I've been in government and/or nonprofit jobs for over 20 years now, from being an intern to an Executive Director. To those who have only been in the private sector, this side of things is just as Dilbert-esque as any other area.
Our receptionist (who WAS a friend) is a germophobe. Yesterday, as a joke, I climbed over her desk. Didn't mess anything up, hit anyone, etc. Just a joke. A half hour later, I got an email from HR. The person who sent it is a friend and I thought it was joke. Nope, dead serious:
Your actions this morning in the lobby are troubling and could bring about discipline for horseplay, misuse of county property, and discourteous treatment of a co-worker. It could have resulted in injury to yourself, others, or county property. I will assume it was a temporary lapse of judgment, but please refrain from similar behavior in the future.
The list of ridiculous things here at work is long, but this tops the list. And I won't even go into real misuse of property...
So, what work stories do you have that made you feel like you were living out a Dilbert cartoon?
At work i had some help dropping a 300 pound log on my foot.
Surgery was denied for my toe on the basis that the log landed on my foot, not my toe.
I rambled on about my story for longer than I had intended. So for those of you who lack the patience for my long rant, the Dilbert strip to which I refer is here.
For years, I was a software developer. Programming was the kind of challenge that appealed to me. When I got an assignment that I thought couldn't be done, but I struggled with it until I figured out a way, I felt like I had really accomplished something. When I fixed a bug, I felt like I had accomplished something.
But how valuable I think I am to the company at a given time, and how valuable my company thinks I am, have little correlation.
Recently, a lot of people at the company lost their jobs. I was nearly one of them, but fortunately, the company found a position for me... in Quality Assurance. In fact, I'm now the ONLY QA person.
So now my job is to test the company's software, find bugs, report those bugs to the developers, and listen to the developers complain that they're too busy writing software to fix the bugs.
I'm still a programmer at heart. I wish that I could dig into the code and TRACE those bugs and FIX them. But I lack the authority and tools to do so now, and in the case of many new-fangled development environments, I lack the knowledge as well. (Yes, I'm getting old now, ya whippersnapper.)
So my supervisor, now and then, would come to me and say "Have you approved the software yet?" and I would say "No, there are still bugs waiting to be fixed." My supervisor would sigh in exasperation and say "Well hurry up and get it out already! We promised this to our customers a long time ago!"
And in the beginning, I was stupid enough to take this to mean that I should work HARDER. So I tested MORE, and found MORE bugs that no one has time to fix. Then I could tell my supervisor that there were MORE bugs.
Ah, Dilbert logic! Ya gotta love it!
I wonder why I've gotten so lazy at work lately.
So I remembered that Dilbert strip from so many years ago, printed it out, and taped it to the front of my cubicle.
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It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety. ~Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
