In response to my post yesterday regarding what was sending me on the path to a meltdown, one of my regular commenter’s mentioned the “efficient worker phenomenon”. Basically when it’s discovered that you can do a good job quickly, people are happy to pile on the work! Which in and of it-self is fine with me, except when you are surrounded by slackers who don’t pull their weight.

This reminds me a situation I was in two jobs ago when I worked with some one I refer to as “The MOM”. I am sure you know where this is heading…

So in IT many times you have implementations that need to be done off-hours (ie late at night or on weekends). Many companies will work out something if you are putting in a bunch of extra hours (during off hours) where you get comp-time etc…

Anyway … in this job I was working on a big project where we were moving a bunch of data from a legacy system to a big new fancy web-based system. Guess who got assigned to do the majority of the weekend implementations? Yep me! “The MOM” didn’t work a weekend the entire time she was there, nor did she stay late. But she was always the first one aboard the “leave early” train! So while I was putting in all these extra hours I started asking if I could start leaving early (ie when my work for the day was all finished… because I can focus and get it done!). Denied! Then a few months later I started asking if I could start telecommuting (I had an hour commute each way by car) 1 day a week. Denied again… needless to say these were some of the main reasons I am no longer with that company!

I am all for being a team player and picking up someone’s slack when there is an emergency or last minute situation… but when it becomes a repeated behavior to the point where I feel that I am being taken advantage of it is then time to ask yourself the serious questions, such as “What can be done about this?” or “Is this the right place for me?”