Acronyms, abbreviations, and other stuff used in this blog:
I'm a techie. I'm a systems programmer and I program on IBM mainframes (uh, I'm sorry. I mean, of course, high end servers). I enjoy reading stuff by Steven Den Beste. He's an engineer and I've enjoyed reading his technical blogs. He wrote sumpin' a while back about OS/2 and how Microsoft won the OS battle. I came in late and never got a chance to get involved in the discussion. Somewhere down the road, I would like to weigh in on how IBM blew a five year head start and how Microsoft's monopoly has led to total mediocrity in the PC OS arena. I'm in tech support and I have to attend an Inquisition Meeting every Wednesday (another subject for a future blog) and the PC guys always have more PR's open. I always smile and say after forty years, mainframes have Reliability, Availability, and Servicability. We IPL and our OS stays up for months at a time. Our customer sat for Host (dat's us dinosaurs) always leads the pack. Nyuck. Nyuck. Nyuck. It really pisses off YWS's to have OF's laugh at them.
In my early years as a young hero sysprog when we needed a new function installed on one of our MVS systems I got the job. New functions are usually available as PTF's. So I would order the PTF and use SMP/E to apply it. The first thing I would do was run an apply check job. SMP/E being the smart program that it was back then it would check to make sure all the prerequisite PTFs were available on the system. If not, it would generate a report and the sysprog (me) would have to go over it and try to figger out what PTF's were missing. The sysprog (me) would have to track down PE chains and prereq chains. This would often involve calls to IBM support for help. Tracking down missing PTF's was a pain in the ass, until my mentor told me to treat it like a game. 'You like working crossword puzzles', he told me, 'treat this like a puzzle'. After that, it never bothered me to put on PTF's anymore. It actually became fun. Now, SMP/E is so easy, anyone can install PTF's. It has reports that tells a sysprog exactly which PTF's are missing. Almost takes some of the fun out of putting on PTFs now.
Anyway, I remembered my mentor's advice to make a game or a puzzle out of disagreeable tasks. And that brings us to CTF. The management of MBUOMPOOTCIDNN has decreed that all employees have to take CTF. After twenty-nine years at TCIDNN, I can recognize a bullshit program when I see one. Some high muckity-muck took some MBA courses at a college and got filled with bullshit by someone who has never (and never could) worked in the private sector and commisioned some bullshit artists to put together this employee competency program called Crawl to Failure. When I first started it, I grumbled (grumble, grumble, grumble) about how this was a total waste of my valuable time. But then, the words of my mentor came back to me, 'Flow with the bullshit. Bend like the reed with the wind. Treat it as a game, Grasshopper.' Which I now do. And TCIDNN pays me the same amount of money to do this as they would do if I were actually doing sumpin' productive. Wait a minute! This is productive education. I got a SHTS code for it.
So yesterday, I covered how I got to go out to a database and I saw the Vision and Mission Statement for MBUOMPOOTCIDNN. These were works of art. I mean they were primo buzzword bingo winners. Ah, if only I could write sumpin' that good, I could get a consulting (remember Dogbert says consult is a combination of con and insult) job writing Visions and Mission Statements, and putting together competency programs for American corporations. The only con job that tops that is Diversity Consultant.
Today, I started on the section of CTF for personal development. It reviewed our development process at TCIDNN. It also talked about how we were evaluated. Since our managers are oh so busy and oh so important, we have to write what they expect us to do. These are called TIETDTY's. At the end of the year, we have to submit our accomplishments. these are our TIADTY's. Then our managers evaluate us. These are WMTAWWD's. I once had a manager who realized how bogus this program was. He wrote our TIETDTY's for us. If it looked like we were gonna miss our targets, he let us change em'. That way we always met our targets. My current manager, on the other hand, is a believer in the process. Bummer!
After yesterday, I figgered our Vision and Mission Statement were slam dunk buzzword bingo winners, but in the Competency Topic in CTF, I came across this gem that pegged both the bullshit and the buzzword meters:
Let's count em'
Assets, skills, and methods: these three components
components (1)
interlock
interlock (2)
to form a unified business architecture
unified business architecture (3)
that has mutual synergy
synergy (4) (all God's chillen gotta have synergy)
among its components,
components (already used once, so doesn't count against total)
which must be delivered in a coordinated fashion.
coordinated fashion (5)
In order to ensure integrated harmony
integrated harmony (6) (I do not even know what that means)
and not duplication, MPOOTCIDNN divided the competencies
competencies (7)
required to deliver the end-to-end
end-to-end (8)
services that our customers demand among the lines of business.
lines of business (9)
Each line was given exclusive domain
exclusive domain (10)
over a particular set of competency segments.
competency segments (11)
As a consequence, MBUOMPOOTCIDNN was given responsibility for the xxxxxxxxx Competency and its associated set of four competency segments,
competency segments (already used)
which are based on the core skills
core skills (12)
of the majority of our professionals:
And then it goes on to list and describe the four competency segments. By this time, I have no more space in my brain for buzzwords. I'm taking Friday off, so I have a full three days to assimilate the current crop and clean up more storage in my brain to harvest the next integrated harmonious competencies of the lines of business and enhance my core skills and form a unified business architecture with mutual synergy to deliver end-to-end services. All this while Valuing Diversity.
So if you happen to be in a building of TCIDNN on Monday and you walk by an office and there's this old cripple guy in there looking at a computer screen and cackling away it will be me.
I'll be Crawling to Failure.
And I'll be laughing my ass off.
And they pay me for this!
Posted by denny at June 20, 2002 09:23 PM