Hacker News Reader

Comment by t1c | Hacker News Reader

Homeless? Just buy a house.

Indeed. I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed right now with tasks assigned to me by the government, but I don't think I can say "no" to filing taxes and accounting paperwork, even when they make it continuously more work to do so. So now I'm off to the post office to have them verify my identity as part of a mandatory process to access their online tax-payment system.

You can outsource this, you know.

I'm not convinced that doing so requires any less work, and I especially don't think it would bypass identity verification procedures. At least I hope that it cannot.

I was thinking the same thing. How many times can I say no to a difficult task before they let me go?

I used to never say no and I worked 18 hour days. Not great.

I started to say no but that does piss people off. Not so great either.

Now, unless it's completely ridiculous request, I never say no.

I say something like "Happy to help! Sounds like this might take about an hour, I can pencil in that time for this project next week Thursday afternoon, looking forward to it!"

If they insist it's for tomorrow I'll include in the discussion whoever needed me today and let them know there is a higher priority request. Let them fight it out. Turns out people are quick to ask for my time ASAP, but if they learn they have to confront someone else to negotiate for it, those requests die down. Or if it truly was so urgent, no problem, we'll rearrange.

I get a lot of mileage out of "I'm happy to help but first I need to let my manager know that you've asked me to do this." Usually the request dies about 15 minutes after.

When the lay-off happened at the workplace both the kinds of people - the "slaves" and the "it's 5pm, see you tomorrow, toodles.. nope, haven't got 5 minutes" - were laid off together, indiscriminately. So that's there.

I use to be in this situation but found a much better job. My hard work is actually appreciated now even though it is not as much work as my previous job.

Pretty sure the business strategy at my old job was to keep giving more work until the person quit or figured out a way to handle it. If you said no, you weren't going to be the one progressing.

I stayed to my breaking point, didn't over stay, but so glad I left.

I like difficult tasks, completing difficult tasks is really fulfilling to me. I just don't like impossible situations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com