!

I just laugh and say nope..

My common place response in letters is often “..you appear to have confused me with your house officer, as this request seems more appropriate for a junor member of your own team to act upon…”

DrP

Beat me to it

So many of my hospital colleagues and patients seem to think that my job is to do what the hospital has told me to, as if I’m in some way junior to them.

See also fresh hospital doctors with three (3!) whole years experience thinking that they can (and should!) argue with me about whether a patient whom I have seen and examined and they have not needs admission, and under which team.

Almost all of mine are the making of someone saying “I’ve found this system that we want, can you install it for me?” instead of “This is the problem I’m trying to solve, what can you find that fits the brief?”. People don’t understand that my little bit of IT doesn’t just involve installing stuff, it involves all the IG and Cybersecurity shenanigans as well.

This was the score in my former place.
We apparently “needed” Modern.Gov (a report writing and meeting management system, a lot of local Government/council etc use it, I suspect largely because they’ve been bamboozled by sales pitch into believing it’ll streamline all their meetings).

Actually the meeting management side of things isn’t *that* bad – a bit clunky but workable and it largely removes issues around emails being forwarded on, people being missed off email chains, people being inadvertently included in email chains and so on.
The report writing aspect of it is bollocks. Huge mountains of overly complicated bollocks. Teams and Sharepoint would do all of this and our IT was actually very good indeed. IT told the individual behind this “need” that Teams and Sharepoint would do it all, showed her how, told her that Modern.Gov wouldn’t play nicely with some of our other software but oh no, we “needed” Modern.Gov.

They’re still trying to get it to work properly 2 years later. I made it very clear when I left that one of the main reasons for taking VR was because of the appalling extra workload thrown my way in attempting to get this hateful system to work – in my case the “frankly absolutely bloody ludicrous work request” was to tell me that I was going to be one of the Modern.Gov Champions. I pointed out that it was difficult to champion a system that I loathed but I was then told to like it. That was also unreasonable… 😉

Sent out to connect new Riyadh office to the corporate network. Turned up around 3pm. Network kit was on site but no PCs. Big cheese turning up following morning to ‘open’ the new office. General manager sent me out with a couple of employees and company credit card to procure – from memory – eight PCs from whatever the local electronics store was (Riyadh back early 2000s, it was a bit of a culture shock for me). Getting the kit was easier than travelling to the multiple stores and back. Driving was crazy.

All nighter to get PCs built with some early version of windows and outlook, connected them to some hooky ethernet and configuring WAN link, setting up mail. Finished around 10 mins before the Cheesemesiter turns up.

Was just glorying in an impossible job well done when reprimanded in front of all the staff because I’D FORGOTTEN TO HOOK UP A PRINTER. That he wanted to use to print an email.

Used to fly business class in those days. Took a while for the drinks trolley get past Aisle 7 on the BA flight home 😉

Keeping it bike related, many times someone would walk in the workshop at 1645 in a Saturday asking for a brake swap, wheel rebuild, full internal cable refresh, headset bearing swap (on a internal bar and stem) for a TT bike (always TT for some reason) with some really niche parts that no one stocks and wouldn’t deliver before 1730 that day anyway. Always with the phrase “I’ve had a go myself but haven’t got the right tool, it’ll only take you 5 minutes and I need it for race tomorrow.

Race? Would champs TT is it? No it’s a local 10 that’s been on the calender for the last 6 months

Oh the irony of printing an electronic mail wasn’t lost on me. I wasn’t sure if to have a massive rant or break down in tears 🙂

I have seen and examined

That’s a novelty, I’ve sat in U/S waiting to spread slides and take fluids and blood for pap examination and 4 out of the 5 patients scheduled are rejected by the consultant as their “lump” or growth is just superficial or clearly benign. Turns out 90% of them were sent for a hospital test after just speaking to a GP/locum/101 on the phone. No one had looked, prodded or poked the patient face to face. Meanwhile those genuine patients with lymphoma/thyroid issues etc are sat in the massive waiting list.

The consultant then spends a few minutes ranting at the waste of his/her time and tells of the amount of times he’s complained about it to those further up.

But I’ll be there again on Tuesday and it’ll be the same story

Also in FE end of year meeting would get a lot of

well it’s your job to get him through

A good response used to be to stare at them and say “you want them to pass without doing the work?”.

Also an internal survey of students with loaded questions on assignments. Outcome was “there are too many assignment” again a clam response of “they cover the spec I can reduce it to 1 assignment but it will be massive”.

Also new manager wanting to go to “long and thin” (subjects all year instead of terms) told him it won’t work and you end load all the catching up and can’t meet the external quality check.
Fortunately I left before the year end, apparently a whole group got to June without passing anything. (He also abandoned the weekly progress/ tracking meetings)

Always with the phrase “I’ve had a go myself but haven’t got the right tool, it’ll only take you 5 minutes and I need it for race tomorrow.

I always love the “it wont take you long”.
I have on occasion invited the project manager who has told me how long it will take to demonstrate it since my estimates were rather higher.

My favourite case was when I was given a “final bug or two. It wont take more than a day” to sort out. I asked for the requirements and after reading the couple of paragraphs asked about a few scenarios which didnt seem to be covered. Think it took six months for the vendor, our team and the client to write some proper requirements consisting of rather more than a couple of paragraphs. Then and only then could actually think about writing the code.

this is OT but pumped by the NHS / consultant / SR / HO discussion above, still contemplating raising a complaint about the NHS respiratory consult that diagnosed a close family member admitted with pneumonia as having “just asthma”. No it F*ing wasn’t, it was cystic fibrosis.   Grrr.

We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do everything with nothing in no time at all.

With thanks to Konstantin Jirecek

I always love the “it wont take you long”

“Can you just….” Is another favourite phrase of mine, usually used as a handy prefix before describing something that will take you 3 days minimum

“Can you just….” Is another favourite phrase of mine, usually used as a handy prefix before describing something that will take you 3 days minimum

As regularly heard in literally every bike shop in the entire world and usually prefacing the need for a complete strip and service, shock and bearing rebuild and a really thorough clean.

My suggestion would be to take the work, apply a great asap levy and get off this forum to complete said work. ;D

Although yes admittedly this forum like crack

Manufacturing – large scale complex process, production staff managed to do the 2nd worst possible thing to this plant (#1 is a large scale fire/complete loss of plant).
In 35 years in the industry ive never seen it happen 1st hand….but it happened.

Manager glaring at me and my right hand man “you need to be working 24/7 till it’s sorted”

Me “remember how I’ve been nagging for years how short staffed we are? I’m leaving at 5pm and I’ll be back in at 8am tomorrow. Lack of resources isn’t my problem”

Took us a week to rebuild it working 8-5 with complete loss of production. We now have additional staff.

“Can you just…?”

In a previous job I was given the job of turning round a prestage lab with constant logistics problems. I had a couple of young apprentices working for me, and engineers alongside occasionally.

What happened in theory:

Projects send us a form with configuration details. Site name, phone number, IP addresses allocated, etc.

This goes to an engineer (before we had trained-up apprenti) who takes that information and adds it to a standard template config for that site type.

Projects instruct the warehouse to release the kit to us. They go dig it out and bring it through. This can be anything from a farty little router to a pallet-load.

We unbox it, hook it all up, apply configs, firmware etc and test it. Box it back up, inform Projects that it’s complete. They then ask warehouse to come collect it and send it to site for a field technician to connect up.

What happened in practice:

Projects call me first thing in the morning. They’ve got something which has to go out today. Because they’ve sat on it for a fortnight and ignored it. Well, I can’t promise anything but I’ll do what I can. (Truth is, it’s likely fairly doable so long as we’re not rammed.)

Projects send us an info form, it’s nonsense. Half of the info is from the previous site we did, or they’ve started making up their own IP addresses and just started incrementing (254, 255, 256…) or something. The engineer sighs, corrects it and starts on the config. (This is one of the first things I put a stop to – if it’s wrong, kick it back, no exceptions).

By lunchtime, the form arrives. No sign of the kit. I chase Warehouse. “Don’t know anything about it mate, we haven’t heard anything.”

The kit arrives at 3pm. The cutoff for sending stuff out is 4pm because that’s when the DPD driver leaves. I give it to the apprentices. They tell me something is wrong. I look, it’s a 48-port switch and the standard build is a 24.

I ring Proects, “yeah, it’s a bigger site.” But these are standard builds, I can trust the PFYs to do a bit of copying and pasting and making sure green lights come on, but to make that sort of change I’ll need an engineering resource and there’s no-one else in today. “But it has to go out today!” they wail, “the engineer is booked to attend site tomorrow!” Well, you’ll have to rebook him then, won’t you. “But the customer expects…” They can expect what they like, it’s not possible. Let me tell you about managing expectations. “Can you ring them to explain?” Can I bird, and you wouldn’t want me to anyway. “But it’s the day before the store opens!” For fu- OK, tell you what, we’ll tape everything back up, you get Warehouse to book it back in and out for dispatch, then warn whoever you’re sending that they’re going to be in for a long morning as they’ll have to configure it on site. (Just to be safe, I then nip through and warn Warehouse what’s happening.)

4pm arrives. Boxes are still here. The DPD driver is in the kitchen playing Mario Kart. The status update finally comes through at about 4:10 and the DPD driver leaves.

The following morning the phone rings again. It’s the on-site Tech. “Hey Alan, you this kit I need to configure?” Yeah. “Well, I’ve just unboxed it and it’s all shipped with EU power cords.” Head/desk interface. Are you anywhere near a PC World?

Last job higher ups were seriously pushing for 4 months of analysis to be condensed into two weeks. It was not remotely possible with any quality and I had that fight all the way up the chain. It all went quiet apart from the odd rumble that we need to move faster.

Came back from a week and a half holiday and the team were three days into two weeks of rapid analysis that got forced through in my absence with reports of people in tears the day before and potentially going off sick. All I could do was help them through it. They got through what they needed to but as soon as it was handed over the quality was slated which came back on our team and no one used what they’d done.

I’ll need an engineering resource

I know this should be in your other thread, but people who refer to other people as resources make me disproportionately cross. To bring it back on topic, such people are the most likely to make unreasonable or frankly absolutely bloody ludicrous work requests.

I got sent to Guam for a week once as no one in our US office was available. I hate flying.

Were you working in Hong Kong at the time…?

Not me but a colleague, we were doing a tender for a car park cleaning job for a major UK supermarket. We’d priced each car park separately at their request, no mean feat as there are hundreds. They then wanted a cost per parking space, at each one. You’d think they’d know how many there were, on a spreadsheet somewhere right? Wrong. We had to go on Google maps and count them.

We won the tender though, so every little really does help.

I have a line manager who has a habit of making unreasonable requests and won’t take no for an answer, or attempt to clarify priorities so other things can be shifted to make time for the bullshit request.

He then expresses his frustration publicly, and jumps in once you’ve completed 90% of the work and does the last 10% himself so he can say “look, that’s all you had to do” in front of uninvolved others so that they’ll take the bait next time he asks for the impossible.

Just remembered a classic.
Two of us sent to remove two gas cylinders, around 300kg each iirc.

We turn up, they’re in the basement. Ok is there a lift? Nope.

We try to get the first out and not surprisingly we can’t lift it up the stairs.

So we ring the manager who booked the job and explain the issue.
‘Did you try the other stairs?’

I resisted explaining the gravity was very similar in the other stairwell.

When I was a diving instructor the owner of a company I sometimes worked for told me there was no oxygen on th boat, but to carry on as normal and not tell the customers. I told him I wouldn’t be diving that day. He then asked if he could borrow 500 baht!

I should have reported him to PADI … not that they’d have done anything, as long as he paid his bills on time.

people who refer to other people as resources make me disproportionately cross.

Take it up with Human Resources.

To be fair, I agree. But within context, ‘resource’ here encompasses more than just a person. It means engaging with the engineering team to get the correct, well, resources for the task in hand. I don’t just need an engineer, I need one with the correct skillset. There would be no point asking one of the phone system guys to write a bespoke firewall config from scratch. Or it could be that I just need to borrow some test equipment and they have it all.

Of course, “engineer” is problematic in itself to those with actual engineering degrees. It should really be a protected term.

I used to have a boss who was useless at her job (in financial services) but a blackbelt in politics.  Her super skill was taking my work and pass it off as her own and get away with it by total bs explanations.  I had one particularly boring number crunching task which should have been done by a junior, but the one ray of light for me was that we had to present the results and a bit of waffle around them.  Every year she would do a run through of the results and what flattering light we could show them in.  My payback was that i would prepare the presentation, share the it with her.  And then slip in a couple of extra appendix pages which she was never prepared for.  Minor victories but always with it.

When I was a diving instructor the owner of a company I sometimes worked for told me there was no oxygen on th boat, but to carry on as normal and not tell the customers. I told him I wouldn’t be diving that day. He then asked if he could borrow 500 baht!

@easily – where were you working?

I have a few horror stories about badly managed dive shops in late 90s early 00s Phuket and Phi Phi.

Though to be fair, some of the instructors and DMs were idiots too.