Letters: Readers respond to an article about quitting the rat race, with some saying their generation was handed an untenable position and others saying the struggle is nothing new
Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I’m too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn’t happen. I’m moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.
Compounding this, when it’s that busy, I’m often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I’m off trying to chip away at something else. When it’s slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it’s easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it’s busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05… Yeah, I’m not entering all that time… At best I’m going to guess, at worst I’m just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: “fixed problem” done.
The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I’m too busy trying to put out fires, I don’t care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.
This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn’t just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I’m not putting out a fire instead I’m taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.
I dunno Sally, why don’t you fucking Google it? I’m not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that’s not broken. I’m currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me?
But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I’ll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my “attitude” towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp’s file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally’s feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn’t meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I’m lead technician on that account.
Agreed. The time wasted just marking down what you did and how long it took you is incredible. If I get too busy, I look like a fucking slacker because the first thing I just cannot do when I’m too busy is to mark down exactly how busy I am. It just doesn’t happen. I’m moving from one task to the next so fast that I barely have time to take a drink, nevermind write a short story about how I did a thing and figure out exactly when I started working on something.
Compounding this, when it’s that busy, I’m often flip flopping between tasks, while I wait for a program to install or a file to copy or something, I’m off trying to chip away at something else. When it’s slow, I can take a minute while thing copy/load/whatever, and update my notes. My tasks occur sequentially, so it’s easy to see, I started on this at 9:30 and working on this and only this until 10:45. Meanwhile when it’s busy, I did X from 9:30 to 9:48, then Y from 9:48 to 9:56, then X again from 9:56 to 10:10, then Y from 10:10 until 10:18, then I finish X from 10:10 to 10:45, and finished Y from 10:45 to 11:05… Yeah, I’m not entering all that time… At best I’m going to guess, at worst I’m just going to not enter anything. Closed/resolved. Worked for unknown time, text entry: “fixed problem” done.
The task of entering time takes more time to do. If I’m too busy trying to put out fires, I don’t care what the time sheet says, I care that the fires were put out as quickly as possible. So I look like I did nothing, but I damn near lost my mind trying to get it all done.
This was a major problem at my last job. Not only would I be so busy, jumping from one foot to the other trying to put it fires, but people would continually walk over to my desk and bug me about unrelated crap. 90% of the time they were managers or senior staff whom I couldn’t just ignore, or tell them to go away. So now I’m not putting out a fire instead I’m taking to Sally, who is the daughter of the owner, about her stupid Excel issue that she can, has, and could continue to work around, but she wants it to work in a different way that she never learned how to do from the cut rate community college during the business course she took.
I dunno Sally, why don’t you fucking Google it? I’m not your personal chat GPT of problem solving shit that’s not broken. I’m currently trying to solve a problem that affects hundreds of people, and this issue barely affects one. Can you go away and stop distracting me? But nooooo. If I tell Sally to go away, daddy bossman will hear about it and I’ll get pulled into yet another pointless meeting about my “attitude” towards staff, that will only put me further behind on fixing contoso corp’s file server, which is preventing them from doing millions of dollars in business today alone. Apparently Sally’s feelings are more important until contoso corp changes IT providers because we couldn’t meet our SLA with them, which will also be my fault because I’m lead technician on that account.
Fuck.