Work Rant

(this is a picture of my office building that I took this afternoon).

So, I've been really busy at work lately. Lots of project work, and more & more various and sundry stuff to come my way, whether it be a real project, debugging and fixing stuff, helping someone out, it pretty much runs the gamut. And I'm happy to do it, especially if it means exposure to an area that haven't previously been involved in, or if I am a contributing member of team or someone honestly needs my help. What I do resent however, is having work foisted off on me by people who just don't feel like doing something.

There is this guy I work with, let's just call him J. He is senior to me, he's been with the company in general and my department in particular for something like 20 years. He built many of the old, legacy mainframe applications that we still, to some extent, deal with today. Additionally, he heads a number of business intelligence projects. Our work overlaps quite bit, I am basically the lead contact for our main company Sales d/b and apps, an application that he was the architect of. Many of the business intelligence projects that I've worked on have been sister projects to some of his. I am basically the expert in my various areas and he is the uber-last-say expert (if I ever have a doubt or a question, I come to him for clarification). So he is essentially senior to me, but he is not my boss. I generally get along with him very well. Nice easy-going guy, very approachable, I always come away from a meeting with him completely enlightened, etc.

Historically he has come to me for quite a lot too. Whenever there is an enhancement needed for the Sales app, some data to be fixed or a reporting project that he is not going to have time to do, I am his first choice. Fine, I am happy to do it. I drop stuff all the time to help him whenever I can. But, what drives me crazy is that it is never reciprocated. A couple of examples:

* Every month/quarter there are always some tricky scenarios with commission points that need to fixed and re-loaded into our points d/b. 9 times out of 10 it is a relatively simple data fix, but you have to know what you're doing because you're changing Sales data and also deleting bad commission records. Sometimes it takes more debugging work to really figure out what is going on, so all-in-all, it's generally not work that just anyone can do. Anyway, I get a lot of this work and he is pretty much the only other person who can do it. One day not too long ago I was taking some vacation time, but being at home, I always check my email anyway. So I see I have an email from the marketing staff about a commissions problem that needs to be fixed. So, I forward the call to our help desk and J and ask if someone can help this person out, to please get back to her either way (I mean, we're talking commissions here) and if J can't fix the problem, then I will do it the following Monday. Lo and Behold I come back in on the Monday and contact the user. User says the help desk contacted her initially, but never heard anything back from J (yay or nay) that he could work on it, or anything about the issue from him. While I am in this conversation with the user, J forwards the original email to me with the note, "sorry, I didn't have time to do this". First of all, it would have taken him a total of 15 minutes. TOPS. Secondly, you don't get back to the user and say, hey can this wait til Monday when Debbie will be back??? At the very least, he could have responded right away to ME and I would have followed up from HOME. But no, he waits until X amount of days when he knows I'm back in the office. It just pissed me off because this would have been nothing for him to fix and I am always dropping stuff to help him out with far more involved stuff.

* We had a call about a week ago about a Sales exception report that needed some product category changes. The note was sent to our help desk and J and I was cc:ed. It was J's report. Help desk tries to assign it to J, J tells them to assign it to me. Because he didn't *feel* like doing it. Without even checking with me first to see what my workload is, or even just sending me an email, nothing. Normally it's not a huge deal, but A) it's not my report, so it takes some more debugging on my part to become familiar with it, and B) he really hit me on a day that I was completely swamped. Anyway So, I make all the fixes, but things are not sorting out the way expected. I end up spending additional time debugging to finally determine that a database value actually also needs to be changed. A fact that (I'm sure) J was aware of (but never mentioned). Whatever.

* I do this monthly/quarterly sales rep new hire training demo on how to use the various web reports and other apps my department has designed to help the field people both service their customers and prospect for new business. It's a little harrowing for me because I end up having to present on a lot of stuff I haven't worked on, or been involved with, in addition to the stuff that I have (I always feel a bit insecure about the stuff I haven't actually written). Anyway, J is just finishing up on this big project to build these role-based dashboards that will load default templates onto each rep's homepage. So, they want to present this to the new hire reps instead of my traditional demo. Great. So, rather than presenting his own project himself and letting me observe so that I can have the salient points for the next time this comes up, he decides that he just doesn't want to do it, so it's going to be completely my responsibility. Even though I had not even SEEN this thing before this past Friday. And the demo is TOMORROW. Of course I'll do the best job I possibly can, but seriously. Wouldn't you think he would want to present his own work in the best possible light? Particularly when it's (basically) for the first time to this community? I mean, really. So, it pisses me off.

I have no problem taking on more work and responsibilities, pitching in, helping someone who is over-loaded, or who isn't making progress on something. What angers me is when I feel that someone is just trying to take advantage. Surprisingly, I have a really, really great working relationship with J. I am always pleasant and willing to do whatever. And I'm (as I said before) always his first choice for any tricky problem or issue. But still, GAH! Anyway, nice that I have this blog on which to rant, so I won't explode at work -- ha!