King Of All Excuses: Part 2

Beavis was the first to start working at home due to the Coronavirus outbreak, but when he should have been ready to return to work, the CEO made the call to send the entire company to work from home until further notice.

Since he doesn’t have to make excuses to work at home, you would think the excuses would stop. But no, they continue:

Day 1: His daughter is ill

Day 2: The schools are closing so he is going to have to arrange some childcare. He didn’t mention why her grandparents couldn’t look after her, but he said ideally he would have gone to his brother…but he has Coronavirus. I wish I would have checked reported cases of Coronavirus at that point to see how likely that was.

Day 3: Apparently he was still looking after his daughter, but could spare the time for the 1 hour meeting. The manager asks to repeat the meeting tomorrow. Everyone in the team can make it; apart from Beavis.

On subsequent days, he ran through a variety of excuses why he couldn’t work at all, or why he could only work limited hours.

Couldn’t work at all:

1. He was ill
2. Daughter was ill

Reduced hours:

1. Windows update took 3 hours, so he had to wait for it to finish. It’s weird that the whole team has Windows and no one else had updates that lasted more than 10 minutes.
2. Was available to work, but needed to spend time freeing up hard disk space
3. Was available to work, but his daughter kept climbing on him so was unable to concentrate.

I accept that he has a young daughter, and between him and his wife – they need to look after her. But if his wife has chosen to work, then he needs to take annual leave, or accept unpaid leave. Maybe they should both reduce their hours and alternate the childcare. They need to do something. It affects the team when he is assigned work, he says he can do it, then the next day – he says he couldn’t because his daughter needed attention. It’s not a one-off; it is an excuse 90% of the days.

One of his tasks was to install 2 software programs, and he ended up logging 20 hours against it on the time-sheet. People did encounter issues logging into these programs, but we just told the guy who was in charge of this initiative and left it with him. It’s not like we actually had to spend time diagnosing issues. It should be 2 hours max.