memes

Y'know what's funny?

There's one particular job where I had to do this bullshit (just a typical NGO hellhole) but there some people who were on the level where could drop all the pretense and be very terse with without worrying about causing offence. Obviously any of the IT team would get that kind of bare bones no-nonsense style of emails out of me because I know what they're like and what they need - and it sure ain't some fucking flowery essay.

It was all "Problem -> Attempted solutions in bullet points -> My hunch about the cause -> What I need from them and a deadline if I'm working to one".

Anyway, whatever I was doing made enough of an impression that the IT team started calling the office I was based at specifically to talk to me about IT problems at my site and to get me to do any physical stuff they couldn't do remotely like identifying a status light, hitting a button, or plugging something in, even when it wasn't my personal IT problem and all of this stuff was completely outside the purview of my job.

Before I figured out what was going on this would cause me to panic because I'd get a call from the national office number or someone would inform me that there's an IT team member that's trying to find me and I'd be wondering wtf I was about to get in trouble over.

Turns out that they just needed someone who was capable of following instructions and who was able to communicate things using specific language and they managed to find their guy on the inside. I mean, I get it - I've done tech support for family and friends where it feels like you're pulling teeth but it was weird knowing that there was this whole IT team that knew me by name and would use me exclusively as their human interface for that site when I had never met any of them in my life and often I'd be away from that office for days on end.

Part of me was like "Goddamn, you'd prefer to wait 3 days just to get me to do some 2 minute job for you?" and another part of me was like "Of course the IT office has an informal list of all the site names, each with particular staff members that they have identified as being above the 'typing the word Google into the Google search bar to bring up Google' level of tech literacy that they share amongst the team."

I'd get people doing weaponised shell-game on me:

I'd write a two-sentence email and people would get dark on me for it.

I'd write something flowery like that and people wouldn't read it.

I'd write something that would open with the lede, turn flowery for a paragraph or two, and then close with the lede and it still wouldn't be okay for whatever reason.

There were people who couldn't fucking answer bullet points when it was completely explicit.

Idk, part of it was that the staff felt overworked, a lot of it was that the role I was in represented a significant change especially with regards to the power balance in the organisation so staff were digging their heels in so as to obstruct my project by any means possible, part of it was just people being inscrutable jerks.

I pissed so many hours up the wall talking to managers to get them to performance-manage their staff on getting them to read and respond to their emails and "wrapping around" communication so that shitty staff wouldn't get away with basically lying about the expectations I was placing on them or what was being asked from them to achieve tasks. That place had a really weird culture.

I know it probably sounds like I was working as a hatchet man but that's the opposite of what I was actually doing. I don't really want to give specifics so I can maintain some anonymity but in round about terms my role was straddling the lines between compliance with regards to accreditation and internal policy as well driving devolution of power, mostly through organisational change.

It varies between different office cultures and it's a bit of an exaggeration but it's also pretty plausible that you'd see something like this.

Although I should mention that I'm not an American, I just live in a Yankee running dog country but it's pretty much the same shit.