SOFTWARE

WHO, ME? Rigid workplace cultures and youthful ambition do not mix

WHO, ME? The world of work is weird, so The Register records the worst of it every Monday in a reader-contributed column we call "Who, Me?" in which you admit to mistakes, and reveal your escapes.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Terry" who told us of a summer job he worked in the 1980s.

"It was at a municipal IT facility, and everyone had a specific job to do, and woe unto you if you stepped over the line," he wrote.

Terry illustrated the workplace culture by telling The Register that not long before he started work, the facility had just replaced a punch clock with a clipboard on which staff recorded the times they arrived at and left the office.

"Everyone wrote 08:00-16:00, but being a young whipper-snapper, I cleverly wrote 07:53-16:01, or 08:02-16:04. That got me hauled off to face the boss for being late."

When Terry wasn't tangling with management, his job involved programming an IBM mainframe. One day, he needed to move a program from one drive to another, a task that the mainframe front end didn't support.

"A colleague told me there was a MOVE command to do the job, so I ran it and my file disappeared from the source drive as expected," Terry wrote.

But the file never reached the destination drive, so Terry's work was lost.

"Always one to collect receipts before taking any action, I looked into the MOVE command and found it was a batch program."

A very bad batch program with no error checking or safeguards, so Terry rewrote the script so it wouldn't delete data. He sent his changes to the mainframe sysop team, which he assumed would be pleased because his changes prevented data loss.

"Instead, I was hauled off to the boss's office again," he told Who, Me?

"They wanted to know why I was spending valuable time doing someone else's job. I said I had to because those people weren't doing it right." That answer went down badly, so Terry tried again. "I lost an hour's work and wanted to save my colleagues from the same fate," he said, before again being told to just do his job and take the matter no further.

"Lesson learned: just do your job," Terry wrote. "I did my job and got another one elsewhere after that summer was done."

Has going above and beyond the call of duty landed you in trouble? If so, it's your duty to click here to send us an email about your experience so we can consider it for a future instalment of Who, Me? ®