Stop Playing Telephone at Work

Hey there, Standing on the Ledge. How are we this morning?

It is now four minutes after four in the morning, and I am just finishing up work. Today was a royal piss-off of a day.

My current boss decided to call my co-worker from Job Site A to complain about my co-worker at Job Site B, then ask my co-worker from Job Site A to relay a message to me so that I could relay a message to my co-worker at Job Site B about what needed to be done.

That set me off.

I had already had this conversation with him a week ago after he pulled the same stunt. I told him then that he needed to speak to her directly. The issues he was complaining about were tied to the work she is responsible for, not the work I am responsible for. I am not her supervisor. I am not in a management role. I am just a grunt trying to do my own job properly.

Last week, I gave him her phone number. He said he was going to call her. He never did.

So this week, he went right back to the same nonsense again, routing everything through my co-worker from Job Site A. I was livid. I did not want to speak to him, and I told my co-worker from Job Site A that she should have shut it down right there and said, “This does not involve me. You need to deal with this directly.”

Instead, she decided to go along with what he wanted. I was not impressed.

She wound up putting him on speakerphone, and I told him straight: “Look, Fred, you need to call my co-worker from Job Site B directly. I am not her supervisor. I do not want to be put in that position again. You need to speak to her yourself.”

His answer? “Oh, I don’t have her telephone number.”

About half an hour later, by text, I reminded him that I had already given it to him last week. He just never bothered to use it.

He finally did call her, but by that point I was still angry, and for good reason.

People need to deal directly with the people they actually need to deal with. Stop this round-robin nonsense of telling one co-worker to tell another co-worker to tell somebody else. That is not communication. That is how things get distorted, how responsibility gets blurred, and how work does not get done properly.

Worse than that, when this kind of garbage goes sideways, the employee usually gets blamed for the confusion instead of the person who failed to communicate properly in the first place.

And that is a problem.

Anyway, that is it for tonight. We are heading out.

Godspeed.