I really don't feel like commenting on anything in the news or in the local paper. And the stuff in the Urinal and Constipation is so rich for ridicule today.
For example, there is a column about hate crimes. I'll tell you I am really sick of that crap!. If I kill you because I hate you are you any more dead than if I didn't hate you? Or, if I'm sentenced to death for murder can you make me any deader if it were a hate crime? Look, crime is crime. I really don't want to talk about how ridiculous the concept of hate crimes is.
Another booger eatin' moh-ron had to weigh in in a letter about how Jimmy Carter was a better President than Ronald Reagon because Iran-Contra was the worst stain on the Presidency in history. I really think that was a very poor choice of words, because the only stain I think about in regards to the Presidency involves a blue dress.
So the paper, today, is a target rich environment, but I'm just not in the mood. Even making fun of Molly Ivins doesn't appeal to me. So I guess I'll just have to talk about SHTS and SPTS.
Everybody says you shouldn't be judgmental, but how can you help it when life is filled with so many idiots? The Rat in the comic strip Pearls Before Swine.
And that is a great lead in to SHTS and SPTS. What the heck are those things you may ask? First let's talk a little about how bureaucracies work.
The first order of a bureaucracy is survival. The second order of a bureaucracy is growth. You can try to trim back a bureaucracy, but it will always grow back, often stronger than before. And, when organizations cannot figure out a bureaucracy, they create another bureaucracy to try to manage the first one. And that brings me to SHTS.
The company I work for, which shall remain nameless, does not seem to know where the money is going and how much certain functions cost. This is a fine example of a bureaucracy at work and it is functioning normally. So the solution was to create a tracking system that would track everything (and I mean everything) that an employee does. I shall call this the Stupid Hourly Tracking System (not the real name) or SHTS for short. SHTS is an elaborate system of codes (lots of codes) and subcodes (lots of subcodes). We were given a one hour training session via a conference call and a printed presentation which was unreadable. Oh, and we had to start keeping track of our time four weeks before the system was available. So we had spreadsheets with codes and subcodes that were incomprehensible to us.
Wait, it gets better. Three months before my organization was supposed to start using SHTS, the only person who knew anything about the administration of SHTS got laid off (surplussed in company speak). Someone with a bad case of clue deficiency syndrome suddenly realized that we couldn't administer SHTS without this person, so she was hired back as a contractor. Talk about management not knowing SHTS!
So comes the day when we have to start entering our time in SHTS. At a meeting, I asked my manager for some clarification on how to do some coding. Have you ever had a manager answer a question and say absolutely nothing? Words came out, but they must have been managerspeak (the language that managers use to communicate with each other so us peons cannot understand them) cause, in the words of Arlo Guthrie, "He talked for forty five minutes and I didn't understand a word he said".
Codes. Did I mention codes. There is a code for almost everything. I haven't found one for going to the bathroom yet, but maybe there is:
Now my manager is gung ho about everything that comes down from the mountaintop of upper management. And what starts as a tiny little turd at the top is a mountain of bullshit by the time it reaches us bottom feeders. Everyone has to have all their SHTS coding done by 8:00 PM on Friday. We have to have ours in by noon on Friday, thus guessing what we'll be doing from noon on. We have two people who come in at noon so I guess they call the psychic hotline to decide what they're gonna do the rest of the day. I can just picture our general manager eagerly waiting until 8:00 PM Friday to pull the reports and see what everyone has been doing.
Who thinks this stuff up? What kind of drugs are they on? Can't you just imagine a bunch of managers at a meeting passing around a pipe and one of them jumps up and says "Here's a great idea. Let's do some SHTS!"
A few weeks ago my manager forwarded an urgent note from the SHTS Administrator to not precode our SHTS. As a good worker bee I asked my manager how this related to his rules. He repeated his rules. Have you ever tried to nail jello to a wall? Oh, and periodically, the project manager comes to us and says we have to go back and change certain codes. I guess they're not getting the numbers they want.
One of my coworkers pointed out to me that SHTS is the perfect bureaucratic tool:
And they're basing business decisions on this.
It just couldn't get any better, except for SPTS which is SHTS existential opposite that completes the duality. SPTS is our Stupid Problem Tracking System. We used to have a mainframe based problem tracking system, but that is now passe. Leaving out the fact that the system worked, was reliable and stable, and could also be used for change management, it was a green screen system. Can't have that can we? So, in our ultimate wisdom, we wrote our own. Just one thing wrong. Shortly after going into production, the guy who wrote the application quit. No one else knew anything about it. And to make things even better, I was at a meeting where one of the project managers told us we were gonna move change management to SPTS. I turned to the person sitting next to me and mumbled 'We're doomed!'
So, I do have a wonderful time at work trying to keep my SHTS together. And it is coming up on the highpoint of the year: our annual diversity training.
I do love my job!
Posted by denny at May 1, 2002 08:44 PM