Thursday, October 16, 2008

Responsibility, or lack there of

There's a saying about how 20% of an organization do 80% of the work. I swear that some of the not-working-so-much 80% are people who have learned to ignore responsibilities they do not care to do and for which they are not called on by their supervisors. One school example: all of the teachers in my school have a week of lunch duty in the cafeteria 4 to 5 times a year. They generally do it because the principal calls them on it when they don't show up ... plus their lack affects what goes on the principal's final performance assessment for the year. Now, we have a second week of lunch duty 4 to 5 times a year, only this time it's in the library. Apparently, our current librarian does not feel comfortable getting parent volunteers to watch the library during the 3 lunchtimes, so she arranged with the administration to have the teachers take over. What has happened is this: those who care about doing the right thing show up for their duty times and the rest do not bother to even acknowledge that they have such duty assigned to them. Since the librarian does not have the gumption either to call the missing teachers and remind them of their duty nor to complain to the administration about this, less than half of the faculty do the library duty. This puts more of a burden to those ones only because then the librarian depends completely upon those people to get time off for her to get her lunch, etc.

Obviously, I am complaining because this is my library lunch duty week and the same suspects are missing. Hence, instead of sharing this duty so that each of us gets to have at least one day of duty off, I get the entire week. Hmm. I think I'll call my absent associates and ask them where have they been all week? Or maybe I'll mention the problem to the administration in a non-accusing way. Or maybe I'll take the cowards way out and do nothing but show up as usual since my experience has been that once I take on a responsibility, I do get in trouble if I join the slacker group even for a day.

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