Hot take: my coworker's 'fix' made our project deadline slip by 3 days

Last Thursday, my teammate decided to 'improve' our client database merge without telling anyone, and it corrupted all the recent entries from our Denver office. I spent Friday manually cross-referencing 200 records against old backups to undo the damage. How do you handle people who jump in and change things without a heads up?

2 comments

2 Comments

jana1791d ago

Had a friend whose coworker "fixed" a shared spreadsheet and accidentally deleted formulas that took her three weeks to build. She had to rebuild everything from memory and lost trust in that person completely. Do you have a process for flagging major changes before they happen?

logan_thomas871d ago

Three weeks of formulas gone just like that - that's brutal. It reminds me of how people treat shared spaces in general, like the community fridge at my apartment building. Someone will "clean it out" on a Sunday and throw away a whole week of meal prep that wasn't labeled yet with dates. They think they're being helpful but they don't actually talk to anyone first. Same thing at my gym, where a guy rearranged all the free weights and dumbbells once because he said the old setup "made no sense." Nobody asked for that change and it took everyone a week to find the 25 pounders again. So I think the real problem is people not understanding that "helping" without communicating is just breaking things in a different way. I always tell my team now, if you're about to touch something that works for others, just send a quick message first.