cybrpunk.com

Sometimes it doesn’t pay

Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be good or effecient at your job.  At least not in every sense.  Sure it allows me to have a few minutes here and there to check the news or write a post like this while at work but most of the time people don’t seem to notice how well you do your job.  They only seem to notice that the job is done in some manner or that it’s not done.

Here’s an example:
Friday night I stayed a little late to start swapping two PCs.  One was a new one from Dell and the other in use by another person who was off for the day but would be replaced by the Dell.  The new Dell PC didn’t show up until 4pm.  Which of course threw off the whole schedule.  I got the bulk of the work done and left for the weekend.

I came in super early on Monday morning to finish the swap before anyone gets in.  Unlike St. Louis, in Hong Kong office hours don’t start till 9am.  So I got in at 7:30am and started to finish things up.  At 8am the person I was giving the new PC to shows up early for a client meeting.  *sigh*  I get her all setup with a brand-spanking new Dell with Office 2007 and IE7 and other new apps that we haven’t given out to the others because their PCs are just too old and slow.  Everything is peachy by 9am-ish.

Then the old rebuilt PC starts causing problems and takes another hour plus to resolve where I’m told that I’m “making the new person stand” while I work on the PC.  Yes, yes I am.  Because I need to be in front of the keyboard, mouse and disply to work on it.  So I fix that after a repair install of XP.

Next the new PC owner calls and tells me she needs the Office Proofing Tools to do translations.  In Office 2003 I can install the Office 2003 Proofing Tools to give translators, spell checks and other fun stuffs for many languages including both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.  I check and this of course doesn’t work for 2007 and I don’t have the new resources to install.  So now I have to uninstall Office 2007 and install 2003 with the Tools.  She tells me she has a meeting at 2pm and I can do it then.  I have a meeting at 3pm but that should be fine and it was.  Done, no problem.

This morning the new PC froze up during a reboot.  I rebooted it again and it was fine.  Then she asked me “what about Office and what I talked to you about yesterday?”  I asked it’s working isn’t it and she responded that I told her it didn’t work in the new version.  Yeah.  So I told her I did it yesterday while she was in her 2pm meeting.  She hadn’t noticed the very different looking applications were back to what she was used to and hadn’t bothered to check if I had fixed it.  Just asssumed not.  So I left her sitting there to try it out on her own since it’s been done for getting close to 24 hours now.

I have better things to do than baby sit people who don’t even bother to notice that work has been done.  Better things like write this rant.  And avoid calling Kuala Lumpur.  Still.