I was reading an old post on Ask A Manager yesterday. That’s what I do when I’m on the toilet or just chilling, by the way. I call them my stories and am fascinated by the glimpse into humanity. I choose AAM because the commenters tend to be more thoughtful than people in general, which means that the responses are higher quality than society in general. Plus, Alison (the site owner) will delete egregious responses that display any kind of isms or are mean to the original poster (OP) or other commenters.
Today, I was reading a post by a manager who was complaining about their best worker, ‘Norbert’. He was doing twice as much work as his colleagues and then when he pointed it out, the OP asked if he was a jerk for complaining. Also, the OP made Norbert train their colleagues when he complained and explained it to Alison as, “It was my way of saying train your coworkers to be as fast as you, then!”.
Alison had a great response as always, but a lot of the commenters got stuck on how he should be able to give tips and tricks as to how he’s so much better. Not that he should do it for free, but that it would be helpful. Several commenters said that he couldn’t be that much faster (naturally), even though more than one commenter said that some people were just that good.
It got so repetitive that Alison had to chime in. She does that by using a blue box to delineate her answer from the masses. Someone was saying there was no way one person was doing twice as much work as everyone else. That there had to be a reason for it.
Side note: That’s so bizarre to me that someone would think that. I will get to that in a minute.