July 20, 2000

The Demands Of Life
   by stacy <pfftnet@stacy.pfft.net>

I'm not talking about the needs of life, like water, air, and shelter. I'm talking about the demands you get from everybody around you. The ones that makes me go PFFT are the ones who demand and don't give back, or demand for no good reason.

Case 1: I have one final university requirement to go before I can officially get my degree. I have completed the paper and distributed it to my advisors, who are supposed to give me their feedback so I can improve it. Unfortunately, none of them have really seen fit to do that besides one, and she left her comments with an advisor who hasn't given any. The problem here is that I don't live in the university town anymore. I sent the paper as an email attachment (in Word format which I'm sure they can all understand), so therefore, leaving comments on paper for me doesn't do much good. The only day I'll be in town is the day I have to give the presentation. To make matters worse, I can't even get my main advisor to call or email back to discuss how we're going to proceed with the presentation!

Case 2: I work in the IS department of a small company, and I do a lot of work that isn't really involved with my job description because our department is a little low on staff. A few days ago, I got a trouble ticket transferred from a guy who's trying to help me learn one of our systems here, just so I can be a backup supporter for it. Well, yesterday I talked to the guy with the problem, and he hadn't even tried something I did for him when I first got the ticket. It obviously wasn't a top priority for him. But when I was unable to fix it yesterday, he started calling every few hours to ask when I would be back to fix it for good. When he saw I was working on it, he needed it immediately, even though when he thought nobody had gotten to it yet, he didn't give it a second thought.

Actually, I'm starting to dislike this aspect of my job. Customer support doesn't really do it for me. But too bad, that's the price I pay for this smallish company and smallish department.

Published: July 20, 2000
Editor: stacy