Business Casual

One of the most annoying coworker traits is when one employee will use and abuse another employee's time and knowledge. Let's say that the annoying coworker is supposed to be authoring a new SQL script for a report. Great fun stuff all around. When the inevitable problem arises within their script, they immediately turn to a coworker to solve the problem.

Now, I don't think that this practice is always a problem. If done in moderation and in actual times of need, asking for help is a necessary tool that you want a developer to use. A business doesn't want an employee staring at a screen for hours upon end when a simple "help me" request could have solved the problem hours ago. I suffer from this occasionally as I sometimes want too much to figure out the issue myself when just asking for another set of eyes to look over some code would have spotted the issue right away.

However, the annoyance occurs when an employee abuses this privilege and stops even trying to solve a problem for himself. Don't know the correct syntax? Ask someone else instead of searching the internet or the manual. Don't know the programming standards? Ask away because you can't be bothered to read the documentation that's on the intranet. By the time the script is finished, the company needed 2 full resources to solve the problem. It's definitely not a win-win-win scenario.

In other news, the five year anniversary of Business Casual is coming next month. I know that the comic hasn't truly been running for 5 years since I took that year plus break, but the first strip was created in 2003. That seems forever ago to me. I'm getting old.