Volunteer Work

Have you ever accidentally volunteered for something? Or, have you ever NOT volunteered for work that other people *thought* you volunteered for? This seems to happen to me pretty regularly.

A few jobs ago, one of the R&D managers showed up in the door of my office and asked me if I knew anything about vibration testing. "I do." I replied. "I used to do a lot of that sort of testing."

TANGENT: Vibration testing is a lot of fun: you tie a thing down on a table and shake the bejeezus out of it until buttons, resistors, capacitors, and other components start flying off of the item like popcorn kernels popping in the bottom of the pot. Great fun destroying things.

Anyway, I talked to this fellow for an hour or so on how one might subject his particular device to vibration testing, how long it might take, how much it might cost, etc.

Two days later my boss asked me why I volunteered to lead the testing effort for this device. I hadn't, I explained, I only had a conversation about how it might be done.

More recently I was asking about compliance documentation that seems to be missing from a device that my company is contemplating marketing. Today one of our controllers asked me how the compliance program was going. someone said that I was working on getting that project completed.

Nuh-uh. Not my job, man. That's what we have Project Managers for.

I have run afoul, however, of two tenets that permeate the business landscape:

1) You touch it, you fix it;
b) If you ask the question, you often end up dealing with the problem.

Both of these tenets, naturally, create an atmosphere where folks do as little as possible, and don't ask the questions that they know should be asked, people being a bunch of lazy buggers.

You ever volunteer for work by accident?