Lazy And Unreliable

People are inherently lazy and unreliable.  Some people don’t mean to be.  They just are.  It took me years to learn this for myself, even though for many of my formative years, Mom tried to hammer this point into my young, adolescent mind.  I don’t know why I was so resistant to just accepting this as reality at the time.  Maybe I had hope back then?  Maybe I just hadn’t seen it enough then to accept this as reality?  Maybe I had it in my head that I would develop strong relationships, friendships, and interpersonal connections later in life and in the end, Mom would have been wrong because I would have people in my life on whom I could rely if I ever needed to?  It doesn’t pain me to say and admit this, but yes, in the end, Mom was right. 

So, I reiterate…people are inherently lazy and unreliable. 

I try to buck this trend and be reliable to those who might make that decision to ask me to do something for them.  I like to think that I’m pretty reliable, though truth be told, I try not to extend myself like that.  Helping is costly and for the most part, I don’t like to do it.  Having said that, I prefer not to rely on other people for anything, due to this underlying thought that in the end, I will be disappointed when these people fail to come through for me. 

If you want something done right, you do it yourself.  Mom used to tell me that too.  I guess she wanted me to be self-sufficient and not reliant on anyone for anything. 

This lack of confidence in others extends to both my personal and professional lives, though since I don’t many social connections in my personal life, this tends to be especially prevalent at work. 

Last week, I had asked Vanessa to see a client for me.  I figured that she wouldn’t be that busy, being that she is still relatively new and she doesn’t have a lot of work of her own on her plate.  She was also going to be in the vicinity of where that client was, so it seemed as close to a sure shot as I could have envisioned.  She was going to be in the area.  She could stop in on my client.  She would save me the trouble and effort of having to see that client myself. 

In the end, she found herself having to deal with an unforeseen emergency, that would take up most of her time that day, to where she was no longer in a position to help me like she initially believed she could have.  She had sent me a text message later that day, apologizing for being derailed the way she was, and promising that she would see that client for me the following week.  Maybe she does?  Maybe she doesn’t?  I may have to make arrangements to see my client myself, being that I would worry about the potential for her to succumb to another emergency again.  Vanessa is not a bad person by any stretch.  I don’t think that she meant to let me down.  Circumstances changed, which I understand is going to happen, but in the end (and yes, in thinking about me again), I was disappointed because someone was not as reliable as I thought they could have been.

Months ago, I had asked Erica to make some client calls for me.  Actually, let me clarify that.  She had come to me on a late Wednesday afternoon and asked for some work she could do, being that she was not doing anything and she needed to pass the time.  I told her that I would go through my things and have some calls she could make for me by the time she came in the following morning.  True to my word, the following Thursday morning, I gave her the information to make two phone calls.  Neither of these calls was pressing, but I figured that it would get her off my back, give her some practice with making client calls, and maybe she’d actually help me out with some of the more menial tasks that I didn’t want to do myself.  Two phone calls couldn’t possibly take more than a few hours, depending on how much those folks wanted to talk.  So, Thursday would come and go.  I would not hear from Erica that entire day.  I knew she had little, if nothing, to do that day, but I didn’t press the issue.  In my head, she just hadn’t written the notes from those phone calls, though I had assumed that the calls had already been completed.  Come late Friday afternoon, she would finally communicate with me and not to my surprise, she had nothing but excuses for me.  She became busy on Thursday and could not make those calls.  I don’t remember what had occupied her entire day, but it wasn’t anything memorable or noteworthy.  She was still busy heading into Friday morning, to where she was finally able to make those calls at 4pm that same Friday.  In the end, she was only able to reach one of those two clients.  The report she wrote for the one person with whom she had spoken was terrible, to where I would find myself re-writing the majority of it.  I am truly of the mindset that had she called my people that Thursday morning, before she became busy, she might have been more successful than she was.  If anything, she would have had more than enough time to try to reach that one client again, if not multiple times.  I don’t mind that she failed to reach that client, but I would have preferred that she would have tried to reach that client more than the one or two times she tried.  Again, I should not have relied on someone to do something, even though this was a task that I knew was relatively easy and should not have taken over a day to try and complete.  I have not asked Erica to do anything else for me since.  Why bother?  She’s pretty useless as it is and like most of the people I work with, she does not write particularly well.

I don’t have any other specific examples, meaning anecdotes that involve specific people at work.  But as far as other stuff at work I see to illustrate this laziness and lack of reliability, through the years, I’ve seen the following. 

–People take liberties with their work schedules, to where people don’t come to work on time anymore.  Instead, they come in late and make up the difference by staying late.  I could see if this happened once in a blue moon, but when it becomes part of your daily routine, you become wholly unreliable. 

–People pawn their work off on others and then suddenly become damn near possible to reach when questions arise or their presence is needed.  It’s very much a hit and run type of situation and I see it all the time.  It is because of this sort of nonsense that I avoid helping people because I don’t want to be left holding the bag when they decide they don’t want to be found.  You do your work and keep me out of it. 

–In the men’s restroom, the wastebasket always seems to be overflowing with paper towels as the day progresses because some of the guys in the office can’t be troubled to ensure that their discarded paper towels are condensed enough to fit inside the wastebasket completely.  Oh, I don’t know.  Why is it so difficult to wad up what you’re throwing away and toss it in the wastebasket?  I always ball up my paper towel after I’ve dried my hands and make sure that it fits in the wastebasket.  Not on top of it, to where it could fall out and not on the floor, as if to completely miss the wastebasket entirely.  I mean, damn, why is it so hard to clean up after ourselves and ensure that our trash goes into the receptacle as it is supposed to?  Ball it up.  Throw it away.  Make sure your trash fits into the wastebasket.  It’s not that difficult. 

–People tend to forget that they’ve printed something out and they’ll leave it on the printer for hours, if not, days.  Really?  How about after you hit that “print” button, you promptly get your ass up and get whatever you just printed?  I don’t leave stuff on the printer.  Why is it so fucking hard to get your printouts in a timely manner?

There are probably more examples of the laziness and unreliability at work.  I just don’t feel like delving into what these are, being that this is just going to make me more irritated than I already am.

I don’t find anything wrong with how I tend to keep to myself at work.  I don’t like to rely on others for anything, if I can avoid it.  I think Mom tried to teach me this at a young age but at the time, I wasn’t receptive to it because I didn’t want to think that people were that lousy. 

Mom is gone now, but her words of wisdom remain. 

I am self-sufficient.  I am independent.  I can’t and don’t rely on people.  I’ve tried and very rarely does it ever work out in my favor.