On a typical night, I might be abed by 10pm. Not necessarily asleep – but possibly. On a typical Saturday night I might be asleep, but if I’m awake I might have had a glass of wine.
So on a normal night, Saturday or otherwise, I would not be checking my work email.
I would not see the note from my manager asking if I can look at a set of questions from one of our internal clients.
I would not be up or able to jump in to try to solve the issue.
I would certainly not, at this point in my life, be pulling an all-nighter, up til 4am crunching numbers. Or up again in the morning to go over them with my manager.
With very few exceptions (one quite notable), I’ve had good managers. My current manager is awesome, and he did not intend for me to pull an all-nighter to get it done.
But also:
He stayed late to get the previous request done when I was busy.
He was interrupting his Fathers Day with his family, and truly felt bad that he was impacting mine too.
He was not going to be in the office on Monday, so if I didn’t get something to him before then I’d have to go in blind.
Also… his manager doesn’t back him up like he backs us up. And this client is particularly difficult. Neither/nor.
How difficult? They sent the request at 10pm on Saturday, and told him it’s “not a rush “ if he could just get them the numbers by Monday at 9am.
So: work on Saturday night / Sunday.
On Fathers Day weekend.
What exactly would constitute “a rush,” one wonders?
But we got it done and they were only kind of ungrateful and demanding on Monday.
And I am sure by next weekend I’ll have recovered from the sleepless night.
Sigh.
Update:on Tuesday things were resolved and our efforts were acknowledged. So that was nice.
aka gringita 