workaday Wednesday
Jun. 11th, 2025 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marcicatYesterday a department director (not mine) sent me a message asking how many times a certain thing happened last year. And I was like: ...
Meanwhile, my brain was all:
*how would I know that?
*what is a tactful way to say 'that thing is managed by your team, so shouldn't they be the ones keeping records on it?'
*I might be able to search my way back through emails and give an estimate?
*but all the emails would have come from your team! you could ask them!
*what in the world do you even need that information for?
Finally I gave as careful an answer as I could, and offered up a [measurable, replicable] search filter for documents (my actual job, lol). I layered it with caveats of low accuracy and non-inclusiveness.
The director: That's exactly what I'm looking for, but only do it if it will take less than ten minutes.
[NOTE: It had already taken considerably more than ten minutes, which could not have been more obvious from the time stamps of the messages we were exchanging.]
In conclusion: I sent the data anyway.
Meanwhile, my brain was all:
*how would I know that?
*what is a tactful way to say 'that thing is managed by your team, so shouldn't they be the ones keeping records on it?'
*I might be able to search my way back through emails and give an estimate?
*but all the emails would have come from your team! you could ask them!
*what in the world do you even need that information for?
Finally I gave as careful an answer as I could, and offered up a [measurable, replicable] search filter for documents (my actual job, lol). I layered it with caveats of low accuracy and non-inclusiveness.
The director: That's exactly what I'm looking for, but only do it if it will take less than ten minutes.
[NOTE: It had already taken considerably more than ten minutes, which could not have been more obvious from the time stamps of the messages we were exchanging.]
In conclusion: I sent the data anyway.
