The Unwillingness to Say No

In all of the "profiles" I've done through various team building activities at work, and through all the 360 reviews, etc. there has been one major and consistent flaw pointed out in my personality - I'm just the girl who can't say no. (at least at work)

I'm too accommodating. I'm too easy on my clients. I don't stop to ask "Should" we do this? I just pause and think "How can" we do this.

And so here I sit at 9:30PM at night, having once again, bent over backwards to take care of a client. The client (my client = internal staff, project manager) called in a panic with edits to a series of technical figures. He called at 5PM. The designer who created the files had left to pick up her son from day care and he needed edits made by 10PM tonight. What??? a 10PM client deadline? WTF?

But, I didn't question. I truly assume that when people contact you in a panic at 5PM with a 10PM deadline they have exhausted all options to push this until the morning. I tracked down the designer in her car, asked her to please log in from home and make the edits. She was good enough to do it. We worked together (through a couple of crashes, some bad handwriting on edits, and two totally unexplained marks that we had to track people down to explain) and were getting the last edits done at 9:30 when one of the team members IM'd me to say they were going to forward the file to the client without the figures since the edits weren't done and we could finish in the morning.

WHAT???????

We had an option for doing the edits in the morning?????

I'm feeling used and abused. And worse, I passed that along to the designer who is at home with a 5 year old and having to ignore his needs to take care of this.

I think I've learned this lesson before, and it hasn't stuck. Maybe this time?