SMELLY TONGUES

Beyond the soft palate

Tag: working life

November 6, 2013

PAIN POINTS

I, and about a dozen others, have been asked to participate in a spot of “training”, a two day spot of training about a particular “system” of “process evaluation methodology”.

This training, we are told, will strengthen our ability to manage and improve the quality of our, and our Global Corp’s, continuing performance and aid us in identifying techniques for “maximising efficiency gains”.

This “system” is called Lean Six Sigma.

According to the blurb on the back of the “Lean Six Sigma for Dummies” book – yes, there is one – this system will help “unclog your pipes” which apparently means “tackling bottlenecks in your processes”, and not what you may be thinking.

We have been asked to identify “pain points” we may currently grapple with in our daily toils to which we might apply this “methodology”, to which I feel very much like responding “Turning the fuck up every day to listen to this bullshit” …

… This morning, for example, a fluorescent light above my desk began to flicker, and I told the person to whom one is supposed to tell such things that a fluorescent light above my desk was beginning to flicker, and was told I should “log” a “service request”, which involves sending an email via a “Service Desk” application and writing, “There’s a fluorescent light above my desk that is beginning to flicker.”

This done, you receive an automated response from the “Service Desk” application informing you that the service request you just sent has been received.

Which is what is supposed to happen when you hit the “Send” button, so it’s nice to know that it works.

A short time thereafter, another automated email from the “Service Desk” arrives to let you know that your request has been assigned to a person, a human being no less, and that this human being will deal with your request as soon as they deal with it, at a time yet to be determined, a later time, a future time, perhaps far flung, perhaps nigh, but a time nevertheless of dusky mystique, of mist and of magic, and big gnarly trees with little elves in them.

Your time magically arrives (as time always does), bringing with it a human being (no less) who then proceeds to step upon a small step-ladder (for dancing upon step-ladders is unseemly and may lead to fornications), take the flickering fluorescent light out, put a new one in, fold up the ladder, and say, “There you go”, to which I say, “Thanks for that”, which is what Macbeth said to Banquo’s murderers after they’d killed him, don’t you know.

Then another email from the “Service Desk” arrives a little later to let you know that your service request has been attended to, just in case you were asleep at the time and missed all the excitement.

Another email arrives a little after that to inform you that your “issue” has been “resolved” and is now “closed”, so you may now change the case name from red to blue on the whiteboard in the squad room, and go to Munch’s bar for a knees-up with some of the fellas in celebration.

You could have just walked down the corridor  and across the aisle to ask the guy who replaces the lights to replace yours if and when he has a moment.

You could have, once upon a distant time, just grabbed a replacement tube, climbed up on your desk, and changed it yourself …

… although today you’d probably be spotted by a Workplace Health and Safety Officer and given a stern talking to about the deadly perils of desk-climbing …

You cannot do these things anymore.

You can no longer simply do a thing in order to get it done.

It appears to defeat the purpose of doing it.

The purpose now is the process, and not the result.

The process now has a map. It has a value stream. It has a timeline. It has inputs, outputs, check sheets, control charts, scatter plots and Pareto diagrams.

It has methodology. It’s been evaluated, measured, mined, reviewed, revised and specially formulated to deliver the maximum of one thing with a minimum of some other thing.

It’s been approved by Senior Executive Management across the globe and enthusiastically endorsed by Leading Business Celebrities too numerous to mention.

People make a living thinking this shit up. Thinking up bullshit for other people to do …

… and they all go quietly crazy trying to do it, trying to understand why they’re doing it, and what exactly is it they’re doing, and then they end up drinking too much, or taking pills, or spending their weekends smoking pot and listening to old King Crimson albums, eating Chinese takeaway because they’re too fucking munted to fix their own grub anymore …

“Pain points”?

WHO PUT THE DICKHEADS IN CHARGE?

5 comments
September 26, 2013

NUMBER 27

62 years old, 27 years with the company and his skills are no longer relevant, no longer needed, he is leaving now, he is going away and saying goodbye.

There’ll be a package, a payment. Sincere regrets. But the changing nature of this, of that, cost efficiencies here, and there, technology, and so on and so forth, we’re very sorry, thanks for everything, your hard work, your life, thank you so much and all the best with what’s left.

I go to say farewell, shake his hand, and he hangs onto it momentarily, and shakes it again, reluctant to let go, his eyes look faraway and filmed with memories, he talks of how it was, all the overtime they used to do, nights and weekends, not all that many years ago, and he talks of how it is now, the changes, the restructures, it’s all gone to hell, he says, not it like it used to be.

Yes, they were the “good old days” alright, until they sucked the fun out of it, the colour..

“Any plans?”, I ask.

“Oh. I don’t know”, he says. “Maybe I’ll just get a job at Bunnings for a few years. I don’t know.”

“Bunnings?”

“They hire older workers. At least I’m told.”

There are two others, one with 24 years up, one with 20, and they’ve all known for a few months, there are no more surprises, yet Number 27 looks somehow diminished, small, frail, and there’s little emotion in his words as he speaks, no anger, just a hint of bewilderment, of confusion, of loss, as if he has already resigned himself to a life of shadows in a land of ghosts, marking time, just marking it, making it go away, just making it go away.

I walk back to my desk.

“That was sad”, I say to my offsider.

I am left with the feeling that Number 27 will not find it easy, and that he will hurt.

Birth.

School.

Work.

Death.

The long con plays on. It grabs us from the start, it pisses on us at the finish, a life cycle of little murders and a new death every day.

3 comments
August 23, 2013

TONGUE OF THE DAY

Appending this article from MacroBusiness on the “Rise of the bullshit job” is this comment …

Gunnamatta says: August 22, 2013 at 2:42 pm

Its all bullshit when you think about it.

I came out of the Federal court years ago with another young lawyer and we looked at each other and said ‘this is all bullshit isnt it?’

He did the honorable thing and took off into 50 acres of Tarkine Wildrness chowing down on mung beans for twenty years. I just opted for different bullshit.

I ditched law for industrial relations and sorting out agreements and intractable issues for some of the largest employers around. The issues that invariably drew the most heat were the ones I had earmarked as ‘bullshit’ and it didnt matter whether it was the Union side or management side there was always loads of ‘bullshit’ in the equation. Chat with line managers and most often they wanted to chat about ‘bullshit’ the ordinary mug punters would want to bring up issues too, or union officials, and they were all ‘bullshit’.

More than once I was offered some very good gigs but always held off with a little man in the back of my head saying ‘this is bullshit’

One day after resolving some particularly gnarly issues for one outfit involving a psychologist I shared a beer with him and basically downloaded my thought that it was all ‘bullshit’ – he told me he thought it was nearly all bullshit but that I should drop what I was doing and go and see if there was anything out there I thought wasnt bullshit.

I ended up working in TV business news media and print media (mainly bullshit) in Europe and the mid east and working offside for finance and investment types making sure their bullshit is tailored to the bullshitees (as we used to refer to them).

Eventually I come back to Australia and find a whole society sucking up ‘bullshit’ every time it turns on the TV or radio, opens up a paper. Then I look at politics and think to myself ‘those men (and women) are talking bullshit’

For sure the powers that be have cottoned on to the fact that idle thinking types represent a danger. Their response has been to either make sure the populace is dumbed down or to make sure they are so deeply in hock that they will put up with loads of ‘bullshit’ just to service the debt. Uncle Rupert has cottoned on to the fact that if you spread the ‘bullshit’ far enough then everyone thinks it is normal.

Of course we have bullshit jobs.

Its Bullshit. Bullshit everywhere. Bullshit in the home straight by 8 lengths. Bullshit bowling a marathon spell from the Members and and Bullshit carving up the opposition with hard ball gets in the middle.

Management is bullshit, strategy is bullshit, 95% of the people you will ever meet are bullshit in the context in which you will meet them.

The one thing I will be explaining to my son and daughter is the view it is all bullshit, and why I have bent over backwards to avoid immersing them in it, to give them an out from the bullshit should they want it, in circumstances where they dont have to pay a bullshit ransom to some rent seeking bullshitter who think is they have a right to impose a bullshit tithe on others.

A bullshit free world. That is something to dream about.

I wish I’d written that.

2 comments
May 9, 2013

FALLINGROCKSDONOTSTOP

The area of the open-plan office in which I work is about the size of a small bedroom. I have a large, laminated desk, atop which sits a computer and a monitor, a phone, a desk calendar, six in/out trays, thirty or forty manila folders, about a dozen ring binders, a hole-punching device, a stapler, a calculator, and a metal container full of Artline felt pens, some pencils and a ruler.

There is a coffee cup.

Eight compact discs of music from home, some eyedrops and a box of angry pills.

My desk faces a partition on which various bits of A4 paper are stuck with small round coloured magnets. On the other side of the partition sit two humans, the nature of whose work is unknown to me. Behind them is a whiteboard. One of the humans has written this on it with a blue marker pen …

“Forget about tomorrow and live for today! If you are depressed you are living in the past, if you are anxious you are living in the future, and if you are at peace you are living today!”

I think to myself, “If you are depressed, see a doctor, if you are anxious, see a doctor, and if you at peace you are either dead or stoned”.

I should know.

Above me is a ceiling. There are fluorescent lights in it, air vents and an “EXIT” sign. Water sprinklers in case of fire.

Behind me are six open-fronted, tall steel cabinets, each cabinet containing several hundred file folders, all arranged in alphabetical order, each of which contains about seven years’ worth of hard-copy tax invoices.

Next to me is the desk of my assistant, and upon it is much the same as I have, only more of it, as this is my assistant, and she does all the work I could not be arsed doing, which is quite a lot lately. My delegation skills have much improved over the years, and I am extremely proud of that.

Below me is a carpet, a dark grey carpet with light grey stripes, and below it is a concrete floor.

I am sitting on my ergonomically designed, pump-action roller-chair, quietly tapping away at my keyboard when I feel a presence in this space, watching, and I swivel around to find three members of the Human Resources department – once upon a time, a human resource was called a “person”, hence the old-time moniker of “personnel” – looking very concerned, looking up at the ceiling, down at the floor, at the desks, the cabinets, looking very concerned, their brows are furrowed, and I wonder, “Am I about to be reamed for spending too much time on Facebook? Ah, fuck.”

“Hi, Ross”, says the Human Resources Manager.

“Um … Hi”, I reply.

“We were just wondering if you have any concerns about safety in your area?”, she asks.

I look at her, blank-faced, and ask, “Beg pardon?”

“… if you have any concerns about safety issues in your workspace, if you feel anything of that nature is troubling you, that needs to be addressed?”, she asks.

“Well”, I reply, “There’s an alien face-hugger lurking between the “L” and “M” files, but we’ve come to a ‘live and let live’ type of understanding.”

Now it is her turn to look blank-faced, and she says, “What?”, not so much as a shadow of a smile creasing her thin lips, her pasty and more than ample jowls frozen in place like two fat pork chops.

“Nothing”, I say, “No. Nothing.”

“Thank you”, she says, and the three of them wander off as if they were all one organism, in search of spontaneously combusting desk calendars or snappy staplers loose and on the prowl.

I rest my elbows on my desk, and I place my head in the palms of my hands and I think to myself, “I’m concerned about my fucking sanity, is what I’m fucking concerned about”, and I think to myself, “This is not my beautiful life.”

“How did I get here?”

“My God. What have I done?”

5 comments
April 4, 2013

NOT DEAD. YET

Seven months of frantic activity …

… leading to four weeks of twelve to fourteen hour days, seven days a week to meet an end of March deadline.

Deadline met. Bonus earnt.

That’s what I’ve been doing.

In the meantime, I understand from the headlines that have been screaming at me the last few months that our beloved country (cry) is in dire peril.

Again.

I’m trying to work up some interest in all this dysfunction, but the anti-anxiety medication I’ve been taking the last couple months is working so well, I no longer give a flying fuck about anything or anybody.

“And the difference to your normal self is what, Ross?”, you may well ask.

That I no longer give a flying fuck about not giving a flying fuck.

Normal services shall resume shortly.

In the meantime, for some fine examples of dinkum Aussie character, check out this site.

Then come back, watch this and calm down …

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February 1, 2013

A WINDOW TO THIS WORLD

“We need two boxes of window-faced envelopes. Can you place an order please?”, she tells the stationery clerk.

“What do you need them for?”, comes the response.

“Origami.”

“ ? ”

“Mail.”

” … Are there other envelopes you could use? Old ones? Plain-faced? We have plenty of plain-faced.”

“No, we need window-faced.”

“Because we have cost contingencies to consider bef – “

“Listen to me”, she says, “I am not going to type up labels for paperwork that already has an address on it and has been designed to fit in window-faced, understand?”

“I’ll have to ch – “

“Listen to me”, she says again, “The difference in cost of window-faced to plain-faced is probably a half-dozen bucks or so, yes? I get paid thirty-five dollars an hour. I can spend one hundred and five dollars of the company’s money to sit on my arse and type labels so the company can save twelve bucks on a couple boxes of envelopes? Are you familiar with arithmetic? Does that make sense to you? Do we have a fight now, shall we have an argument?”

“I – “

“Order. The fucking. Envelopes. Today. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

These …

… the days of our lives.

Oh, Death …

1 comment
January 25, 2013

WE NEED MORE SWEAR WORDS

9.47 a.m.

The phone, it rings.

“Ross, are you in this meeting?”, the manager asks.

“What meeting?” I ask. “Wait, let me … I’ve got a meeting at 11.30. I’ve got a meeting two hours tomorrow, 9.30.”

“They moved it to today. Now.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Neither did I. Neither did Warwick. We just found out.”

“Are we still having the 11.30?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll be right up.”

And so begins our teleconference, and so begins our day, a meeting spanning four different time zones, each time zone comprising three or four people, all speaking in a variety of accents, and every few minutes someone will interrupt proceedings to ask, “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that, can you say that again please?”

And two and one half hours later, and still in this first meeting, with the second meeting thought best left to another day (that decision taking at least fifteen minutes of this meeting to arrive at), I shake my head forlornly (again), my stomach barks at me, and I hear someone from somewhere on the eastern coast of the United States ask “Ross, do you have that email now?”

“I’m not at my desk”, I reply.

“Oh. Where are you?”, they ask, sounding surprised.

“I’m in the meeting room”, I say. “In a meeting.”

“Oh. I thought you had a computer with you”, they say.

“No. My computer’s at my desk. That’s why they call it a desktop computer”, I say.

The manager smiles, and Warwick chuckles quietly to himself and three hours later, a document of intent has been “signed off” on, this document of intent comprising a number of statements stating something needs be done about a thing and someone needs do it, and at some point in the future, a meeting shall be arranged to decide just how many more meetings may be required to decide precisely who, why and what shall be done, and if the doing of any of it is even remotely feasible.

“Shall I schedule a meeting for Friday?”, asks someone from somewhere in the United Kingdom.

“Fine”, we all chorus in response.

“The best we can … look, for you guys in Australia, I hate to do this, but given the time differences, the best I think we can manage your end  is 9.30 Friday night. Can we all do that?”

“ … ”

“Guys? Can we all …? I think we’ve made a lot of progress today”, they say.

“ … ”

“Guys?”

“ … ”

Swear words.

We need more swear words.

The ones we’ve got now are shit.

6 comments
December 14, 2012

THAT’S LIFE

When you leave high school, you need to put a little thought into where your talents and interests in life lie and what you’d really like to do with them.

Otherwise, you may find yourself sitting at a desk in a concrete box thirty years later with a 25,000 row spreadsheet in front of you, still twelve years from retirement, and wondering where the fuck it all went wrong.

For what once may have seemed an easy prize to grab in our uncaring and callow youth, an uncomplicated series of simple games, will gradually, over years, reveal itself as nothing more than a faded, gaudy bauble, a tin-foil cup studded with cracked plastic rubies abandoned in a muddy tributary choked with gape-mouthed carp.

And that’s when you find yourself thinking, “How the fuck did I wind up doing this shit for a living? “

Which is my final thought for 2012.

And I expect it will be my first for 2013. Merry Christmas.

I guess.

.
On a lighter  note, that guy there? Was born 97 years ago today. And no-one, no-one, will ever come close to him.

6 comments
October 16, 2012

WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK

“Why is everybody smiling?”, thinks Unfriendlyman as he walks to the railway station. “Is my fly undone?”

It is not. 

As he walks down the steps to the platform, he thinks of the morning that awaits him.

“One more email from that woman today, I’m going to fly down to Melbourne and stab her in the eyeball with a chopstick”, he brainsnaps.

The train arrives, and Unfriendlyman boards.

There it sits, an insensate mass of black-clad blubber, another one, earbuds firmly in place and oblivious to the world, poking at tiny buttons on a shiny rectangle with fingers like clubs, her face a sweaty and disheveled pudding of childlike absorption, and all around her a dozen people stand, and there she sits.

With her bag on the seat next to her.

“A seat is not a luggage rack”, thinks Unfriendlyman, looking down at the thing.

“A SEAT IS NOT A LUGGAGE RACK!”, he thinks again, attempting to gather the perfect storm of his unfriendliness to hurl at the sluggish consciousness of this sloth, a bolt of super sourness to jolt her into an awareness of her surrounds, maybe even fling her down the length of the carriage in an enjoyably unfriendly fashion.

Nothing.

“Probably that third glass of wine I had last night”, he muses. “Or the sixth … seventh. Maybe it’s a diet thing …”

He lets the matter slip, secure in the karma that will no doubt come to slap her full of forty cream donuts a day for a year until she drops dead of a heart attack at 22 on her first visit to a Jenny Craig.

He alights at his stop, begins the dreary trudge to a dreary office in a dreary building full of dreary people doing dreary things and pretending to care.

He doesn’t. Care, that is.

Why, just this last week past, he was invited to a meeting to discuss the development and implementation of a new system for the company, a “new” system that had been in development for so long, it is to “new” what Pong is to Grand Theft Auto, and he had no hesitation in letting everyone know precisely how he felt about this state of affairs and the people responsible for it  …

“I wouldn’t trust your mob to put a battery in a fire alarm without sending 30,000 emails about it first, and then blowing up the building.”

“You need to have faith sometimes, Unfriendlyman.”

“Sometimes evidence is better. Frank. I don’t know what “faith” is. Leprechauns and fairy dust far as I’m concerned. Based on the “evidence” so far, least as far as these last half-dozen years are concerned, we could give your people the plans and materials to build a spaceship to fucking Saturn, you’d give us a crystal radio and a Viewmaster and tell us if we looked hard enough, we’d find aliens.”

“There are not that many commercial solutions available for this type of project, Unfriendlyman.”

“If by not many, you mean hundreds, no there aren’t. There are about a dozen. They all work. They work because they were built by people who know how to make them work. Intelligent people. With talent and skills. Your man’s effort is a clunky collage of inflexible crapware that’s got more bugs in it than a Dubbo cow paddock. It’s 2012. This shit you’ve cobbled together is 1987 … Look, I’m all in favour of providing the simple with meaningful employment, but maybe you should have them lick envelopes in the mail room instead of programming our fucking systems.”

“That’s not very helpful, Unfriendlyman.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to me when I’m being rude.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ve lost my train of thought now.”

“Sorry.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“ … ”

They’re tricky, friendly people.

It’s the softly-spoken, unfailingly polite ones. The ones who are always there with a helping hand, or a kind word. The ones who sincerely enquire after your health if you’ve been ill, or wish you a happy birthday, or ask about your weekend.

They wish you a merry Christmas, some of them, and put chocolates on your desk, sometimes little chocolate eggs at Easter. Once, somebody gave him a bottle of wine, and it took every shred of his self-control to stop him from smashing it against a wall, and then glassing the bastard who had been so foolishly unthinking as to offer it.

“It’s not easy being Unfriendlyman in a world of smiling, hollow-souled psychotics”, he thinks.

An email arrives from the company’s Social Committee …

“We’re very excited to announce our very first “Bring Your Kids To Work Day”!”, it shrieks and continues, “If you’d like to volunteer to help with the event, as a tour guide, buddy, or general helper, please let us know! We’re looking forward to a fun-filled day!”

“I don’t know what to do anymore. Except maybe die”, he thinks, and then he screams inside, silently, despairingly, hopelessly, “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART!”

Is this the end of Unfriendlyman?

2 comments
September 26, 2012

UNFRIENDLYMAN IS WORKING

“I thought you already knew about the changes to the royalty payable on these.”

“No. How would we know that? You have to let us know. So we can set it up and pay the right amounts to the right people when it’s due them. If there’s a change to the contract, to the rate, what we’re supposed to pay them, you have to let us in on it. That’s why we’re called the “Royalty Department” and not the “I Can Read Your Mind and Pull a Fucking Rabbit Out of My Fucking Hat Department”.”

2 comments
September 7, 2012

CONGRATULATIONS

Head Office has sent out an “all staff, all locations, all around the world” email again.

Somebody I have never heard of who does a job I never knew existed has been promoted to a job whose purpose I cannot fathom and our paths have never and shall never cross.

I understand that he will be assisting  us all in leveraging our core competencies over eight areas of focus in our plan with consistent architecture supporting strategic plans in the development and prioritization of product roadmaps, as well as operational execution and best practices in UX, and will be a key member of the B.D. Leadership team as we strive to refine our structure in support of stronger strategic and operational collaboration to achieve our vision.

Congratulations.

1 comment
September 6, 2012

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CALL

Hi Ross,

What do you normally do if a supplier requests sales information of his products prior to the close of the accounting period? Do you have a workflow for this kind of enquiry?

Warm regards,
Julia.

 —————–

Hi,

Yes. Tell them.

Ross.

7 comments
August 29, 2012

FONT

Head Office has sent out an “all staff, all locations, all around the world” email again …

We have a new corporate font.

…

…

…

I find myself pondering the nature of “work” in this world, what “work” is, and what is expected of us in the doing of it.

For, if I had known, all those many years ago when I just a wee lad in school, that my working “life” would one day bring with it the promise of reading breathlessly written communications about a typeface, I would’ve stabbed myself in the head with a pencil at seventeen.

1 comment
November 10, 2011

IN MY OFFICE …

We have an I.T. department that is not called an I.T. department, it is called something else.

We have an Accounts department that is not called an Accounts department, it is called something else too, and we have three groups who were once called “this group” or “that group”, until somebody decided that it would be better to call them “units” and then somebody decided to call them “divisions” and now they’re all back to being called “groups” again.

We once had a Managing Director but he left and we got somebody else, but they weren’t called a Managing Director anymore, they were called something else and it wasn’t “CEO” because that’s some bloke in the States. Then we got another Managing Director to replace the Managing Director who wasn’t called a Managing Director anymore and this new person was called something completely different again and that is because they reported into somebody different from the last one and they couldn’t be called a Managing Director if they reported to that person, they could only be called a Managing Director if they reported to this person instead, only this person wasn’t the least bit interested having that person reporting into them, they’d rather they pissed off out of it and reported to that other person and leave them the fuck alone to watch videos on YouTube and fart about on Facebook all afternoon.

As you do.

It’s a very complex organism, an office, and it takes a lot of fucking effort to make one work, especially when it comes down to that vital business of figuring out what to call a thing.

I hope you all appreciate that.

I know I fucking do.

3 comments
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