Something happened at work yesterday that annoyed me more than it probably should have.
It was over bonus marks.
For context, I am responsible for compiling some bonus marks awarded to students for attending activities outside the classroom — learning journeys, webinars and the like. The last webinar for the term had already taken place, but we were still sorting out the attendance records.
And it was taking some time.
Some of the records had to come from an external partner. I was also manually extracting attendance records from Zoom and trying to reconcile them.
I knew it was late.
In fact, I felt quite bad about it.
Then yesterday, a colleague messaged me. She had received an email complaining about the delay and asking her to remind the relevant people not to send the marks so late.
Except she wasn’t responsible for them.
I was.
And strangely enough, that was probably the first thing that bothered me.
Why was she getting the email when I was the one responsible?
I already felt bad that the marks were taking so long. Now someone else was getting caught in the middle because of something I was supposed to be doing.
But after sitting with that feeling for a while, another thought came to me.
Actually, so what if I had received the email?
Would that have made it okay?
There were reasons why the marks were taking time. There were things happening behind the scenes that weren’t visible to the person waiting for them.
And this was just one of many things I was taking care of.
If I’m being super, super frank, this isn’t even part of my KPI or any particular goal I’m being measured against. It’s simply a responsibility that was handed to me.
And I’m doing it to the best that I can, on top of everything else that I’m doing.
Perhaps that’s why the whole thing annoyed me so much.
The person making the comment wasn’t directly involved in the work. She wasn’t teaching the module. She wasn’t part of the process of compiling the marks. She couldn’t see what was happening at the back end.
What she could see was the effect at her end:
Something is late, and now it is affecting us.
And to be fair, I can understand that frustration.
When we’re waiting for someone else before we can finish our own work, it is frustrating.
But there’s a difference between saying,
“Hey, what’s happening with this?”
and deciding that someone else is delaying the whole process.
Because you don’t know.
You don’t know what that person is waiting for.
You don’t know what else that person is carrying.
You don’t know whether this thing that is incredibly urgent to you is one of ten equally urgent things sitting on someone else’s desk.
And you don’t know whether that person already feels terrible that they haven’t managed to get it done.
That last one stayed with me.
Because I did feel bad.
Nobody needed to make me feel bad about it. I was already acutely aware that I hadn’t completed something I was responsible for.
And perhaps that’s also why this incident made me stop and think about myself.
How many times have I done the same thing?
How many times have I received something late, or waited too long for a reply, or been inconvenienced by someone else’s delay and immediately thought:
Why haven’t they done this yet?
Maybe sometimes they really did forget.
Maybe sometimes they really did drop the ball.
But maybe sometimes there is an entire chain of things happening behind the scenes that I know absolutely nothing about.
I don’t think this means we shouldn’t chase things.
Work still needs to get done. Deadlines still matter. If someone’s delay affects your work, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask what’s happening.
Maybe it’s simply about how we ask.
There is a human being on the other side of that email.
And sometimes, before deciding what that person has or hasn’t done, perhaps we could just ask.
Because we don’t always know what’s happening behind the scenes.
So why can’t we be kind?