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Doesn't really feel like a brain burp or worthy of a Cursing Out Coworkers post, but still felt like I needed to relate this.
My office has this weekly task that needs to be completed. [Weekly Task] involves, in a broad non-revealing way, checking the status of a few dozen databases, to see if they're getting close to becoming too large. We maintain a spreadsheet to keep track of all this, and if a dbase is getting too big, we submit a request to archive the dbase's current contents, purge the dbase, and let it start accumulating new data.
It used to be that [Weekly Task] was handled by one person, before it was moved to a rotation through everyone in the office. To help keep track of whose job it was on a given week, a separate calendar was created to note this. Then, two weeks ago, we were informed that [Weekly Task] would be handled by me and a coworker (CW) on alternating weeks starting in September. The calendar was updated accordingly.
Last Friday (Sept 1) a little calendar reminder popped up about [Weekly Task], but it had CW's name on it. So I clicked off the pop-up and went about my day. Come this past Tuesday, when we're all back in the office after our 3-day Labor Day Weekend, CW walks by my desk and says, "Jay, you forgot to do the [Weekly Task] last week." And his tone wasn't the "you fckt up and I'm gonna bug you about it" sort of way, it was the sort of "you got distracted by the internet and forgot to do it" kind of tone. And by then, I'd forgotten about the pop-up I'd gotten and feared that I had forgotten to do the task. Forgot that I'd even seen the pop-up.
But then I double-checked the calendar, and ... I'm scheduled to do the task this week (Sept 8), so it wouldn't have been my responsibility last week. Sure enough, when I checked last week's reminder, it was addressed to CW.
I popped by CW's desk to let him know, no malice or ill will at all between us, commiserated with him about how the calendar could be hard to navigate or understand sometimes, and left him to doing a belated version of [Weekly Task].
My office has this weekly task that needs to be completed. [Weekly Task] involves, in a broad non-revealing way, checking the status of a few dozen databases, to see if they're getting close to becoming too large. We maintain a spreadsheet to keep track of all this, and if a dbase is getting too big, we submit a request to archive the dbase's current contents, purge the dbase, and let it start accumulating new data.
It used to be that [Weekly Task] was handled by one person, before it was moved to a rotation through everyone in the office. To help keep track of whose job it was on a given week, a separate calendar was created to note this. Then, two weeks ago, we were informed that [Weekly Task] would be handled by me and a coworker (CW) on alternating weeks starting in September. The calendar was updated accordingly.
Last Friday (Sept 1) a little calendar reminder popped up about [Weekly Task], but it had CW's name on it. So I clicked off the pop-up and went about my day. Come this past Tuesday, when we're all back in the office after our 3-day Labor Day Weekend, CW walks by my desk and says, "Jay, you forgot to do the [Weekly Task] last week." And his tone wasn't the "you fckt up and I'm gonna bug you about it" sort of way, it was the sort of "you got distracted by the internet and forgot to do it" kind of tone. And by then, I'd forgotten about the pop-up I'd gotten and feared that I had forgotten to do the task. Forgot that I'd even seen the pop-up.
But then I double-checked the calendar, and ... I'm scheduled to do the task this week (Sept 8), so it wouldn't have been my responsibility last week. Sure enough, when I checked last week's reminder, it was addressed to CW.
I popped by CW's desk to let him know, no malice or ill will at all between us, commiserated with him about how the calendar could be hard to navigate or understand sometimes, and left him to doing a belated version of [Weekly Task].