Work Annoyance

I'm sure this has come up before, but this week has been particularly hideous for me in this regard. It's one of those things that no one does consciously, and I'm sure there have been times I've done this to people either out of lack of confidence, lack of desire to talk to someone new, or just my general introversion. I can even explain why someone would do this; you don't want to waste your precious time on dealing with someone who may or may not be able to answer you. The downside to this attitude is that you might be turning down someone who knows better than the person you're looking for.

What I'm referring to here is using people as informational resources. I work in an area with Optimus Prime. We both do essentially the same thing -- or rather, we share a common responsibility with differing outlying responsibilities. Within this similar responsibility, however, he is always considered the preferencial person to ask questions of when someone has them. This is understandable. What hurts sometimes, though, is when he is not only preferred, but I am excluded completely and deliberately.

Here's what happened: a few days ago we were looking at a problem with one of our clients that had stumped us for a few weeks. We had seen an error message, assumed what it meant, and didn't know what to do about it. Well, on the day in question, I finally cracked open the log file to see if this message was telling us the truth or not, and I found to my surprise (shouldn't have been a surprise), the message was not giving us the whole story. It seemed to indicate a login error, but in fact, it was a connection issue and the login error came from the connection resetting, returning to the login screen, and the enter key being pressed as a sort of "leftover" action from the previous screen definition. This generated a login error that our scripts were not equipped to deal with.

Our response to this error was to just resume the task and it typically processed just fine, so what I did was add the error message to the code and upload it. It worked like a charm. Well, while I was keeping an eye on that client, someone else came over, glanced between us, and (as this person ALWAYS does) shifted into Prime's cube to ask him about this very same client and the very same issue I'd just fixed but was monitoring. Prime told him that I was just working on them. This person glanced over to me, but was unwilling to speak to me on it. He said the a contact from that client was on the line, so Prime said to transfer the caller to him.

Huh? That equates to taking credit for someone else's work. Not that I care in most cases if someone else talks to a client over something I did, but in context of everything else that transpired, it just seemed really, really weird.

Ok, so maybe I'm just whining, and if you feel that way, that's fine. But you have to also understand that part of the satisfaction of doing a job is feeling valued in that job. When you see all the time that your opinion (though asked for) is not valued, it's hurtful, and that situation just came off as completely de-valuing what I do. 

The next day, something similar happened. I had asked Prime about a particular piece of the system and rather than just answer the question, he launched into an explanation of how it worked. I didn't need that, and wondered why he thought I did. He's also going to be on vacation next and has repeatedly asked if I could handle it. Why not? I've handled it before. He's also given repeated advice on some best practices. Again, I can handle it.

This whole thing has caused me to read a lot into a lot of other stuff, and I need to let it go. It is my sincere hope that just typing it all out here will help me to get past it. I played Guitar Hero last night for an hour and a half trying to get over it. It was over an hour before I could play much of anything straight on it. I felt better when it was over, but I still needed a little vent on here...