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?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Working Wednesday. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.