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Fantasy vs Reality part 2
Feb. 3rd, 2016 10:45 amI'm covering for a colleague at work who will be out for two months due to surgery.
When she's only out for a few days or a couple weeks, I can do a smaller percentage of her job, but with her out for this long, I have to do most of the stuff that she does.
With her stuff plus my other stuff, my boss asked me to write up a schedule for about how many hours per week I would work on my various projects. In trying to estimate how long it would take me to do stuff, I decided to ask her how long she thought it would take me. She thought about it and estimated that it would take me around 4 hours. A week. She actually broke it down by days ("well maybe 1 hour mondays and thursdays and half an hour or so the other days"). My immediate thought was "you are out of your damn mind." My second thought was "wait, does this mean you can finish most of your work in 4 hours a week?" I more than tripled it to 15 hours based on my previous experience doing stuff for her. As it turns out, that was a gross underestimation too. I'm spending about 80% of my time doing her job, and I'm not even totally caught up. Now, of course, to be fair, I'm also not as experienced as she is, it takes me longer to get stuff done, I have to look stuff up that she might not need to, etc. But still. I can't even begin to grasp the concept that she thought I could get all her stuff done in 5 hours a week. Just... no.
Also got to deal with ongoing car drama this morning. Zen's car wouldn't start even though it just got out of the shop (after being there on and off for 2 weeks). He talked about dropping his classes and his internship and taking them again in the summer. This was very depressing. He's *so close* to being done. But he's doing a ton of driving and none of it is nearby, and without a reliable car, it's going to be a problem. So I called for a tow truck and the tow truck driver was actually able to get the car started and said it was flooded, but that it didn't sound right even after it was warmed up. I agreed and I ended up having him tow it anyway because timingwise I couldn't work out a better way to do it (if I drove it I was going to have to walk home, and I needed to get to work too). I drove my car to Zen's work so he could use it to get to his internship tonight and had a rental company come pick me up, so I'm driving a rental car. I don't know if my steering wheel is just massive or something, but the Elantra I'm driving has a steering wheel that feels so small I feel like I'm driving a toy car. It's very weird. The tow truck driver thought that it might just need a tune up.
When she's only out for a few days or a couple weeks, I can do a smaller percentage of her job, but with her out for this long, I have to do most of the stuff that she does.
With her stuff plus my other stuff, my boss asked me to write up a schedule for about how many hours per week I would work on my various projects. In trying to estimate how long it would take me to do stuff, I decided to ask her how long she thought it would take me. She thought about it and estimated that it would take me around 4 hours. A week. She actually broke it down by days ("well maybe 1 hour mondays and thursdays and half an hour or so the other days"). My immediate thought was "you are out of your damn mind." My second thought was "wait, does this mean you can finish most of your work in 4 hours a week?" I more than tripled it to 15 hours based on my previous experience doing stuff for her. As it turns out, that was a gross underestimation too. I'm spending about 80% of my time doing her job, and I'm not even totally caught up. Now, of course, to be fair, I'm also not as experienced as she is, it takes me longer to get stuff done, I have to look stuff up that she might not need to, etc. But still. I can't even begin to grasp the concept that she thought I could get all her stuff done in 5 hours a week. Just... no.
Also got to deal with ongoing car drama this morning. Zen's car wouldn't start even though it just got out of the shop (after being there on and off for 2 weeks). He talked about dropping his classes and his internship and taking them again in the summer. This was very depressing. He's *so close* to being done. But he's doing a ton of driving and none of it is nearby, and without a reliable car, it's going to be a problem. So I called for a tow truck and the tow truck driver was actually able to get the car started and said it was flooded, but that it didn't sound right even after it was warmed up. I agreed and I ended up having him tow it anyway because timingwise I couldn't work out a better way to do it (if I drove it I was going to have to walk home, and I needed to get to work too). I drove my car to Zen's work so he could use it to get to his internship tonight and had a rental company come pick me up, so I'm driving a rental car. I don't know if my steering wheel is just massive or something, but the Elantra I'm driving has a steering wheel that feels so small I feel like I'm driving a toy car. It's very weird. The tow truck driver thought that it might just need a tune up.
