Occupational hazards

I work in a fairly small company, and in a small company, it's no big surprise that we are all sometimes expected to do things that fall a bit outside our traditional job descriptions. In many cases, I understand and am thoroughly OK with this. Being the second string line of support for the company's main phone line, for example, is really not that big a deal (particularly when you consider that the third and fourth lines of support are our accountant and our CAD specialist). There are, of course, other miscellaneous items that fall under that last "catch-all" item of every job description--"all other duties as assigned"--that I'm slightly less enthused about... Some of them, I'll admit, make me downright surly at times. But I feel it's important to remind myself in times like those that at least I have never been asked nor expected to interrupt my usual desk job temporarily to climb into the crawlspace in the ceiling of the women's bathroom and burrow myself through the building's ductwork to fix an errant cable. No, I can't say that has ever been among my particular "all other duties as assigned." I cannot, however, say the same thing for a particular co-worker of mine, who subsequently spent the better part of this afternoon picking pieces of blow-in insulation off his shirt and out of his hair and coughing up what were likely carcinogenic particulates.

Poor guy. He's also the one we call to fix the toilet when it's not behaving. I'm just guessing that when he signed on in the Sales department, this was not exactly what he had in mind.