No doubt, I've harped on this theme before, but it came around to bite me again this past week--which clearly means The Universe at Large isn't heeding my rants--shocking as that may seem. [insert sarcastic eyeroll]
The backstory is that the client in question--so far as I can tell, anyway--staffs its I/T department almost exclusively with vendors (meaning temps). Mind you, I'm not slagging temp. employees: I've been there, done that and ragged out the t-shirt for good measure. But is it ever obvious when the contracts expire! That's when I stroll into work, to be greeted by emails (from their third shift) telling me to fix data in a system to which I have absolutely zero direct access.
You'd think that by this point, I'd have a boilerplate response filed away on a shared drive by now. But, apparently, I'm a slow learner. So I merely direct the "newbie" to the proper channels (i.e. the "upstream" application that actually generates the data) and make a point of carbon-copying the person who reported the original issue. Normally, that's the last I hear of it. Until the next contract renewal, anyway.
If it were a question of the company pissing away its intellectual capital in false economies, I'd shrug and dismiss them with a simple, "Good shuttance, ya mouth-breathing, bean-counting wankers." But the fact is that they're offloading some of that cost to "my" balance-sheet via the "free" training I provide to fill the vacuum of organizational know-how.
I suppose there's a rule-of-thumb metric buried in here somewhere that has to do with the ratio of temps vs. "real" employees one works with. And, while I wouldn't presume to interpret the actual significance of that ratio for any given situation, I do think it's a number worth tracking--regularly and for the long haul. Granted, it can't match the real "golden ratio" for sheer nerdtastic coolness. But if you find yourself in the position of having to triage clients, I think that there are few better indicators of the health & longevity of a business relationship.
