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Original poster

What's your unofficial role in work?

204 replies

MamaAndTheSofa · 07/03/2025 19:10

Chatting to a couple of friends the other day, we were discussing how we all have unofficial roles in work - roles that are never in any job description, but which someone has to do.

Mine is "Attender of funerals". When we feel we ought to send someone from the office to a funeral (eg a colleagues mum has died or something), it always ends up being me.

Another friend is the unofficial knot un-tier; if anyone has a knot they can't undo (which seems to happen ridiculously often in his work, as far as I can tell), they come to him and he undoes it.

Another friend is the one who always has hand cream.

What are yours?

OP posts:
17CherryTreeLane · 09/03/2025 15:41

Sender of cards, secret keeper and general counsellor/therapist.

selffellatingouroborosofhate · 09/03/2025 18:39

RightThenFred · 09/03/2025 14:18

At the risk of sounding humourless, I do find a lot of these examples depressing. The ones that are basically enabling other people's learned helplessness. It's very true that men do not get stuck into these "sticking plaster" roles. I've recently resolved to stop doing this. It's never done anything but hold me back. The worst example was probably when I joined a company as "X Specialist". As soon as I got there, I was put onto the task of "Y Donkey Work". I had very little experience of Y, but got stuck in and became reasonably proficient. There was actually a whole team of "Y Specialists", who simply couldn't or wouldn't learn the advanced skills. Their manager once apologetically said to me "It's just that you know how to do it". I nearly exploded. Poor management, low-quality colleagues - it wasn't long before I left for a job that actually used my skills instead of using me to mop up other people's deficiencies.

Yup. It's the blokes in my place who apparently cannot change a centrefeed roll.

Original poster
MamaAndTheSofa · 09/03/2025 21:58

Marble10 · 08/03/2025 23:15

'Nice handwriting' so naturally when something needs to be written on the board, in cards, meetings in minutes... it's me 😆

Oh, I'm the "nice handwriting" person in my work too!!

OP posts:
WilfredsPies · 09/03/2025 22:21

I work at quite a distance from my team, in the same office as people I’ve worked with for donkeys years. So in my team, I’m the one you go to when you need to know about processes, what happens before we do our bit, the reason we do our bit, how to do our bit properly and what happens after we’ve done our bit. When I’m with the people I’ve worked alongside for years, who know as much as I do, I’m in charge of bringing in new snacks we’ve not tried before, telling people to bugger off when they try and swap our nice chairs for their crappy old broken ones and telling management that we aren’t happy about stuff.

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