Laziness and Consequences

I was sent to Delaware to learn a job and bring it back to Texas. The way things worked in Delaware was that two people worked on one part of the job, and one person worked on the other.

We had four people, and that meant a change for our team. We could either do two and two, or we could do one and three. So it was decided that we could each learn both aspects of the job, and it would be decided at a later date.

We were put into pairs, and we each learned half the job on the first day. On the second day, we switched. The first half of the job was busy and a bit crazy - it involved a lot of communication with the client, a steady stream of work, and a whole lot of paperwork. The second half didn't seem that bad - it seemed to involve a whole lot less and appeared to be easier.

Not to mention that one of the jobs worked until 6pm, and the other seemed to be done around 4pm.

As my partner and I went to lunch with our boss, we began to talk about the work. With only one day of training on each job, we each knew the same thing - it would be much better to work on the job that was easier and got out early. Unfortunately, my boss basically told meet that she needed me on the "harder" job. And that's when it happened.

"I wouldn't mind doing (the "easier" job)," my partner said.

She said it as if she was reluctantly volunteering for something terrible. But she knew what she was doing - she was taking the lazy way out before anyone else got the chance to. She assumed that she would have a light day and get to go home early - who wouldn't volunteer for that?

The next day, she was the only one training on the "easy" job. The other three of us began training on the other half. And, as of today, that's the way things are working.

In talking to the rest of the group, we each discussed that we wanted the same thing. We each would've preferred to be on the easier job, and people were surprised when I revealed that our colleague had volunteered for it.

But the lazy way wasn't necessarily the easy way. What the volunteer had failed to realize that the person who had done the job in Delaware had done it for five years. In fact, he was the one who had originally brought the job from New York. Of all the people at the company, he knew it the best. It was one of the reasons why it seemed so easy, and it was one of the reasons he got done so early.

And so when she started to do the work by herself, she struggled. She complained about how much work there was, and she was upset that there was no one to help her. It only took a couple of days for her to realize that she had made a mistake.

Her job might be the easiest, but our job is now divided amongst three people. While we get our work done, she struggles. She gets help from both our manager and our visiting trainer from the UK, and she's constantly asking us for assistance. And this makes her unavailable to help us.

And even now, she's looking for the easy way out. She's convinced our manager to have someone assist her on her most difficult account, and she continues to complain about her workload. I'm a little surprised that she hasn't "volunteered" to move back to our job.

And what's sad is that, since her job actually is less intensive, she should have been the first one to learn it. And instead of us helping her, she should be able to help us.

She's very nice, and I don't intend to be mean. But I do think it's funny that she asked for the easy way out, and it didn't really work out that way. Sadly enough, it works out more often than not.