The lamb's blood on the lintel of the doorway to my office must have worked. The dreaded Dark Angel of Layoffs passed over my office and I survived yet another purge. And, yes, rumors were correct, as my friends in Dallas informed me. They knew some people who were told that their services were no longer desired by TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name) today, albeit, not of their own choice. I also heard there are going to be some site consolidations. That means people will have to move to keep a job or leave TCIDNN. Tough choice!
But today I want to deconstruct an editorial from the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation. The editor of the paper is Cynthia Tucker and, although she is an unabashed liberal, she does have principles. For example, she actually called for the resignation of Bill Clinton at the start of the Lewinsky scandal. That surprised the crap out of me. She has also come out against the crass, money grubbing antics of the King family, who have turned Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream legacy into I have a Cash Cow by selling his name and writings to the highest bidder. In Atlanta, it takes a lot of courage to disparage St. Coretta and her brood, but Cynthia has actually done that. Also, she has taken on Atlanta's other Cynthia, that certified nut case, Cynthia McKinney, who, I'm ashamed to say is my congressional representative.
But Ms. Tucker does have a weak point where guns are concerned. She's against them. Whenever an anti gun editorial appears in the Urinal and Constipation, you can bet your ass that Cynthia wrote it. Let's look at todays anti gun editorial:
Nobody wants pilots to have guns in the cockpit but pilots themselves and a few congressional supporters.
Wait a minute! I want them to have guns and in the words of Jesse Jackson, I am somebody. And goddammit, I know my sister, my brother-in-law, my nephew, my friend Richard, Neal Boortz, and whole big bunches of other people want pilots armed. Cynthia, are we a bunch of nobodies?
The Bush administration, in the person of Transportation Security Administration Director John W. Magaw, is opposed to the idea. And Magaw knows what he's talking about.
He does? Sez who?
"The responsibility of the pilot is to control the aircraft," Magaw told the Senate Commerce and Transportation Committee this week. "The use of firearms aboard a U.S. aircraft must be limited to those thoroughly trained members of law enforcement. Our position is: make that cockpit as safe as we can, control that plane and get it on the ground."
Wait a minute. This was the paradigm (I just can't resist getting a buzzword in here) before 9/11. Get the plane on the ground? He is right that the pilot has to control the aircraft. What better control is there than shooting some brainwashed madman who thinks he can go bang seventy two virgins by flying the plane into a building? And this bastard knows what he is talking about? Has he ever been on a hijacked airplane?
Since Sept. 11, the idea of guns in the cockpit has taken on all the momentum that could be mustered by the nation's thousands of commercial pilots, but the airlines themselves, the federal government and other members of the flight crews all oppose it.
All right. Let's think this through. Who is in charge of the airplane? Yes, you in the back. That's right. The pilot. He's the HMFIC (the man in charge). And, ya know, over thousands of pilots couldn't be wrong.
Magaw said rigorously trained air marshals should be the only armed people on a flight, and the government is committed to increasing their presence.
But until there are enough marshals, I would sure feel safer if the pilot is packing heat.
Magaw is not just a federal bureaucrat with an opinion. He spent 40 years in law enforcement and consulted extensively with experts and interest groups on this. He is joined in opposition by Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, the Airline Transport Association and the Association of Flight attendants.
Here's a simple question. Whom do you trust? A bureaucrat or a pilot who is reponsible for many lives on a daily basis? Uh, Yes, you in the third row. The pilot? Good answer. I'd feel safer if the pilot had a rod. Pilot to Abdul, 'Hey buddy, I got your trip to paradise right here.' Bang!
Yet some members of Congress vow to continue trying to pass a law allowing pilots to arm themselves. The House Transportation aviation subcommittee will take up legislation on the issue today, and a group of senators is also backing a bill.
Good for them. I bet Cynthia McKinney and Ted Kennedy are not among them.
Advocates said Magaw's comments did nothing but pressure them to redouble their efforts. That's disappointing.
No. That's encouraging.
There are many, many other aviation security issues that Congress could better spend its time on. As just one example, airport screening procedures still need a lot of work. Congress ought to let go of the issue of guns in cockpits.
Airport screening procedures need a lot of work? Now there's the understatement of the year. Good God, there was another metal detector unplugged in Houston yesterday! Jesus! I thought little Tommy Daschle said, 'To professionalize, you must federalize.' Great! Half the airport screeners, wait, better than half of the airport screeners couldn't get an order at McDonald's correct and you want us to depend on them for airport security?. And all these asshole democrats (Jesus, God, would someone just ram a sock into Hillary's mouth) ranting and raving about how the Bush Administration had advance warnings of 9/11. What the hell were they supposed to do? Pick out Middle Eastern men and search them? Isn't that like, um, racial profiling? Let's hear what Ann Coulter has to say about that. Even though 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, even now we cannot single out persons of Middle Eastern origin. Yeah. Airport screening procedures. That's the ticket. Wake the fuck up! Man, now I'm really getting pissed! Many pilots are ex-military and guess what? They have been trained on how to use guns. Airport screeners are the dregs of society who will soon be unionized, which means we can't fire them, and most of them couldn't even say 'Do you want fries with that?' C'mon Cynthia, get with the program!
All this reminds me of what Archie Bunker once said on an All In the Family episode. Issue everyone a rod when they board the plane. That way when the hijacker tries to take over the plane he's outgunned.
Works for me.
Things are kinda gloomy at TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name). There are another round of layoffs coming and everyone feels like the Sword of Damocles is hanging over our heads. Rumors are rampant. Last week's rumor was the layoffs would be announced last Wednesday. This week's rumor is that they will be announced tomorrow. It's like being at the Last Supper. Lord, am I the one? But, since I am eligible for retirement, I would just get 'retired'. So, in effect, I am bulletproof. Anyway, if I got 'retired' I could spend more time blogging and maybe, just maybe, I could get my blogs up to the level where other bloggers would actually read what I wrote. On the downside, some of my best material comes from TCIDNN, and that is the subject of today's blog.
In the blog I wrote on May 13, The LFQP I talked about how companies, when in a downturn, usually do two things:
We've already had the layoffs (with more to come) and now we have a FQP.
I think the reason we have FQP's is that we have entirely too many managers. That is also the reason we have matrix management and dotted line management organizations. In our company we sometimes refer to managers as lion food. It seems two lions escaped from a zoo. They met up two months later. The first lion was skinny and mangy. The second lion was fat and well groomed. The first lion said 'How come you look so good? I ate one person and they've been hunting me ever since.' The second lion said, 'I've been hanging out at the headquarters of TCIDNN. I've eaten one manager a week and no one has noticed.'
So, we have too many managers and I guess they run around in circles screaming and shouting that they must do something, anything! So what does that mean? Another FQP.
This iteration of another FQP is a self study course that I will call CTF (Crawl to Failure). Everyone in my organization has to finish CTF by the end of June. My particular group was only told about this three weeks ago. CTF is supposed to address skills needed to better perform our jobs. I've taken the first two units and already have enough buzzwords to fill out a buzzword bingo card. Empowerment? It's there. Vision? It's there. In fact we have a Vision Portal. I'm not kidding. Competencies? Yup. Core skills? That too. I feel smarter already. Oh, and since our group has to do everything better than every other group, we have to send a Status Report documenting where we are in CTF to one of our project managers every Tuesday. Isn't that special?
I have been with TCIDNN for twenty nine years and the one thing I've learned on FQP's and special certifications and other bureaucratic bullshit is to always wait until the last minute. There are two reasons for this:
So I've been taking my time doing CTF.
CTF also eats up hard drive space as I have had to download some large databases. That means I have to find the servers where these databases reside. That involves searching the wonderful world of TCIDNN servers to find the specific one I require for that particular database.
I have found a few tricks to doing CTF. When you click on a particular module, it expands to sections that you click on to read. When you close each section, it marks it as complete. When you finish a module, you send off a completion certificate. You don't really have to do anything at all!!! I gotta love the person who designed CTF.
My officemate did tell me that in module four there was a test. Here's another trick: When taking tests for certifications or other types of courses designed to build enhanced competency skills, always choose the answers with the most buzzwords. Trust me, this works. A few years back I had to take a certification exam for another FQP and I didn't even look at any of the course material. Answer a: one buzzword. Answer b: one buzzword Answer c: three buzzwords Answer d: all of the above. Correct answer is c. Another hint: All of the above and None of the above are usually wrong answers. I passed the test. No problem.
And of course we have a SHTS code to use for this. For info on SHTS see SHTS and SPTS, my May 1 blog. And this is productive education. There is also a code for nonproductive education which begs the question: If it's nonproductive, why do we do it?
So I am anxiously awaiting tomorrow to see if I will get laid off or, if nothing happens, what the next rumor will be I'll be in my office CTFing, SHTing, and SPTing.
In the meantime, my officemate and I have spread lamb's blood on the lintel over the entrance to our office in hopes that the dreaded Angel of Layoffs will pass over us.
Wish us luck.
I'm heading up to St. Louis tomorrow to attend a retirement dinner for a friend who was just 'retired' from TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name). When I was first hired by TCIDNN, he was my mentor. I continued to work for TCIDNN and he left the company twice to pursue other endeavors. How he came back to work for TCIDNN is an interesting story in itself but I'm not gonna relate it here. He's leaving again, albeit involuntarily, but he is getting full retirement and severance pay. And TCIDNN is giving him a retirement dinner and I'm attending.
I'm not writing anything this week after today and I see many lost opportunities. Monday's Atlanta Urinal and Constipation was a target rich environement. I mean it was just begging for ridicule. There was the expected anti-gun editorial. Joseph Lowery wrote a pro-Palestinian op-ed. And, I cannot leave out the incredibly funny column by that noted humorist Molly Ivins. She once again points out that the Israeli military offensive had no effect on Palestinian terrorism. Did I miss the reports of all the suicide bombings that have occured since the Israeli offensive? That Molly. What a kidder.
But I'm not gonna write about any of that stuff. Since I have to attend a Diversity Meeting today, I'd like to say a little bit about the full day Diversity Awareness Workshop I had to attend a few years ago.
If you read my LFQP blog from two days ago you might remember GOC's rule
of thumb about training sessions: If, when you walk into a classroom, the tables and/or chairs are in a horseshoe shape, you have a Ken and Barbie in the front of the room, and they call themselves facilitators, it's gonna be a long day. It was.
When I arrived and saw the danger signals, I had my action plan in place. I would sign the class roster and, at the first break, I would split. Alas, Ken and Barbie had safeguards in place. They would not allow us to sign the roster until after lunch. Hmmm. This Ken and Barbie team is smarter than the usual Ken and Barbie team. Curses! Foiled again!
Ken, who was very obviously gay, introduced himself and told us how much fun we were gonna have. Ken, ol buddy, you should never start off a class, uh, a workshop with a blatant lie. Barbie, introduced herself, and told us, with pride, that she was a New York Jew. Huh? What do we care? Maybe this was supposed to heighten our Diversity Awareness.
Our first exercise was to recall some time in our distant past where we had experienced the feeling of being different from others. We had to share this moment with the other members of the Workshop. I could think of some time in the current present. I felt different from anyone who thought this day wasn't gonna be a total waste of time. But, I played along, and shared my experience of being the first person in my second grade class to wear glasses, and being called four eyes by my classmates. I feel much better now that I've shared this experience. I understand how others must feel about being different. I see the light. I embrace Diversity. Can I leave now? No? Damn!
Nope. We have more to come. We have to see the visual about the purchasing power of various groups. These groups include:
So since all these groups have a lot of money, we should make sure we have people who look like them, selling products to them. Uh, excuse me, isn't this kinda like white people should only vote for white people, and black people should only vote for black people? Uh, Isn't this, like, racist (or sexist, or ageist)? No? Oh, this is Diversity. I understand now. Are we all done here? No? There's more?
Now it is time for the Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes video. An elementary school teacher divided her class into two groups: blue eyes and brown eyes. (What she did with the green, gray, and black eyed kids wasn't mentioned.) One day the blue eyed kids had all the privileges and were able to look down on the brown eyed kids. The next day the roles were reversed. The kids were amazed at how bigoted they became. Wow! Bigotry is bad! I'll never be a bigot again! Are we done? Can I leave? There's more? Groan!
Yup. We gotta talk about stereotypes. Ken and Barbie put up this big poster that had various nationalities on it and we had to put our impressions of them by putting postit notes under each nationality. Example: Japanese...good at math. Chinese...bad drivers. I got a neat thing about stereotypes: In European Heaven the English are the police, the Germans are the mechanics, the French are the cooks, the Italians are the lovers, and the whole place is run by the Swiss. In European Hell, the English are the cooks, the Germans are the police, the Swiss are the lovers, the French are the mechanics, and the whole place is run by the Italians. Anyway...
And right here in mid-sentence, I have to go to my annual Diversity Awareness Meeting. I will have a summary of that when I finish this at home tonight.
I'm back, I got my SHTS done and I'm logging off and going home
(as I finish the sentence started before Diversity Meeting) ...Ken and Barbie inform us that all stereotypes are bad. OK Are we finally finished? Nope. Got to pull our chairs in a circle and summarize. About now, I'd like to take a chair and beat Ken and Barbie over the head, but if I did, I would probably have to go through this all over again for not valuing the worth of Diversity Awareness instructors.
At least there is some justice in the world. The Diversity Awareness Workshop that managers have to attend is two days long. Heh Heh Heh
But now things get real bizarre. Our annual Diversity Awareness Meeting today was conducted by one of our employees. I shall call him MC (Meeting Coordinator). I was gonna call him Meeting Facilitator, but didn't think MF was appropriate. He started off by telling us that he had asked our manager if he could do the Diversity Awareness Meeting today because Diversity was real important to him. As some of you may know or not know, I am gay. I'm sure you suspected as it's unusual to be over forty five years old and not be married.Uh Oh. I'm fifty five and not married. MC says I, that's stereotyping.Anyway, MC thanks for sharing. I didn't really want to know that and what's more, your sexual orientation is none of my goddamn business.
He then had to spend another fifteen minutes discussing about how things at TCIDNN had improved over the nineteen years he had worked for the company. And now he felt comfortable about being gay. Hey! What about me? I don't feel comfortable about you talking about being gay. It's none of my goddamn business!
And then.....He asked Are there any questions?And this little voice inside me was screaming NO! NO! Don't ask any questions! I'm begging you! Please! Please! No freaking questions! Stop! Stop! I give up! I can't take any more! No such luck. Someone asked another question. This led to another ten minutes of shit that I didn't care about.
Look. I don't care if you are black, white, red, purple, green, yellow or orange. I don't care if you are monosexual, bisexual, trisexual, or you perform disgusting acts involving a monkey and a football. I don't care if you're Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish or Islamic. There is a caveat here. You can't be the type of Muslim who's idea of a good time is killing himself (or herself) and taking a bunch of us with you. That's where I put my foot down. All I care about is can you do the job and carry your share of the load. Don't try to ram your beliefs down my throat.
Now we come to the high point of the meeting. MC introduces and then shows a fifty minute video about the life and times of Ruth Ellis. Ruth Ellis was born in 1899 and lived until 2000. And she was an inspiration because...she was Gay, she was Black, and she was Female. See she had to overcome three obstacles: homophobia, racism, and sexism. When I left the meeting I was truly inspired. I would really like to write a description of the video, and the effect it had on me, but I honestly could not do it justice. I guess one of the inspirational moments was when she was given an award at a Black History/Herstory Festival. MC told us she was all over the internet and, sho' nuff, I just did a Google search and the first hit had all sorts of info, including the name of the video Living With Pride: the Ruth Ellis Story.
So now I can value Diversity for another year. And I'm gonna go look for Ken and Barbie and tell them about Ruth Ellis.
They can add her video to their Workshop.
I'm gonna do part of this blog from work. It's only fair, since work cut into my blogging time last night.
I have a user working in San Francisco this week. Our 2nd shift operator called me at home telling me he didn't know how to do what this user needed done. OK, have the user call me. The user called and said all he needed done was having an id reset. I called the operator back and he said he knew how to do that on two other systems but not this one. It's not different. It's the same bloody operating system! Arggghhhh!
Sometimes it's just easier to do it yourself. So, I fired up the old laptop to connect to the network and IT DIDN'T BLOODY WORK! I stayed home one day last week making all this stuff work and now it doesn't? Maybe the old way using my other PC works. Yeah...Let's try that. Nope! Your Account Has Been Shut Down. Thanks a bunch! OK, I'll just call the operator and talk him through it. In the meantime, the user in San Fran has called me two more times on my cell phone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm working on it.
Call the operator back who has told me he knew how to do this on the other systems. I still have to tell him anyway. First we have to get him logged on. It takes three tries. Same id. Same logon procedure as the other two systems. I still have to talk him through it. Why me? Is it any wonder I'm a grouchy old cripple?
Now he's got me rattled. I can remember the command to reset the password, but I cannot remember the command to reactivate the id. So I tell the operator to call one of the programmers in Dallas and ask him to do it. The user calls me again on my cell phone. I'M WORKING ON IT!!!
Ten minutes later the programmer in Dallas calls me on my home phone. What do I need? The operator was not very good at explaining the problem (I'm shocked!) At that very moment, the user calls me on my cell phone again ( passing thought...Is cell phone one word or two?). Aha! The end is near. The programmer in Dallas does his job. I tell the user in San Fran that it should work. He tries. It does. Mission accomplished. Once again science and technology triumph over ignorance and superstition.
Another quality fix by two highly trained (and one lowly trained), highly paid, and highly motivated I/T professionals.
So, I lug the laptop into work this morning so I can connect up to the LAN and get this stuff fixed. Easier to do stuff at T1 speeds. But first, I have to attend the reguarly scheduled team meeting conference call. After that, I need to talk to the Operations Manager to see what we can do about Mr. 2nd Shift. Then, it's time to do SPTS.
On May 1, I wrote a little piece about SHTS and SPTS. SHTS is our Stupid Hourly Tracking System. SPTS is our Stupid Problem Tracking System. In cases where the user has bypassed the normal procedure to call the Help Desk, or, when the Help Desk has passed the call directly to Operations, expecting the call to be resolved quickly (not on 2nd shift), it is the responsibility of the operator or the programmer to open a PR (Problem Record) in SPTS. Even if the problem has been fixed quickly (or in my case, not so quickly) we need to open a PR and then mark it resolved.
So I dutifully logged on to SPTS to log in my PR. Now the last time I used SPTS, I had problems. When trying to save the PR I got a 404. Not surprising since the guy who wrote it was a 404 kind of guy, but it was not his fault. They didn't put it on a server with enough capacity. Then, to compound the problem, they added more functionality to the SPTS application. Yeah, that's a good idea. Take an application that doesn't work, and, that's running on an underpowered server, and try to add additional functionality to it. Man we really need another FQP (Quality Program) about now.
So I fire up the SPTS program and my id and password still work. That's one positive sign. OK. let's just go click on that little square that opens up a new problem record. Nothing happens. I must be doing something wrong. Let's log off and recycle Internet Explorer and log back on. No help. All right, time to call the Help Desk. I'm in luck. I get my favorite: the cute, sweet one with a brain.
'OK' she says, 'Do you see those opposing arrows at the top of the display?' Yup. 'OK, click on the box to the right. What happens?' Nothing. 'Nothing?' Nothing. 'Have you tried logging off and back on?' Yup. 'Hmmmm.' That doesn't sound good. 'I'll have to have William call you.'
Now here is where the story takes an unexpected twist. William calls me five minutes later and in another five minutes FIXES THE PROBLEM!!! They are ice skating in Hell at this very moment.
Now, time to tackle the laptop. First, I need to find a token ring card. Maybe Tony has one. He does. Now, lets see if I can fix all the problems. It only takes about an hour and it appears everything works. I cannot believe it. They're actually having a bodacious snowball fight in Hell. This day is turning out all right after all. Then I make a tragic mistake. I check my mail.
My manager has scheduled a diversity meeting for tomorrow.
The snow is all gone.
The ice has all melted.
Tomorrow I shall be in Hell.
When technology companies experience a downturn you can almost always count on two things:
And everytime they introduce the New Quality Program (NFQP), they always say this is not AFQP. Of course, when they say that, they are admitting that the Last Quality Program (LFQP) was bogus. Understand? Well, since TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name) is still slow on the rebound we have had layoffs with more to come and, guess what? AFQP. But, I don't want to write about that. I want to write about the LFQP.
The LFQP occurred about ten years ago. This was the age of paradigm shifts, empowerment, six sigma, and the Malcom Baldridge Award. Motorola, who created six sigma (six defects per one million), was the model. Anyone notice how Motorola is doing today? Attention clueless executives! You can have all the quality in the world, but you're going nowhere if no one wants to buy your products!
The LFQP was predicated on knowing your customer. (duh!) Knowing what your customer wanted. (double duh!) And being able to react to changing markets (triple duh!) We should not need a FQP for this. This should be standard business procedure and it should start from the CEO and work its way down. Just as a turd at the top becomes a mountain of bullshit by the time it hits the peons, good business practices should work the same way. It should not take a FQP to accomplish that! Tom Peters, call your office.
So all of the employees had to go to what I call Green Hat School. See, there were six different colored hats at the school. Each color represented something different. Green was creativity, red was anger, and, my favorite, black, was negativity. There was also yellow, blue, and another color I cannot remember. It was all bullshit anyway. Let me tell you something about these types of classes. When you walk into a room, the tables are in a horseshoe shape, up at the front are Ken and Barbie, and they refer to themselves as facilitators, trust me, it is gonna be a long day (or two, or three).
So let's talk about the fun I had in Green Hat School. First, Ken and Barbie introduced themselves and welcomed us to the class. They then gave the class big pieces to a big ol' jogsaw puzzle that was so large it would need to be assembled on the floor. The class dutifully assembled it. I was not able to help. I'm a cripple ya know. After successfully assembling the puzzle, which consisted of the initials of TCIDNN, the class looked to Ken and Barbie for approval. It was not forthcoming. 'We did not want you to assemble the puzzle', said Ken, 'We wanted you to put the pieces into three equal piles'. The moral: Ask your customer what he wants. Damn! How could we miss that? Are we stupid or what? We've only been here an hour and we've learned something already. What a class!
Next we had some sort of lecture and the Paradigm Video. You've never seen the Paradigm Video? You had to. I've seen it at least three times myself. It tells you about stuff like the Swiss who invented the digital watch but gave the secret to the Japanese because no one would want cheap digital watches. Uh oh. The Swiss needed to make a paradigm shift. Other examples abounded, but who cares, no one ever talks about paradigm shifts anymore. Now we think outside the box. Everytime I try to think outside that damn box, they just put me in a bigger box.
Now it was time for more fun: the magic carpet walk. There was a carpet that was put on the floor. It consisted of a checkerboard pattern that was 4 or 5 squares wide by 10 or 12 squares long. The dimensions were not really important. There were sensors under the carpet. When stepped on they beeped. The trick was for everyone to be able to walk from one end of the carpet to the other without beeping. Everytime someone stepped on a beeping square someone else had to start over. By trial and error, the team should be able to find out which squares beeped and avoid them. Oh, and one more thing, no talking.
I had a good view of the fun from where I was sitting. I was unable to participate. I'm a cripple ya know.
So I got to see a bunch of people pointing at squares so the current magic carpet walker knew where to step. Eventually, the team broke the code and figured out the correct sequence of squares to get from one end of the carpet to the other. By golly, I bet this is an exercise in teamwork. Nope. I'm wrong. After about half the class (minus me, I'm a cripple ya know) had negotiated their way across the magic carpet, the damn carpet started beeping again, No fair! Ken and Barbie had changed the sequence. I get it. This is an exercise in reacting to changing markets, What a neat exercise! Believe me. I'm not making any of this up.
Some more lecture. Can't remember a bit of it. No more fun exercises for me to watch. Time to go home for the day.
Day 2 started off with something involving building blocks on tables. At last! Something I can do. Don't remember what we were supposed to do. Can't remember what we were supposed to learn either. Somewhere during day 2 Ken and Barbie promised a Cross pen and pencil set to whoever did something first. The winner got a cheap pen and pencil crossed and secured with a rubber band. Ha Ha! Good joke Barbie! (I just read something on the internet today about a Hooters waitress who won a beer serving contest and the award was a new Toyota. Ha Ha Just kidding. It was a Toy Yoda doll. Pretty funny. huh? She sued. She's getting a new Toyota. Hey Barbie, you owe someone a Cross pen and pencil set. I was gonna provide the link, but when I went looking for it Netscape died and when I tried to bring up Internet Explorer it got an 'illegal operation' and shut down. How the #### can IE get an Illegal Operation with Windows? It's part of the freakin' code. Reboot. Anyway, back to Green Hat School)
Day 2 almost over. Just one more exercise. It involved standing blindfolded doing something with a rope. Tying knots. Untying knots. Hell, I had a good view of the action as I was unable to participate. I'm a cripple ya know. I should remember what they were doing and what it was supposed to teach us, but I'm drawing a blank.
So in two days of an exciting class here's the summary. Out of the four exercises I was able to participate in one. They did give us all a green hat so the two days were not a total waste. I cornered Ken and Barbie after the class and told them that education should train by example. In other words, they should know their customers and be able to react to changing markets. I asked them what they would have done on the first day if they had walked in and everyone was in a wheelchair. Your market has changed, react to it. No answer. Blank stares.
There was no way this shit could happen today. Remember, back then, we only had Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity. This was before the magic of Diversity. If this happened now I could contact the Ken and Barbie from the Diversity Awareness Class and sic 'em on the Ken and Barbie of Green Hat School. OK, you four pukes who have wasted a total of three days of my valuable time, I want you to duke it out, in a cage match at Wrestlemania. Calling the WWF.
But we're not done with the LFQP. Back where I actually work, we had to form four committees:
These committees actually served a purpose. We had a Mission Statement that was plastered very conspicuously all over the building where I worked. We had a Vision Statement made into a poster that was framed and placed all over the building. But, and this is for real, the way they printed it it could only be read if you were within four feet of it. Obviously indicative of a very short sighted Vision. Talk about having troubles with the Vision thing.
Now I, and many of my coworkers, who had real work to do, weren't able to become members of these committees, but we were kept up to date with notes telling us who the members were and the progress of each of these committees. When the next round of layoffs occurred we discovered the real function of these committees. Most of the people who had time for these meetings found themselves laid off. I'm sure there's a moral here somewhere.
Anyway, TCIDNN, is fixin' to have another round of layoffs and we're supposed to start training on the NFQP. I think I'll wait until the last minute on that NFQP thing. Maybe they think that anyone who has time to work on the NFQP has too much time on their hands.
In the meantime, I'm sitting at my desk, blindfolded, tying knots in a rope. I'd like to do this while standing but I can't.
I'm a cripple ya know.
Having finished off a bottle of Cotes du Rhone (le Clos du Caillou 2000..only $10.99 great buy) I'm half in the bag and feel real lazy, so, I'm gonna let others do most of my work tonight. That is the beauty of being a blogger: linking to other bloggers and making comments.
Our first stop is Midwest Conservative Journal. I really like this site. I happen to be from St. Louis and I grew up in Webster Groves which Christopher Johnson has mentioned a few times. I also like the way he deconstructs articles and editorials. It is akin to what I do to Molly Ivins. Molly is easy and I hope to graduate to more tougher stuff. Anyway, I know Pat Buchanan is a rabid antisemite (is that two words and is Semite capitalized? And one more thing. Arabs happen to be of the Semitic race, so how can they be antisemites? Just checking) but just when did Joe Sobran cross over to the dark side? I mentioned earlier this week that I had attended a memorial service for my friend Cindy's grandmother and I was a little bit miffed at a passage in the gospel reading about 'that is why the Jews wanted to kill Jesus'. OK Listen up. The Romans killed Jesus. I mean it has been 2000 years and some people still don't have this straight.
Scroll on down and read how he takes apart a Post Dispatch editorial. On the editorial page of the Post Dispatch they have a quote by Joseph Pulitzer about all the good things that newspapers are supposed to do and then the Post Dispatch violates them all. Way to go Christopher!
Another interesting site is rantburg. I like the way this guy thinks. An example:
Article:
Another must see site is USS Clueless.
So Iraq is holding a referendum. I wonder if that is like the Palestinian election that Jimmy Carter certified? In an op-ed written for the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation, Jimmy Carter said that Yassir (Yassir Yassir he's our terrorist...how many different spellings of his name are there?) Arafat was the 'duly elected' head of the Palestinian people. Jimmy, stick to building houses, please. Oh, and Jimmy's going to Cuba to kiss Castro's ass and Clinton is going to East Timor. Quick! Close the borders!
Anyway, I got a copy of the ballot used in the elections
My type of election
And the Rolling Stones are going on tour. Denbeste makes a joke about Brian Jones (who is dead by the way) joining them. Is Keith Richards still alive? Sure doesn't look it.
And with that, I'm off to look at other sites
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!