[Lunaryn]

Bluecat has a point, even though it's not very well put.

I work in what could be termed a large small company (non-profit). We have a variety of divisions but few enough people that some flexibility is always going to be needed. I'm part of the IT department, brought on to handle miscellaneous projects. I do various IT and programming work in support of various software programs used by the company.

Nominally, something like data entry would be outside my job description. We have other people responsible for this. One time, however, after a major site-wide software upgrade, there was some early morning confusion over the new system, and a couple people ended up working in the test database instead of the production database. This included a data entry person putting an entire shift's worth of time sheets into the test database instead of the production database. Given the nature of the front-end software, we were unable to migrate the records over in any automated way, so we had to manually reenter time sheets, and I was tasked with assisting with this since I was the most familiar with the new system.

In this case, emergency data entry for a couple hours fell vaguely within the purview of my job description, in that my primary duty for that week was to see that everyone got up and running on the new system smoothly. It wasn't an unreasonable expectation in that context.

On the other hand, if I were arbitrarily pulled off of my current project and put on data entry because a data entry person was out sick, that would be outside my job description, and such a thing being a regular occurrence would be grounds to consider seeking new employment.

Ultimately, the problem with most support-capable jobs in FFXI is not that parties demand flexibility. It's that by and large they always demand you provide a particular limited subset of your job's (or subjob's) capabilities, and that particular subset is often not what you signed up for. Worse still, those who survive this kind of treatment often don't learn how to do anything else, meaning that party leaders who would like flexibility often feel they can't count on said jobs to provide anything more than what the average party has ended up expecting from them.