Yes. Consider if he were hit by a bus tomorrow, they wouldn't hire a new person to do that job, they'd just have someone already employed spend 5 minutes to do that job instead. Every job I've ever worked there have been tons of near retirement aged people doing jobs producing spreadsheets and reports that no one reads, mostly by copy and pasting all day. When they retire, either someone else figures out how to do the same job copy and pasting automatically or figures out that no one had been looking at those reports for years anyway.
Hah! The "once a week" job guy recently retired but instead of hiring someone new they handed the task to an existing employee without consulting that person (to see if they had the requisite knowledge). Now that task is failing and they're paying consulting fees to the previous guy (well, they did at least once now) to come back in to (re)run that task... Which apparently failed regularly before he left but he "just knew" how to correct things/massage whatever (data?) it was and then re-run the task by hand.
That's the reason why I know about this situation... I know the guy that now has to do the old guy's "once a week" job (in addition to his existing one). He'll get the hang of it eventually... Probably. Maybe. :shrug:
The replacement was given four days to train with the retiring person to learn how to do the job. It wasn't enough, obviously.
Yes. Consider if he were hit by a bus tomorrow, they wouldn't hire a new person to do that job, they'd just have someone already employed spend 5 minutes to do that job instead. Every job I've ever worked there have been tons of near retirement aged people doing jobs producing spreadsheets and reports that no one reads, mostly by copy and pasting all day. When they retire, either someone else figures out how to do the same job copy and pasting automatically or figures out that no one had been looking at those reports for years anyway.