Past His Prime

One of the people working in my building is not generally sought out socially. He has developed a reputation for being strongly opposed to manual labor and having a complete aversion to independent thought.

I will say this, some of our corporate behaviors actually do seem to make it pretty clear that our company does not think a person with his specific job title should be getting carried away with the independent thought side of things. Unfortunately, my job puts me in an excellent position to see why exactly that is our (unofficial) policy.

The problem comes from him having an aversion to manual labor too. I’ll say this, he’s not the youngest guy here. No one is really expecting him to be moving mountains. But from his body shape, you sort of get the feeling that maybe he might try moving a molehill every once in a while to get the old heart rate up.

But he doesn’t do that. So over time, he has gotten the jobs that involve less labor, but require more independent thought. Unfortunately, he does not use the thought to advance his job progress. He just tries to delegate his work onto other people and spend his time doing… well, I’m not sure anyone knows what he does because people avoid him for always trying to delegate work. He’s also horribly socially awkward, even if he appears unaware of that fact. It’s important to note that his job description does not give him the power to reassign work. When I was a new hire, this guy confused me initially by trying to give me some of his work as a training exercise. He came up with that idea all on his own. I have to give him credit, that took some balls. I outrank him a great deal. However, it did not take me long to look into and discredit this “helpful” gesture and completely ignore it.

It took him about a year, but he eventually noticed that I had casually adopted a policy of agreeing to “look at” any of his work that he wanted to leave in my hands. If it actually concerned me in some way, I completed my end of things in a timely manner and passed off having done so. However, if he was clearly just trying to con me into doing his work (as was often the case), I’d take a look at it all right. I’d look at it as it aged in a file of papers in my office he had given me that had absolutely no bearing on anything I do here. Since I never agreed to take over responsibility for any of those things, he eventually noticed that his buck passing was getting him in trouble. His supervisor knows what he should be working on and does not take kindly to stories that he “reassigned it” to someone six pay grades higher than he is. That problem thus worked itself out nicely, and I no longer have to deal with that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, this guy has simply decided to morph his delinquencies into new forms. Right now, I am listening to a series of test beeps and buzzes over the alarm system intercom in my building. It’s a mildly annoying sound. It has never bothered me before. Today, however, it has me extremely annoyed and writing a post to slam this coworker.

You may be thinking, “Are these alarm testing sounds related to the story about the lazy manipulative coworker somehow?” Why, as a matter of fact, they are!

About a month ago, I got a phone call at my desk. From the sound of the ring, it was clearly an internal call. Over the course of any given day, I get about 5 phone calls. Often it’s someone from maintenance hoping I can muscle our production staff into letting a piece of critical equipment be repaired. Often its one of the shift supervisors with a technical question. Sometimes it’s a chemist looking for advice or my input on a project. Occasionally it’s a chemical operator with a real concern.

On the days when he’s here, it’s also often this schmuck (who is also a chemical operator). He likes to call me. Sometimes he likes to call me several times a day. He’s the sort of person who likes to avoid work by “raising issues.” Now don’t get me wrong. Frankly, not enough issues get raised around here. I often discover things that need doing when someone really should have just told me about them when the problem started. I’m not opposed to that. However, I do have a policy of wanting the issues raised to, oh, say, “exist.” Real issues are good. Issues about things that might exist some day do not fly well with me. This guy is a master at spotting all sorts of “potential” issues and telling me to fix them. My solution to all of those: “Waiting until it a problem exists” works perfectly every time.

But a month ago was different. I got a call in the afternoon, picked up cheerfully, immediately recognized the voice, and didn’t even bother to disguise the abrupt shift to a somnambulistic tone of voice. I inquired what was on his mind. He told me there was a problem during alarm testing

I should break for a quick second to add some context. This guy does all of the alarm testing for our building now. It’s the sort of job that’s perfect for him, because it doesn’t require much energy and because the test signals (ringing right now) clearly announce to the entire building (and his immediate supervisor) if he is actually working, or if he has just wandered off to try to talk someone into doing his work for him.

Back to the phone call. He explained to me that he had put the alarm system into test mode and that when he tried an alarm, rather than beeping (like the building is right now), nothing happened. This got my attention. We need those alarms to work. I asked him how widespread the problem was. Long pause. He told me he just tried the one button, then gave up and called me. Long pause, this time on my end. I tell him that we’re going to need to know what the problem is before we can figure out the best way to fix it. I then asked him to continue on with the alarm testing so that we would know how big a problem we were seeing. I hung up, and began to ponder the options.

If the alarm system was actually down, I would be giving a very sudden call to shut down the building. But I wanted to understand what we were looking at, so I waited to hear back. I did not have to wait long. 30 seconds later, my phone rang. Same guy. I asked him what he needed. He told me that the button right next to the one he pushed in the first place, on the same speaker, in the same place, didn’t work either.

Another long silence on my end. Finally, I informed him that when I asked him to find out the full scope of the problem, I wanted him to try a little harder than that. I told him to try alarms in three places that I picked randomly (chosen for being in relevant, separate areas) and THEN call me back. He didn’t sound happy about that, but he said ok and hung up.

About half a quiet hour later, I got another phone call telling me that all of those alarms were also silent. Now he had my full interest. This did not seem to be a local speaker out. That suggested a big problem. I mentally prepared myself to call in and shut down the building. But then I had a hunch.

Me: “Do you still have the alarm testing mode on?”

Him: “Yes.”

Me: “ Shut it off please.”

Him. “Ok. … Ok, it’s off.”

Me: “Now go push that first button again.”

Him: [long pause] “But the test mode is off.”

Me: “I’ll make the announcement. Just go push the button please.”

So I announced to the site that for engineering reasons I was about to send an emergency alarm signal over the site alarm system. Two minutes later, the alarm went off in full force, as expected. Obviously, the alarm system was on and working fine.

He called me back and told me that the alarm I had just cleared went off. (I had noticed.) He told me to contact someone to fix the alarm testing mode. Seriously annoyed, I told him to write the work request himself (like everyone else does), since it was for the problem he had found personally, especially since he was the one who knew exactly how the testing had gone. After a pause, he agreed.

I checked up on this the next day and discovered that maintenance had discovered no problems at all with the system. So I chalked it up to a programming fritz and added that repair to a project on the system I was already working on. Since test mode not working is a minor problem, I was not overly concerned.

It has taken me this past month to finally finish the contractor projects required to call in the alarm people to do the work for me. I repeat, they have not come yet.

So why, you may ask, am I hearing the alarm testing tones in my office this morning? That’s a good question, since no one has come to fix them.

The reason the alarm testing mode works now is the same reason that I am writing this very, very annoyed entry. A certain favorite person of mine clearly discovered that the alarm test mode can be set to run silently. You have to set it up to do so, but it can be done. If someone did that, they could easily stage the illusion of a failing alarm system and get out of alarm testing for at least a week.

Heck, if contractor issues prevented the engineer from having someone in to look at the system for a while, it might even take a month. But what amazes me most of all about this is the boldness in turning it on now. I can clearly explain what happened. He realized that the month is ending. His one checked duty is to finish all the alarm testing every month. I was just getting ready to tell his boss to let it slide this month because the problem was on my end. But I hadn’t yet, and my favorite operator clearly assumed I wasn’t going to. So rather than risk the failure be noted on his review, he has turned on the alarms now and is pretending to me and everyone else that the “problem” magically healed.

If I could prove that, I would have him fired today. He’s literally the last person in my building left who I want to see gone. (Two out of three gone already.) Unfortunately, I can’t prove that, and it would be a hassle for me to try. But he had better watch his back if he knows what’s good for him. I can be easy going about most in life, but sabotaging my alarm systems and almost making me shut down my building are NOT amusing ways to f* with me.