It's critical, it's important, eh, skip it!



  • Three months ago, my boss asks me to take on a new [i]critical[/i] development effort that absolutely positively must be done five months ago because he promised it to his superiors.

    Two months ago, the project was described as [i]important[/i] because management needed it.

    Two days ago, he told me to shelve it, and start on another [i]critical[/i] effort. I grind for 2 days. I just this minute got informed to scrap the latest project and that I will be moved to a different [i]critical[/i] project (utilizing the skiill at which I have the [i]least[/i] proficiency, and he knows it).

    I'm going home early today.

    Confidential to YY: Beware the purple duck!



  •  Well just 2 months ago we are in process of a surrogacy with a gestational carrier (contracted egg donor and contracted carrier). Time for the embryo transfer, the IVF clinic decides to do a 3 day transfer instead of 5 day transfer (embryos grow in the dish 3 days instead of 5).  They said it's better because of the quality of the embryos.

     We are there for the transfer - whoops!  Someone forgot to mention I need an FDA mandated blood test.  That 3-day transfer we said would be good for the transfer - it's not important.  5 day is just as good.  



  • Sometimes it almost seems like we work together.

     My boss drew up a chart of who was knowledgable and interested in what, and then used it as a way to assign them to anything BUT those areas.

     And it was 'critical' then, too.



  • The Paranoia RPG often seems to take this approach, on the apparent theory that $CITIZEN_LOUSY_AT_X needs to be assigned to $X because he needs the practice.  Or, as explained in the section on Mandatory Bonus Duties:

     

    "It's not that we think any incompetent can be team leader.  It's not like this test is purposely designed to put the person least familiar with Alpha Complex etiquette in charge.  Trust us.  It's not like that at all."

     

    Yeah, it's funny as hell, unless it happens to be a little too similar to your actual place of business.

     



  • It's one thing when it's done as a means to stack the odds against the group - like in Paranoia, which is basically a game which tries to bring out the fun of player-killing game masters. It's another thing when it's done as a means to make the group as a whole stronger.

    The closest I've been to this scenario myself was at a company where they tried to identify the individual with the most potential at X but had sub-par levels of experience with it to do X. But they'd only do that if they had less than N people who were trained at X, where N was some number greater than 1, supposedly based on the level of need for skill in X. For DNS, Sendmail, Apache, and firewall support, N = 2, apparently. Tivoli support, on the other hand, apparently had a much larger N; I don't recall ever having heard of the same person setting up backups thrice...



  • @snoofle said:

    [snip] op [/snip]

     

    SNAFU for me too. Make sure that all critical work you do gets stored away, for future use.

    One of my best weeks at work was when, months earlier I had been asked to prepare a critical design for some integration piece, which later became "unnecessary after all". Months later, the exact same requirement became crtical again. So I spend the next two days rebranding (of course, in that time marketing had changed our logo) and re-dating the same design documentation. Even made the effort to send a couple of "clarification" emails late at night to reinforce the impression that I was working around the clock on pushing out the design. Voila! Instant kudos.

    Happened to be performance assessment time as well, so great timing...


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