The fact that the reward for doing good work is to get more work just seems like a general life rule. I mean, I suppose it applies to sales and NPR, but it applies to pretty much everything.
Way back in my long-ago youth, I discovered that I could do most school assignments in a fraction of the time allotted.
This led to repeated variations of the same thing happening: I’d get an assignment, along with the rest of class, finish it, assume that everyone else was as finished as I was, and proceed to become disruptive, because most of everybody else was not finished and whatever I was doing to amuse myself distracted them from doing what they were supposed to be doing.
So the teachers started giving me more work to do. Everyone else would get 10 math problems to solve, and I’d get 25. The thing is, I had the idea by the end of the second or third, and didn’t really need additional repetition to learn or retain. This gave me a bad attitude towards education that I didn’t really shake until I started work on my second degree.
I don’t work in sales, OR give money to public radio.
James – I had the same problem in fourth grade. But then the teacher wouldn’t give me more work. Or let me go to the back of the room and play with the educational toys, or get out a book and read. She’d just punish me for the inevitable disruption, if I did anything but spend literally half the class period sitting and staring into space. Yeah, that really didn’t help…
It’s not just public radio. If you give to the Alzheimer’s Association, you get reminders asking if you’ve forgotten to give your annual gift.
It seems kind of cruel.
As the moniker suggests, I like cats. Walked into a humane society on a trip to another state, visited a few kitties, tried to leave some money anonymously walking out the door. “Please leave some contact information purely for demographic purposes”, they asked. Three years later, still receive regular fund raising requests from them. No good deed goes unpunished?
Mark: That’s hilarious! Made my day.
Mark: Yes, I also have been inundated with Alzeheimer’s Association begging letters. The expense of sending them has obviously long since eaten up the small donations I gave them a couple of years ago.
Over the past year, I did give significant extra money to [REDACTED]. My annual membership in that organization had always been fifty dollars, but when I got a renewal notice last week — three months early — they had added up said contributions and now “suggested” that total as starting point for my new annual membership. Bah.
There’s a classic short story, “The Absent-Minded Coterie” by Robert Barr, about a scam artist who puts an ad in papers offering to give away a free pamphlet to people self-identifying as having memory problems. He does so, but that’s just to build up a mailing list, which he can use to send them bills every few months for installment plan payments on services they don’t remember asking for — but then, they wouldn’t, would they?
Yeah, it doesn’t matter what/who you give money to – political contribution, place of worship, street panhandler, etc. – they all work under the assumption that it’s easier to get more from someone who’s already given than it is to cultivate a new donor.
Like Shrug said: a few years ago we noticed that NPR was burning through our donation and more in efforts to get more money from us.
If they’d just stick with e-mail, it would be a pain, but at least we wouldn’t be paying for our on junk mail.
My first software job, the work got divided into month-long period. We were assigned all our work for the month at the start, and had workitems to track how much progress we made on each item. Typically, there was a mad dash of late nights at the end of the period. I didn’t mind working late, but I hate rushing through things at the last minute, so I would work late early in the month, so that it wouldn’t (in theory) be so stressful at the end. Inevitably, what would happen at the end was that at the end of the month, my manager would notice that I was “low” on work, and give me workitems that someone else wouldn’t be able to finish in time. Then I would be rushing at the end, anyway, but with someone else’s workitems.
I asked my mentor how to deal with this, and he said, “Yeah, there’s no point in working ahead. Or if you really, really, hate doing things at the last minute, you can work ahead, but don’t update your workitems to show how much you’ve done.”
Due to changes in life and the tax laws, I knew I wouldn’t be deducting anything after 2017. So I lumped several years expected charitable donations into a “Donor Advised Fund”. You can deduct as soon as the DAF is funded, but distribute the donations over whatever time period you want. As a bonus, you’re allowed to donate highly-appreciated shares of stocks, ETFs, or mutual funds so you can avoid capital gains taxes on those.
A side benefit is that the DAF makes the donation, so the recipient doesn’t have your personal information unless you request it.
Along with Shrug, I’ve noticed that if you give $50 the next year’s solicitation has suggested gifts of $60, $100 and $125. Or else it has $50, but also a “handwritten” note saying “Mark, if you could give us $100 this year it would REALLY help us meet our goals.”
I’ve given a token amount to WGBH for some time. A few years ago, I called them saying that I give online once a year in the fall, so please don’t send me any solicitations. It worked remarkably well. On the rare occasion that an appeal comes in, it goes directly to the recycling.
I used to donate cash to the food bank around Christmas time.
This got me solicitations for other parts of the year.
So I sent a polite letter indicating that I’d prefer that my donation be used to provide food to hungry people, and not to continued solicitation. That got me off the mailing list.
I used to give annually to the American Heart Association, but they called me on the phone once, and I told them that just for that I would never donate to them again, and I haven’t donated to them since then.
I had a client who was an MD and heavily involved with a specific hospital. I made a donation of $5 in his name (this was a very long time ago). Annually after that for 20 years or longer I would receive a contribution solicitation from them asking for a donation. I finally wrote back and pointed out that if they had not been soliciting me annually for so long, they would have actually been able to use the $5 for something medical instead of postage to mail me solicitations – they should have guessed based on why I sent the donation after say, 5 or 10 years, that they were not getting another one from and saved the cost of the mailing.
Rats, I left out that I made the contribution when he died in his memory.
When I was in first grade my mom went to parent-teacher night. She came home very confused –
“All the other parents complain that the children get too much homework and they have to stay up too late to do their homework. You never do any homework – how come?”
Comics I Don't Understand 
The fact that the reward for doing good work is to get more work just seems like a general life rule. I mean, I suppose it applies to sales and NPR, but it applies to pretty much everything.
Way back in my long-ago youth, I discovered that I could do most school assignments in a fraction of the time allotted.
This led to repeated variations of the same thing happening: I’d get an assignment, along with the rest of class, finish it, assume that everyone else was as finished as I was, and proceed to become disruptive, because most of everybody else was not finished and whatever I was doing to amuse myself distracted them from doing what they were supposed to be doing.
So the teachers started giving me more work to do. Everyone else would get 10 math problems to solve, and I’d get 25. The thing is, I had the idea by the end of the second or third, and didn’t really need additional repetition to learn or retain. This gave me a bad attitude towards education that I didn’t really shake until I started work on my second degree.
I don’t work in sales, OR give money to public radio.
James – I had the same problem in fourth grade. But then the teacher wouldn’t give me more work. Or let me go to the back of the room and play with the educational toys, or get out a book and read. She’d just punish me for the inevitable disruption, if I did anything but spend literally half the class period sitting and staring into space. Yeah, that really didn’t help…
It’s not just public radio. If you give to the Alzheimer’s Association, you get reminders asking if you’ve forgotten to give your annual gift.
It seems kind of cruel.
As the moniker suggests, I like cats. Walked into a humane society on a trip to another state, visited a few kitties, tried to leave some money anonymously walking out the door. “Please leave some contact information purely for demographic purposes”, they asked. Three years later, still receive regular fund raising requests from them. No good deed goes unpunished?
Mark: That’s hilarious! Made my day.
Mark: Yes, I also have been inundated with Alzeheimer’s Association begging letters. The expense of sending them has obviously long since eaten up the small donations I gave them a couple of years ago.
Over the past year, I did give significant extra money to [REDACTED]. My annual membership in that organization had always been fifty dollars, but when I got a renewal notice last week — three months early — they had added up said contributions and now “suggested” that total as starting point for my new annual membership. Bah.
There’s a classic short story, “The Absent-Minded Coterie” by Robert Barr, about a scam artist who puts an ad in papers offering to give away a free pamphlet to people self-identifying as having memory problems. He does so, but that’s just to build up a mailing list, which he can use to send them bills every few months for installment plan payments on services they don’t remember asking for — but then, they wouldn’t, would they?
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19369/19369-h/19369-h.htm#The_Absent-Minded_Coterie
Yeah, it doesn’t matter what/who you give money to – political contribution, place of worship, street panhandler, etc. – they all work under the assumption that it’s easier to get more from someone who’s already given than it is to cultivate a new donor.
Like Shrug said: a few years ago we noticed that NPR was burning through our donation and more in efforts to get more money from us.
If they’d just stick with e-mail, it would be a pain, but at least we wouldn’t be paying for our on junk mail.
My first software job, the work got divided into month-long period. We were assigned all our work for the month at the start, and had workitems to track how much progress we made on each item. Typically, there was a mad dash of late nights at the end of the period. I didn’t mind working late, but I hate rushing through things at the last minute, so I would work late early in the month, so that it wouldn’t (in theory) be so stressful at the end. Inevitably, what would happen at the end was that at the end of the month, my manager would notice that I was “low” on work, and give me workitems that someone else wouldn’t be able to finish in time. Then I would be rushing at the end, anyway, but with someone else’s workitems.
I asked my mentor how to deal with this, and he said, “Yeah, there’s no point in working ahead. Or if you really, really, hate doing things at the last minute, you can work ahead, but don’t update your workitems to show how much you’ve done.”
Due to changes in life and the tax laws, I knew I wouldn’t be deducting anything after 2017. So I lumped several years expected charitable donations into a “Donor Advised Fund”. You can deduct as soon as the DAF is funded, but distribute the donations over whatever time period you want. As a bonus, you’re allowed to donate highly-appreciated shares of stocks, ETFs, or mutual funds so you can avoid capital gains taxes on those.
A side benefit is that the DAF makes the donation, so the recipient doesn’t have your personal information unless you request it.
Along with Shrug, I’ve noticed that if you give $50 the next year’s solicitation has suggested gifts of $60, $100 and $125. Or else it has $50, but also a “handwritten” note saying “Mark, if you could give us $100 this year it would REALLY help us meet our goals.”
I’ve given a token amount to WGBH for some time. A few years ago, I called them saying that I give online once a year in the fall, so please don’t send me any solicitations. It worked remarkably well. On the rare occasion that an appeal comes in, it goes directly to the recycling.
I used to donate cash to the food bank around Christmas time.
This got me solicitations for other parts of the year.
So I sent a polite letter indicating that I’d prefer that my donation be used to provide food to hungry people, and not to continued solicitation. That got me off the mailing list.
I used to give annually to the American Heart Association, but they called me on the phone once, and I told them that just for that I would never donate to them again, and I haven’t donated to them since then.
I had a client who was an MD and heavily involved with a specific hospital. I made a donation of $5 in his name (this was a very long time ago). Annually after that for 20 years or longer I would receive a contribution solicitation from them asking for a donation. I finally wrote back and pointed out that if they had not been soliciting me annually for so long, they would have actually been able to use the $5 for something medical instead of postage to mail me solicitations – they should have guessed based on why I sent the donation after say, 5 or 10 years, that they were not getting another one from and saved the cost of the mailing.
Rats, I left out that I made the contribution when he died in his memory.
When I was in first grade my mom went to parent-teacher night. She came home very confused –
“All the other parents complain that the children get too much homework and they have to stay up too late to do their homework. You never do any homework – how come?”
“I finish it on the school bus coming home.”