by Serguey Shinder
For two years I sat at the end of a row, ten metres from the operations team, and anybody walking to the kitchen passed my chair. I liked it. I would have told you it made me useful, and in a narrow sense it did.
One spring I kept a tally for three weeks, on paper, of every request that reached me. Forty one in total. Twenty nine arrived in person, from people sitting within about ten metres of me. Twelve came through the queue where requests are supposed to go.
A month later I went back through the list and marked which ones had mattered, using the meanest test I could think of, which was whether anybody would have noticed if it had never been done. Almost all the queue items passed. A duplicate invoice run that was overcharging four customers. A partner integration that had been failing silently since a certificate changed. Half of the ones that had arrived at my shoulder did not, and several were questions the asker could have answered in five minutes by opening the same screen I opened in front of them.
The part that has stayed with me is a request from our depot in Leeds that sat for eleven weeks. It was a small fix, it affected about thirty people's working day, and it never once got in front of me, because nobody in Leeds walks past my desk. Nothing about our system was unfair. I would have sworn I was working on the most important thing available, and I was, from where I was standing, which was the whole problem.
With no queue, the order of work is set by proximity and confidence. Both feel like signals and neither has anything to do with value. It also feels like generosity, which is exactly why it survives unexamined. The person standing at your desk is a human being with a face, and the person in the queue is a row in a list, and turning towards the first of those feels like decency rather than a scheduling decision.
Everything comes through one place now, including things people ask me in person. I write it down in front of them, which takes twenty seconds and, more usefully, changes what they ask for, because a sentence somebody has to watch you type is a more considered sentence than one said over a chair back. I work the list in order. Two hours a day are kept for whoever needs me soonest, and that covers nearly all of the genuine urgency.
What changed most was not my day. It was Leeds, and the other places we have people, whose requests started getting done in the same fortnight as everybody else's. They had not been deprioritised. They had never been in the comparison at all.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply