Tuesday, July 3, 2007

My coworkers part 1

I'm going to start a mini series on my coworkers. What's funny about this, is that no matter where you go, what industry you're in, you're going to have people with these exact same traits I'm not going to name anyone but I gaurentee you'll be able to relate someone you work with to all of these.

The first coworker we'll examine is "The Piddler." The piddler is someone who always appears busy, but never really is, Sometimes it's hard to point the piddler out. The reason I started noticing was because of the volume of work I had to complete whenever we were short staffed and I had to work alone with her as oppossed to other people.

I first stared to really pay attention to the piddler because it's the same person that had basically called me racist. Just so we're clear, I'm not racist but I HATE lazy people, no matter what the color of your skin. I yelled at you because you're lazy, not because you're asian. Sorry about that side rant, but it needed to be said.

The piddler is especially dangerous because she looks like a good worker, and she's especially swamped when the boss is around. This may lead the boss to believe that they are a better worker than you are, thus diminishing your credibility in case of a conflict later.

I've picked up on a few of her tricks. Her "go-to" move is to work on "problems" first so that she's not having to do any actual work. She's always on hold with a "very important problem" This really irritates me because all those stupid little things can be solved in about five minutes if you save them for the end of the night when the bulk of your work is completed. Another good tactic is that she'll walk back and forth between lab departments with a specimen in her hand so that no one will ask her to do anything. This reminds me a lot of another piddler from another job. The only difference was that I liked this guy so I guess it didn't bother me that much. But his go-to move was to put on a lab coat and walk around with a clipboard with random papers on it. I don't know how it worked so well, but it did, until my other buddy danny caught on to it. He wasn't as forgiving. He called him out on it pretty quickly.

I hope that you can't label a piddler amongst the people you work with, if not, you're pretty lucky. Maybe you should be on the look out from now on.

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