Have you ever been stopped from making your task easier?

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As part of my previous job, I had to do gardening. One of the tasks was to wind up the garden hose after use.

The hose we were using was already a bit old. Some parts of the hose had been bent/twisted so badly there were white marks at those spots. These were often the parts which would get twisted again in the process of winding it up. We had to swing the twisted parts of teh hose like a lasso to untwist it before winding it up. But if the hose was wound up anyhow or too quickly there would be twists in the hose after it was wound up.

I figured that if the hose was wound up neatly (more or less in a circle) there would be fewer twists. But after I did that a few times (and the way I remember it, there were fewer twists), the older and more experienced colleague stopped me, saying "there is no need to do it so nicely". So it was back to the old mode, lots of twists and lots of swinging to do. Once as I was struggling to swing out a twist this colleague said, "You must struggle, then you will learn."

Has anyone else here been called fussy/too particular or stopped when trying to make a task easier for yourself?

All the frikkin time. although you seem to handle it better than me, if I can't make it easier after I've figured out how I refuse to do it

I have to fill out a ton of paperwork while doing other tasks at my job. Most of the time, I end up writing the exact same things in the exact same boxes with only occasional changes.

I started filling out my paperwork in advance of the tasks it related to then, once I had completed those tasks, erasing and altering the very few little bits that needed it. At the end of the day both my tasks and my paperwork were completed correctly.

My superiors apparently preferred that I be distracted every five minutes by having to stop what I was doing and go fill out paperwork because, when I was seen doing that, I only narrowly escaped being fired.

Luckily, there was one manager who saw the logic in what I was doing. I still had to go back to doing things the old way, but this person was able to convince the others that my way wasn't just me trying to find a way to slack off and not do my job.

Work Harder, Not Smarter!

I've been stopped from doing tasks altogether, having been deemed incapable of carrying them out. Once, I was working too slowly for the other person's liking. That was very frustrating. I go slowly because if I speed up, I make mistakes.

My step-mother does this to me constantly. she's a very stubborn person and whenever I try to do something efficiently, but not in the typical, way she comes over and tells me to do it her way. then, when I try to explain why my way is better she talks yells over me about how I'm stupid and thinks she's justified by saying I think differently and clearly that makes me wrong. It is just really frustrating knowing a better way to do something and having her litterally go "lalalalalala I'm not listening lalalalala".

What they really mean is "dammit, that's brilliant! I should have thought of that."

Not as much as I might otherwise because it's often expected and encouraged in IT, but I have had a few occasions, mostly to do with cabling. I was told I was wasting my time labelling network cables in server racks with IDs, then tracking the endpoints of each cable keyed by the ID. What I was told turned out to be correct, because it turned out nobody else really cared that much and didn't follow the system. Surprise surprise, the cabling is now a mess. Same deal with obtaining cables of varying lengths to ensure minimal slack. At another job I was prevented from making improvements to the network monitoring system (well, more accurately, told I was not allowed to) because it was in a state of "change freeze" while a replacement system was being designed by someone else who took over 2 years to do so (whether that was his fault or whether he was strangled in red tape I don't know). Someone else decided to ignore that and go ahead and make the changes I proposed without asking, and was praised for doing so.

My mother is contantly telling me that her way is "easier". She can't get it into her head that my way is easier for me.

When I started teaching, I gave all of my tests online, so that they were graded instantly. Later in the year, the principal told me to give tests on paper...one of the reasons was that "you just got out of college, and you know colleges don't give tests online, do they?" Meltdown.

Luckily, that principal left at the end of the year and I went back to doing it my way.

I remember once in third grade the teacher told us to draw little things to practice mulplication. I told her it would take too much time and she yelled at me. When I did see things her way and drew little things, she yelled at me saying it would take too much time.

Yup, all the time.

One particularly noteworthy occasion was when I was do a data entry job for a large electric company, loads and loads of accounts to go through there were 12-15 people doing it at any one time.

The work was very repetitive and after reading the manual I realised the software had an internal scripting language so users could automate tasks that we were doing manually.

So I write about 40 simple scripts passing data from the software into microsoft office and back, auto completing loads of stuff and remap the keyboard shortcuts on my login so I don't have to move my hands, just tap a couple of keys that are next to each other.

End result is that I had to slow right down to 'only' doing 5 times the daily target number of accounts.

What happens when my line manager finds out? I get accused of hacking, threatened with the sack and disciplined.

They decided to spend £5,000,000 on brand new software and justified it by saying it made people 20% more productive.

Yup, £5,000,000 to get 20% improvement or £30 to get 500% improvement. I'm sure in NT world it makes perfect sense...