Am I too touchy?
Mar. 25th, 2004 10:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennyaxeI have several cow-orkers. One of them is a person I don't much like - I find him arrogant and overbearing. Also unable to accept that he might be wrong, and unwilling to clean up his own messes.
We're currently working on a project together. We have to work together, because our boss thinks we're both very competent and she needs people who have different approaches to stuff. I'd find this reason more compelling if I actually thought cow-orker M was competent and that his approach held any sense... but I digress.
One of my jobs in the project is to configure a webserver in a certain somewhat complicated way. I worked on it, got it mostly right in testing, and we started a test run yesterday. I had to go home early due to the endo acting up, so cow-orker M watched the test run. He reported a failure; I replied that I'd deal with it.
Today I got an email laying out exactly what config changes he thought should be made. And when I got to work he'd already made the changes.
This pissed me off mightily. I have this silly idea that if I'm actively working on something, it'd be corteous of others to not tear it out of my hands and start "fixing" it themselves. I feel that if I leave something half-done and plan to continue with it the next morning, I should find it in the same condition I left it. To add insult to injury, the changes he'd done won't work - which I know because I'd already tried it that way. Which he'd know if he'd read the versioning systems history of the file, where I kept noting what I tried.
M couldn't at all understand why I was angry. He'd had some time on his hands, and obviously doing stuff like documenting his own systems or patching them or something silly like that, he'd been kind to me and fixed my problems. Without talking to me first, of course. And if I had any problems with that, it was obviously just my being territorial and uncooperative and unwilling to work with others and unwilling to accept help, yada yada yada...
So - am I being too touchy? Should I just smile thankfully when someone does my job for me - and takes the credit, of course, showing once again that he's Da King[TM] of Unix operations and nothing would work unless he's there to fix it? Not that I'm accusing him of megalomania and manipulation or anything... or, wait, I am, I guess. The question is, am I right?
We're currently working on a project together. We have to work together, because our boss thinks we're both very competent and she needs people who have different approaches to stuff. I'd find this reason more compelling if I actually thought cow-orker M was competent and that his approach held any sense... but I digress.
One of my jobs in the project is to configure a webserver in a certain somewhat complicated way. I worked on it, got it mostly right in testing, and we started a test run yesterday. I had to go home early due to the endo acting up, so cow-orker M watched the test run. He reported a failure; I replied that I'd deal with it.
Today I got an email laying out exactly what config changes he thought should be made. And when I got to work he'd already made the changes.
This pissed me off mightily. I have this silly idea that if I'm actively working on something, it'd be corteous of others to not tear it out of my hands and start "fixing" it themselves. I feel that if I leave something half-done and plan to continue with it the next morning, I should find it in the same condition I left it. To add insult to injury, the changes he'd done won't work - which I know because I'd already tried it that way. Which he'd know if he'd read the versioning systems history of the file, where I kept noting what I tried.
M couldn't at all understand why I was angry. He'd had some time on his hands, and obviously doing stuff like documenting his own systems or patching them or something silly like that, he'd been kind to me and fixed my problems. Without talking to me first, of course. And if I had any problems with that, it was obviously just my being territorial and uncooperative and unwilling to work with others and unwilling to accept help, yada yada yada...
So - am I being too touchy? Should I just smile thankfully when someone does my job for me - and takes the credit, of course, showing once again that he's Da King[TM] of Unix operations and nothing would work unless he's there to fix it? Not that I'm accusing him of megalomania and manipulation or anything... or, wait, I am, I guess. The question is, am I right?
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 04:56 am (UTC)1) you'd already tried it
2) documented that you'd tried it
3) he just jumped in on your work without even clearing it with you
I'd say that not only are you entitled to be teed off, but also to be in a position where you can let your manager know how much time it has set you back to undo his "corrections"
no subject
Date: 2004-03-25 05:01 am (UTC)