Grievances

The nature of the world is such that, one way or another, someone has to complain about their job. This is natural and to be expected. No matter how nice of an employer you are or how good you are as a manager, sooner or later, someone is going to complain about something. It could be something small and insignificant, a matter that will blow over given some time and maybe a nice paycheck. Others are more genuine and concrete, and will brew for prolonged periods under the surface, simmering until some undefined point when it becomes absolutely intolerable.

This post is dedicated to one particular aspect of the daily workload, known as blog commenting/research. Basically, it requires one shift to find 40 blogs a day that fit certain parameters, while the other shift takes those lists and finds 6 of them a day to place comments on. There are other aspects of the task, but these details are not required to know.

There are, naturally, a few guidelines. First, they have to be of a specific rank. This one is easy enough, just time-consuming because of the nature of the tool used to determine it. It takes so damn long, especially if the blog has a lot of javascript or flash running. The second is that it has to be open for comments. As of now, we are hidebound to the research half of the task, and we've been getting some annoying messages about it. The worst of which would be that there can be no duplications not only within the "40 per day" but from the very start. The second is that if the blog requires registration, then there should already be one. And finally, if links do end up duplicated, we have to provide replacements.

To an extent, I understand the insistence that no duplicates be made. This is perfectly understandable, as excessive duplication of the output just speaks volumes of laziness. However, given the nature of what needs to be done, I find it completely unreasonable to expect a complete lack of duplication entirely. We cannot be expected to have a master list of our output that we can all access for comparison to the output for the day. Do you have any idea how long it would take to countercheck all 40 of them with the hundreds that get compiled onto said master list idea? It'd take all day, so unless the boss wants us to sacrifice everything else for this specific task, then expect duplicates to crop up every so often.

Then there's the issue of active accounts on the sites we seek out. This one I have two issues with. First, we got a lot of those sites when we were on the receiving end, rather than the research end. I can personally say that at least half of the ones I got required a registered account to place comments. However, while we all got it, we didn't complain. We simply skipped over them and used the ones that didn't require registration. And he wants us to not only find these sites, determine if they need registration, then confirm said registration? Does he have any inkling, any concept at all of how long that would take? Waiting for a registration to be confirmed could take days, and we already do quite a bit of registration daily -- just not of this nature.

The second issue regarding registrations is this: we skipped past them during the last rotation, why can't the night shift people? It isn't like there aren't a whole of other options available on hand in case one is unusable, and it isn't as if everything we list down actually gets used. When the blogs are sent in at 40 a day from 4 different researchers and the comments required of the other shift comes down to only 6 per day per commenter, that's a lot of leftover stuff. Even if a few require registration and need to be skipped over, there's very little chance they'd actually run out of sites on any given day.

Finally, I absolutely refuse to provide replacements for duplicates. Duplicated links will be inevitable given this task, and we already do what we reasonably can to minimize them. The whole process is time-consuming, especially given the piece of shit Internet connection (my home wireless connection is faster, honestly) and the fact that my PC seems required to crash at least twice a day at the most inopportune times.

Thinking about it, I have another issue I need to let out. Whenever I meet with the night shift people, I don't hear any complaints. We send in our required number of blogs, and if there were any problems, I figure I'd hear about it from them on those instances when I arrive before they head home. It has happened a few times, and not one complaint. So why is it that the division head seems like he's got nothing better to do than to dig through our lists and look for duplicates or other things to complain about? If the people who use the lists don't see any problem with what we provide, then why should he?

We encountered these same problems in the last rotation, when we were doing the commenting and the night shift did the research. We certainly didn't make a big deal if one or two blogs were the same, or if some of them required us to have to sign up for an account on the site. We got the ones we could use, did our jobs, and paid the rest of them no mind. We'd appreciate it if the favor was returned.