People at work are trying to kill me

In this week’s episode of Working Wednesday we will be discussing a big pet peeve of mine. Yes, it has nothing to do with balancing family and work, but it has everything to do with my sanity.

In my job I work with a bunch of different groups. Sometimes, after having a pow wow with said groups, I have to be the bad guy and tell Sales we absolutely cannot support whatever ridiculous pricing they want to offer a customer. We try to be accommdating, but there are just certain things we can’t agree to.

In these discussions I often get to have a little chit chat with the Billing group to discuss what they can live with and what they absolutely do not want to support for a customer. Usually things go smoothly. But other times I want to punch the billing person in the face.

Here’s a little piece of advice. If I ask you if you can support something, the appropriate answer is either “yes” or “no.” I can even live with a “well I guess if we do this and that” or a “we really don’t want to but if it’s a dealbreaker…” I’m pretty easy. I can work through a solution with you. But when you’re dumb it pisses me off.

For example, today I asked a billing person if we could support this out-of-the-box thing. [I want to apologize right now for using the way overused term "out-of-the-box."] The conversation went like this:

Billing person: I’d have to find a customer who has made changes and see how it actually looks from an invoice and a download perspective.
Me: Ok, let me know what you find out.
Billing person: I don’t know if I can find a customer who made changes.
Me: so should I push back on this? Or do you think it’s something we could deal with for the six month trial?
Billing person: I don’t know until I look at it on the invoice and in a download.

And that’s when my head exploded in to a big bloody mess all over my cubicle. Seriously? You need to look at the invoice and download. But you can’t find a customer. And you can’t approve unless you look at the invoice and download. And I had to pull all of that out of you rather than you just telling me right from the beginning.

Do you think you could help a person out here? Can you do anything but talk in circles and completely waste valuable minutes of my life? Do I seriously have to ask you if you could possibly do some research? Shouldn’t that just be your automatic response? Instead of a 10 minute IM conversation couldn’t you have just said, “I need to check the invoice and download for a customer. I don’t know one of the top of my head, but I’ll do some research and get back to you.” Is that seriously too much to ask?

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