Slightly unreasonable or frankly absolutely bloody ludicrous work requests

Someone has just asked me to do some actual work. At 15.00. On a Friday.

They’ve left it late for me as well today – just had the call…

“I’m doing a seminar tomorrow and need course notes printed – x20 copies, each a hundred pages, wire bound with plastic covers. Can I collect before you close?”.

🙂

Can they?

Nope! 🙂

I should add for context – there’s just me and the dog here – not a big team of creative professionals. And the dog is ruddy useless with the wire binder. Bloody great at shredding though! 🐶

I get lots of reasonable requests piled on to make it an unmanageable workload. & yes I work in education.

“I’m doing a seminar tomorrow

… and they discovered this just now? FFS, I’m cross on your behalf.

I had a sales guy ring me asking for a quote for his customer, needed it ASAP as it was for a presentation meeting he had just arrived at…

I’m going to go with Great Barrier Reef.

I’m going with Erinsborough.

When I was getting made redundant from the bank, my last day was christmas eve, I was the last person out of my team. I got an email at 10am telling me I was expected to stay til 5pm in case I was needed on-call 🙂 I’d been planning to hang around til about 12 eating mince pies and maybe occasionally pretending to work but I just emailed back “lol no”, packed up and went home

I’m doing a seminar tomorrow

We used to have a customer like that, renowned for the 4pm Friday phone call. In the end we had the following conversation

‘I need a load of product sheets designing and printing for a seminar in Germany next Tuesday’

‘When did you book your flights Steve?’

‘2 months ago, why?’

‘Should have told me about them then, not now, shouldn’t you? Close the door on your way out, there’s a good lad…’

The railways love this…. Here’s a fairly complicated bit of site investigation we need doing. That’s all doable in one nightshift right? Given that all too often that shift which in theory is 8 hours is actually 3 hours of madness, 1 hour of them desperately trying to get you to pack up.

Last Friday I got a slightly shirty email about 40 trucks arriving this week requiring full livery making and fitting as soon as possible. Plus another 30 arriving soon after. And another 20 up north which we need to supply but not fit.
Lead time on a new truck is probably about 6 months minimum. Ample time you would have thought to get your ducks in a row.
It’s going to be a busy few weeks!

15:40, sales wants a part cnc plasma cut, fabricated, welded and on a pallet ready for collection at 16:30, eh no…….

Sat AM, customer wants a bike fully serviced for a race on Sun, eh no…

Unreasonable expectations?

At least with a bike, they can justify having sat on it for weeks…

ctk
I get lots of reasonable requests piled on to make it an unmanageable workload. & yes I work in education.

I fully endorse this opinion.

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).

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!