swestrup | Stupidities of Work.

On Monday, during a department-wide meeting, someone mentioned that the User Manual I had written (in a number of 1 and 2-day rush jobs) could use some polishing. The CEO asked me to finish it by that evening. I told him that what he wanted wasn't possible. Polishing it to my standards would take 4-5 days MINIMUM. "Okay", he said, "Just make sure it has all of the options defined and clean up any vague wording, for tonight." I agreed.

I did it. Tuesday evening I got an email from him, saying that as I had claimed I could polish the manual in 2 days to Company Standards, he was expecting to see it by Thursday. This is a man who doesn't know how to count, can't tell the difference between a minimum and an estimate, and thinks his company is up to my standards (it isn't).

I nearly quit, then and there. In fact, since it was late in the day, I just went home. That evening I saw that my immediate boss was intervening on my behalf, so things were looking up. I decided to go in, and just do as much polishing as I could do in 2 days. After all, he said it had to be to the Company Standard, not my own Personal standard. As CEO he sets the standard, and that is apparantly the 2-day rush crap job standard.

This afternoon my immediate boss indicated that the CEO is expecting to see the manual I am working on AS WELL AS a related manual, both done for Thursday evening. Last time I got mad. This time I had a very Dilbertian moment. I vividly remembered the scene where Alice is given a task with a simple "Here, take care of this!" from the pointy-haired one. Alice's respons was: "Take care of this? This would double my workload. I'm already pushed beyond my limits. This would make ALL my projects totally futile. I won't be able to finish ANYTHING. And... that means... I'M FREE! If I can't succeed, no matter how hard I try, then I don't have to try! It'll have the same results, no matter what I do!"

So, tomorow the CEO will get the old manuals back, but this time they'll have the added features of page numbers and tables of contents. Lucky him. I did have plans to try and do a better job than that, but why bother? Surely our million-dollar customers will be perfectly happy with a 2-day rush crap job. And if they aren't, well its not MY company that will go under.