I'm sure I've mentioned before that the end of the month is often busy at my job, as we have a surprising number of people who assume that their project is more important than anything else and thus can be sent in late but still done immediately. Sometimes month-end is steady and other times the delusional people are a deluge.
After several quieter months, the end of June was batshit insane, as a startling number of people whose reports were initially supposed to be done in 2024 tripped over each other trying to get it done in the first half of 2025. By contrast, July wasn't that bad: yesterday we had a few projects of roughly 10 pages apiece come along, but nothing bigger.
And then.
Miss Truly Delusional came to play.
Miss TD is in the UK, so I was surprised to see, upon starting work this morning, that she had sent in a report at 10 last night our time (all three main editors are in the US, Eastern time zone; there's one editor in the UK, but his first focus is on a UK team that has stuff they do every morning, UK time). I mean, 10pm is after our working hours but in the middle of the night for her.
So she sends in a slide deck, 51 slides, puts "High Priority" in the subject line and ASAP in the text, and says in the email that she was "currently working on one slide but wanting to get the ball rolling."
Ma'am? Nothing is rolling at 10pm.
Then, at just before 7 our time this morning, she sent the "final edit" and added, "Again, is this can be prioritised."
Is this can be.
My boss assigned it to me, so I got started. It was not actually as badly done as some we get, and not the most text-heavy slides I've seen, so I had made decent progress by the time Miss TD got tired of waiting*.
*We do generally email back when we start a project to let them know we're working on it and when to expect it back. In this case, for a same-day project, I didn't do that this morning.
Yes, she emailed again at 1:40 to ask, "Can I follow up on this please."
Sure, why put a question mark on a question? That is, I guess, why put a question mark on a question. I replied that I was working on it, and sent it back an hour later. And hopefully, she will actually look at the comments that have questions on them before she publishes it, but who knows. That's above my pay grade.
Sigh. I would like to win the lottery soon, big enough that I can retire, please.
I feel this. I'm so sorry.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if I ever mentioned that a friend and I ran a typing service off campus while my husband was in grad school. We had one guy come in with twenty pages where our alphabet was not his native language, much less English, and he had written about double the lines as a lined 9x11" sheet that all kind of looked like Urdu. Squint. He wanted it in two hours. We told him we would try to get it done by the end of the next day but could not promise it. He was very antsy about it, and we said to each other afterwards that his failure to meet his professor's deadline was not our problem but we would do our best.
We were typing using the very first word-processing system and were much in demand and we already had a pile of stuff to work on of people who'd come in earlier and been promised. We'd had no idea he was coming nor who he was.
His took two days and he was lucky to get that. But when he complained, my friend held his sheets in the air and said he was welcome to submit his paper as he'd written it. It was required to be typed (wonder why) and he shut right up.
People can be the worst part of any job--or the best. I made my closest lifelong friends in my teaching job. There were others that I was happy to get away from when I retired!
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