Sequential work time
I’m apparently a very bad worker. I saw my work hours for the last month and it turns out I had one very unproductive day in which I managed to do -11 (yes, that’s minus eleven) hours of work.
I don’t get paid by the hour, but my boss likes to feel on top of things, and prefer that we’d sign in and out of the office each day. The results are not that accurate, since I do tend to forget and later on enter approximate times (not a biggie for either of us, since money is not directly involved), but they’re generally representative.
Then all the start and end times are typed by our company’s secretary manager’s assistant into an Excel sheet, which has pre-made formulas to calculate total work time. (And just to emphasize, I did not design the thing, or was involved in it’s making in any way whatsoever. It predates me)
So how does one get such a wonderfully effective workday as I did, you ask? Simple. When entering the data to the Excel page, the start hour (approx 11:00) was dutifully copied to the Excel page. The end hour was not (Or was, but was later accidentally deleted by someone, NM). Hmmm… An empty hour field… It needs a default value… How about 00:00 ? Yes! Great!
How are the working hours calculated? By the most basic and foolproof system possible.
So if I’d come in at 11:05 at left at 21:35, I’d have 10:30 total hours of work. And if I’d come in at 11:05, and left at… say… 00:00… I’d have -11:05 hours of work. Which of course tally up into the monthly work hours, those being logically enough a simple sum of the daily work hours.
Thank goodness I don’t get pay by the hour! that could have been around two uncompensated work days , or even a bit more (The day in which I got the negative hour count, and another 11 actual hours of work to even in out).
Naturally the spreadsheet page contained no sanity checks. What errors could possibly creep up on such a simple and straightforward calculation? It’s foolproof I tell you, foolproof! And designed by someone that forgot there’s always a bigger fool.
Not that it’s that simple, mind you. What would you suggest, setting the default leaving hour to 24:00 ? We rarely leave the office that late, so the costs may be incurred by the wrong side…
Oh, wait, it’s actually quite fortunate we rarely leave the office after midnight. I mean, that would legitimately and correctly place us doing things like coming in at 9:00 and leaving at 3:00, for a total net time of -6 hours for the day… Not that bad considering we could cover most of our losses the next day and even get some actual hours of work out of it…
Then it gets funnier (sadder?). See, the same ingeniously design spreadsheet also calculates overtime hours. (No, I don’t get paid by hours, so I certainly don’t get overtime hours. Is that a reason not to bother calculating them? You think?). The formula for that is also quite simple:
Yep, 9.1 was arbitrarily decided to be the daily work hours. Can’t see why I should mind either way, considering it doesn’t effect my pay in any way, so why not?
Now can someone guess what the total productivity for this day has been for me? Let’s see:
Wow! What a day, eh? I must really be something special.
Makes me so sorry I don’t come to work as late as 15:00. Now that have been really something. Not everyone can work less than minus 24 hours a day…
October 10th, 2004 at 15:11 EET | Categories: Web |
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