The perpetually busy Employee of the Century.
'I'm so busy, I'm so overworked, I do tons of overtime that I'd never dream of expecting to be paid for, this task I'm doing at the moment is so incredibly complicated that it's going to take days and weeks and months because it's from a Word list that I type out first from a collection of Word lists created from handwritten lists that are scanned and filed and once all the lists have come in and then I've got to type each of the letters each time, then sort them manually into alphabetical order once I've printed them out and it'll never stop -'.
How about we record the details in Excel, set up a template letter and then create a mail merge instead? <blinks slowly> I can set it up for you if you like, then Excel can be updated as you go along and sorted alphabetically so it would save you time. <blinks again>
'Oh, no. I'm so busy, I have to do the task I'm doing, all the letters have to be printed and then sorted alphabetically because they don't come out in order from the Word lists'.
<bangs head on desk>
Three weeks later: 'I'm so busy, the letters are taking forever, I'm doing so much unpaid overtime on this'.
Busy AND Important people.
'the information you need is on a spreadsheet. We keep excellent records, it'll take you a few moments to go through it'
Spreadsheet is a random list where things that should be separate fields are all mashed together into a 300 character text string with no logical place to separate them. And the 'list' = some in Column A, some in Column G because Cell A is overlapping, some in Column X because Cell A overlapped, some in Row 37.
'Where's the date and outcome for these?'
'The information is on a spreadsheet'
Separate spreadsheet, not even a second tab, where there is no common field to indicate the link between spreadsheet 1 and spreadsheet 2.
Sort through it. Make sense of it, go back to spreadsheet 1. Some fucker's deleted three columns of data because 'I didn't need it and it wouldn't all fit on a page of the report'.