Idiots
My friends,
I have a question to pose to you all. As you know I work with several other research assistants on a number of different studies involving mainly drug users, and now people with antisocial personality disorder (they lie a lot, tend to use a lot of drugs and generally have trouble with the law). Now we recruit these people mainly by placing newspaper adds and having them call us, we then ask them a lot of questions about their education, health and drug history. Now here is where the question comes into play: would you call back the most recent people to call first, or call the oldest ones first (up to 4 months since we last contacted them)?
Now, I am a person who generally feels that people are intelligent and if need be can use their brains most of the time, however I feel that recently I have been proved wrong time and again by some of my coworkers. This morning we were having our supervisor look over the phone screens of several people so that we could either call them in to schedule or put them in the pile of non-qualifiers. I chanced to look at the dates and the most recent one was about a month old. Now for normal people if you call them a month later you will most likely reach them, however for most drug users they don't really have a stable income and tend to move and change phone numbers often. That would make it seem, at least to me, that you should call in the MOST recent first as they are the most interested at the moment and we may still have a working number for them. Apparently my co-workers don't really understand this. Now, whether it is because they want to make it look like they are doing a more constant amount of work, or just don't want to have to call back so many people I don't know, but it just pissed me off to see that they had a whole stack of people that had called in the last couple of weeks that they hadn't had approved. Why would you do that? Yesterday I wasted 30 minutes of my time trying to call back people from 3 months ago (I only reached 3 of the 15 and 1 was no longer interested) when there was a whole new group that could have been called.
I tell you, every day is a new problem, either with the bosses or the co-workers and I am just tired of it. Why would they hire these people? They have no reasoning skills! They seem totally incapable of figuring things out on their own without mass amounts of guidance. This job certainly requires some training, however after a certain point you should be working almost completely independently. *sigh* What to do?
I have a question to pose to you all. As you know I work with several other research assistants on a number of different studies involving mainly drug users, and now people with antisocial personality disorder (they lie a lot, tend to use a lot of drugs and generally have trouble with the law). Now we recruit these people mainly by placing newspaper adds and having them call us, we then ask them a lot of questions about their education, health and drug history. Now here is where the question comes into play: would you call back the most recent people to call first, or call the oldest ones first (up to 4 months since we last contacted them)?
Now, I am a person who generally feels that people are intelligent and if need be can use their brains most of the time, however I feel that recently I have been proved wrong time and again by some of my coworkers. This morning we were having our supervisor look over the phone screens of several people so that we could either call them in to schedule or put them in the pile of non-qualifiers. I chanced to look at the dates and the most recent one was about a month old. Now for normal people if you call them a month later you will most likely reach them, however for most drug users they don't really have a stable income and tend to move and change phone numbers often. That would make it seem, at least to me, that you should call in the MOST recent first as they are the most interested at the moment and we may still have a working number for them. Apparently my co-workers don't really understand this. Now, whether it is because they want to make it look like they are doing a more constant amount of work, or just don't want to have to call back so many people I don't know, but it just pissed me off to see that they had a whole stack of people that had called in the last couple of weeks that they hadn't had approved. Why would you do that? Yesterday I wasted 30 minutes of my time trying to call back people from 3 months ago (I only reached 3 of the 15 and 1 was no longer interested) when there was a whole new group that could have been called.
I tell you, every day is a new problem, either with the bosses or the co-workers and I am just tired of it. Why would they hire these people? They have no reasoning skills! They seem totally incapable of figuring things out on their own without mass amounts of guidance. This job certainly requires some training, however after a certain point you should be working almost completely independently. *sigh* What to do?