I’ve been psyching myself up to do a good deed. CARE Australia managed to convince me to go doorknocking for them. It’s meant to be done sometime this month. It’s only a small range of houses, from my own street, but I can’t say I’ve ever done anything like this before, so I’d been putting it off until yesterday.
I was walking out the door, fully equipped with my little personalised badge thingy, a pen, and a book full of receipts to fill in and hand out to generous donator-type people, when my mobile phone rang. It turned out to be a support call from work, which although it wasn’t the system I work on that had broken down, did take several hours of involvement from home.
At least, it took several hours for me. Stanley, a guy I work with, was foolish enough to let himself be convinced to work all night on it. And I mean all night – he went into the office and worked to 4am doing conference calls and trying to help the guys who had got themselves into this mess, and all sorts of shit he wasn’t responsible for. Then he went home to bed. And then somehow, unaccountably, he was convinced to go back into the office again for another couple of hours, and finally went home again at 6am.
When I heard, I couldn’t believe Stanley had done that. There’s no way I would have – not for a problem:
- that he had no direct control over fixing
- that was not his responsibility
- that (literally) the other guys had caused themselves
- that the other guys should have been able to fix themselves
I’m also staggered that a guy who wasn’t Stanley’s boss, and worked in a completely different area of the company, had the front to convince him to do so. I must make a note to teach Stanley about when the make use of the expression: "It’s not my problem."
So anyhow, I didn’t go doorknocking. Darkness had fallen by the time I had finished the work stuff, and CARE tell you not to do it after dark. I’ve got a few more days to do it. Maybe tomorrow.
