Wed, 6. February 2013
The Things We Were Asked To Do At Work
Joan was a well paid senior personal assistant to corporate executives and some of the things she was asked to do - mainly because she is a woman - included making coffee for other workers or doing jobs for men who had no authority to ask. Mysogeny was alive and well in those days and I am sure it still is. She even had employees coming up to her whilst doing annual management pay roll reviews, asking for salary information about themselves or another person. However, Joan had developed a number of diplomatic ways to deal with all these demands, which always sent the offenders away unrewarded.
As a male, I was not exempt from such requests either. Early in my career as an apprenticed electrical engineer in London, I was sent by an engineer to mend a light switch in a millionaire tycoon's luxury apartment in Portland Place, adjacent to BBC House in Central London. I should never have been asked to do this because I was not being trained as an electrician but I was too young to argue and besides, I was intrigued about visiting Baronet Sir Isaac Wolfson's home.
I fixed the broken switch but did not get invited to stay for dinner.
Soon after I began working for Austin Australia as an electrical engineer, I was instructed by my supervisor to go and connect a water heater for another employee who had asked. He also passed me several home appliances, brought in by other employees, to repair. None of this was part of my job description nor did I have any training in appliance repair work and it was beginning to irritate me.
Again, it was too early in my company career to refuse to do something which was clearly an outright imposition, so the job was done. I found it difficult to say no when colleagues needed help with something like that but sometimes it went too far and people were just taking advantage.
I did make a stand when various people within the organisation thought - because I worked in the electrical design department - that I was responsible for replacing failed fluorescent lighting tubes! I insisted they were all capable of changing their own lamps and despite some heated arguments, that is what eventually happened.
I was dumbfounded when my supervisor had the gall to ask me do some grocery shopping for him whilst I was out of the office on a site inspection. On my return, I simply told him "Sorry, I forgot."
In my last few years at Austin before the company collapsed, I was an understaffed senior engineer with the added responsiblity of managing an IT network of over a hundred PCs. I was arriving early, taking no lunch breaks and leaving late. I had no time to do anything except focus on my dual role. So up rocks an insensitive colleague who invites me to visit his home several kilometres away and set up his personal computer for him!
This man worked in a different discipline and I told him truthfully that I was overloaded with work and that he had the intelligence to do it himself. His response? "...but you could do it for me during your lunch break!"
I told him I had no lunch breaks any more, so he asked me to go after work. At that stage of my career, I lacked Joan's diplomacy skills and despite his continued insistence that I comply with his wishes, he was told where to shove his computer.
After the company collapsed, I organised regular-six monthly reunions for several years. Soon, emails to this same person bounced back as undeliverable. When I eventually saw him, he accused me of not inviting him any more, so I enquired if he had changed his email address. "Yes," he admitted."
I then asked him if he had notified me of the change. "No, I didn't" he replied, "What's that got to do with it?"
Ding-dong!