Perceived Insignificance

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.

I got a land yacht car from my brother-in-law to drive to work, and in the back seat was a book called God's Little Devotional Book For Men. After I disposed of the cover, which was in poor shape from sitting on the floor of the back seat for three years. One window didn't close completely creating a heck of a humid environment, though the book itself never got wet. But I digress... What I wrote above is a quote I read in there this morning, and personally, I try to do the jobs I do as well as I can because I know the result reflects on me.

Not everyone feels this way, however. No where is this more apparent than in the service tickets that people create to send to this other department. As I indicated in a previous post, people get away with stuff because they can, and I'll grant that this other department's requirements are more than just a little over the top. Yet, we have to follow them, and since people don't, I get to do something called gatekeeping to make sure they do.

What is interesting is what you can perceive about people through these little virtual items that pass by me in droves every day. People tend to create their tickets the same way and have the same types of information every single time. For any given person, you can tell whether they take the requirements seriously, have any respect for the other department, understand their job, or sincerely want to do their best every time. There are people whose name I like to see come up, and others whose tickets I dread opening because I know what I'm going to find.

These people boil down to three basic categories. The best one is those who follow instructions and do a great job in ensuring that these tickets have sufficient information to not only complete the job at hand, but give sufficient understanding to anyone looking at the ticket. By looking the ticket over, I know what the problem is, what the customer wants, and even what needs to be done to fix it (if only I knew the first thing about how they do their job to fix it). These are works of art, and you can tell the people making them respect either the people receiving the tickets, or have at least been threatened to the point that they understand and respect their jobs. These reflect well on them.

At the other end of the spectrum are the ones who either can't or don't want to follow the simple list of instructions for these tickets. Something is always missing, and when you bring it up, they get ugly stating that the other department will accept the ticket without this. This attitude of theirs led me to correcting these tickets myself in most cases, since the information was actually contained in the ticket; it was just in the wrong place. They couldn't be bothered to even move a piece of info from point A to point B. Clearly, they despise the other department's requirements, have a disdain for having to make these tickets to their specifications, or just don't understand why they need to do what they need to do. It's usually the same people too.

In the middle are actually the most irritating of the bunch. You see, while you have a leg to stand on in requesting more information from the rule-breakers, this next lot gives you enough to fit the bill, but not enough to understand the problem unless you "know" enough about the background processes. Trouble is they do include the information that is required on the list of instructions, so as much as you might want to send it back for more clear information, you can't because they followed the rules to the bare minimum letter. They know exactly how much it takes to get by, and they do no more than that. Their regular tickets that only have no requirements are nightmares to decipher. When I get one that I have to actually fix in my real non-gatekeeping job, it usually takes me twice as long since I have to decipher what the problem is before I can even begin. By contrast, I can usually solve tickets from the first category without any information gathering because of their completeness.

So, if I ever become a manager, having had the insight I'm getting from this gatekeeping process, which group do you think I'd want on my team?