‘Fix your mess’: IT worker skillfully complies with micromanager, puts in 16 hours on a two-hour task, resulting in client's refusal to pay the hourly rate

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    "Leave well enough alone..."
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    You really want me to log time by the ticket?
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    I'm sure all of you reading this have to log their work time in one way or another. And I'm sure most of you don't agree with the granularity of said logging. So, I work in IT. Many years ago I was involved in a big project creating a new platform while maintaining the old one. So, during the week I would spend some time on support tickets. My role was more high level, I would never be the one to actually work on a ticket.
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    At one point in time, there was a new support coordinator assigned to the client account. The number of tickets was rising and the team couldn't keep up, threatening the new platform. The coordinator needed metrics on the teams performance, so he generated reports from the ticketing and the time logging systems, combined them, and started looking into improvements. Until he came across my logs.
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    The metrics told him I spend about two hours a week and edit a varying amount of tickets. This looks weird and he couldn't bill the client on tickets I worked on, so he asked me what was going on. I explained that I would look over the list of open tickets, bulk update where needed, and log my time with a remark like "classified tickets". Then I would move on to my other duties. He didn't like that and told me to enter a time log for each separate ticket
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    I work on. I asked him what the minimum time was that he wanted me to log, which turned out to be 15 minutes. Fast forward a few weeks of me spending an hour a day logging hours (and logging that task too) and creating virtual overtime of about an hour a day. Then the coordinator comes up to me with a request to go through and update the full backlog. I'm fine with that
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    and tell him I'm logging that as a generic task and not per ticket. He tells me no, it must be logged per ticket. So finally the malicious compliance: I spend about two hours to go over the backlog and make sure everything is in order. Then I spend the rest of the day entering everything into the time logging system. Fun fact: I was the first to reach the system's limits, but found a
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    workaround to log everything. That day, as logged in the time tracking software, I worked for more than 16 hours. The rest of the week I took it easy, came in late, went home early. I was done for the week and every hour I worked extra would be unpaid, right? When it came time for the invoicing, the coordinator could not justify the huge amount
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    of hours I logged on the account (my rate was twice that of a tech support) and finally he allowed me to stop logging by the ticket. My productivity went up again, as did my mood. I did flag the potential problems and drop in productivity to the CTO and CEO, who I reported to directly, but they said to comply anyway. We did laugh about it afterwards and learned a lesson in how not to waste time.
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    Thank you for reading my story! TLDR: instructed to log time per support ticket, "worked" 16 hours on a two hour task, client refused to pay.
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    dynamitediscodave 1 day ago Some times manglement need to actually sit and think, and actually research before opening their pie h e. But well done!!
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    3lm1Ster 1 day ago · edited 1 day ago • I know you said the mangler wanted 15 minute increments, but how long did it actually average you to sort tickets like you had been?
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    josh_who_hah 1 day ago 112.5 seconds per ticket 16 hours is 64 15 minute intervals 64 tickets in 2 hours is 32 tickets per hour, which is 1.875 minutes per ticket
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    chris06095 1 day ago • I was once the junior tech support person in a small (but 'worldwide') Oracle Applications installation. One day in my first (and only) year in the group, a Sales VP came down to our group to address the VP of IT and our entire group on the critical importance of our work at that exact time.
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    We were coming up on the end of a sort of 'triple witching' period: end of the month, end of the quarter, and end of the fiscal year. Sales was intent on making their numbers, so they wanted to be sure we could accommodate their transactions in the system, and make everything go right. As a pep talk, we didn't really need it, but okay: 'make things go right' was the plan, and we were on it.
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    In closing, he stressed the importance of avoiding unscheduled outages of the system. As if we somehow controlled unscheduled outages. I should have just ignored his pep talk and bloviation, as my colleagues did, but I burst out laughing, assuming that he had knowingly made a joke. No, he was d d serious.
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    nodoubt63 1 day ago Years ago, I heard the quote "the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing", and I think if the stories in this sub have taught me anything, a lot of managers can't do that. Either that, or their main thing, and the company's main thing differ substantially
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    dragzo0o0 1 day ago I used to be %100 booked to a client. Got a new manager who wanted us to enter every ticket we worked on individually in the timesheet system. We ended up with a timesheet code for doing o timesheets and around 100 odd staff were spending 2 hours a week doing timesheets for no value at all.
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    Thankfully after about 5 months a new manager came along, said ? And things returned to normal. Ah the joys...
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    Geminii27 · 1 day ago but they said to comply anyway "Hey, it's your budget." When you mass-updated the tickets, did you use a template which included the line "As per SC's direction of YY-MM-DD, am logging this in time-system as 15 minutes"?
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    redmartally OP 23 hr. ago • Sadly, that was not possible. I reverted to plain data entry. Especially since the ticket ID. needed to be in the time log for the link to be made in the reports.
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    • UncannyPoint 21 hr. ago edited 21 hr. ago Metrics are key to a business, but they require management to be able to turn the "Data" and "information" that they provide, into the "knowledge" and "wisdom", that will benefit the company. It's the latter part that a lot. of places have trouble with. It usually boils down to a communication impasse. Though they know it well, try
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    as they might, the workers at the production end can't seem to distill the context and reason behind the metrics in a way that management can digest. Management is at a loss until they hire very expensive consultants to translate that message for them.
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    3lm1Ster · 14 hr. ago And what do the consultant do? Oh yea. They go talk to the people that compile the data, ask for an explanation and translation of the data, and then dumb it down to a 3rd grade level for manglement.
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    UncannyPoint • 14 hr. ago It's beautiful isn't it. It's like sifting for gold at the gold refinery.
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    Lolaccio .22 hr. ago Everything must be measured. Work must be measured. To ensure value is blah blah blah No it doesn't. Not everything. Learn to trust your employees
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    algy888 1 day ago At an old job I had to invoice and section off where and what I worked on. This was fine for most of the year but a few times per year we had event openings and I would be running around making the magic happen. During those times I just logged it all as "Anything that needed doing to open - 8 hours" (or 8+ x OT). Kept it simpler for me.
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    Key_Concentrate_5558 5 hr. ago I spend about two hours per week filling out my timesheet. That's the only unbillable time I have all week.
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    RandomBoomer . 9 hr. ago When I worked in IT, we also charged customers by the 1/4 hour of our time, but I never had any problem honoring both the letter and the spirit of the time logging systems. If I spent an hour reviewing tickets, then I billed 1/4 hour to the four clients with the most tickets or the most involved tickets. The following
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    week, I'd bill against a different set of clients. Over the course of a month, all clients were probably charged a 1/4 hour of admin/review time, maybe a 1/2 hour if they had a lot of tickets in the system. That small charge never raised issues with the clients, but it captured my billable time spent working on billable work and provided useful metrics.

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