Cover Your A** With Paper.

Some people have asked me, "Merle, why is it the you don't mention the name of the company that you work at, with so many posts being about your lousy job and all?" That's a good question and there is a simple answer. I have refrained out of concern that I would get fired and possibly sued. Okay, not the fired part so much, but definitely sued. At the minimum I might be beaten senseless by an angry coworker or call center employee from our building. Or worse yet, one of the jackasses might write stuff about me in retaliation. But today I throw caution to the wind. For most of the past thirty-eight years, excluding a couple of years during my ill-fated teaching career, I have been employed by Tedious Systems, a leader in the field of internal process redundancy. At Tedious System, our pledge is, "We got your back...up!" With that in mind, I was sitting in my cubicle this morning when I received an email from Kendall Ling, my boss, instructing me to read the attachment to his email and act on it pronto. At Tedious Systems, the new year is the time for us clean up the processes from the past year and to get ready for the challenges ahead. We don't really do this every year, just when some one at the top of the organization has a fit about the backlog. Then it is numero uno. Our work generates plenty of files, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, reports, readouts and reconciliations, so there's plenty to do. Of course, someone at headquarters is put in charge of making sure we have dotted our tees and crossed our eyes. The attachment was a memo from one of the brown-nosers at headquarters, who had won the brown-noser lottery and been put in charge of producing a spreadsheet of what guys like me needed to do to get stuff closed out and put to bed. The possibility of a congratulatory memo from the bosses offering a hearty thanks for a job well done, must have been thrilling to the lucky winner. As an aside, I am amazed at what some people will volunteer to do for the chance to sit at the foot of the throne, even if it is just for a day. I looked over the spreadsheet, which had about 1900 lines of data and it made no sense to me. Not only did I not know the answers, I didn't even understand the questions. Only a few lines of the report seemed to pertain to me, or at least I assumed they did, because I was listed as the owner, corporate-speak. Owner is a term that Tedious Systems dreamed up when they laid off 99% of the clerical staff. We used to have people to do this kind of stuff, but now it is dumped on highy-trained professionals such as me. Like it or not, I am the owner., or as I prefer to call it, the chump. I told a corporate knucklehead last year that if I was the owner of the crap he was making me do, I would find the damn receipt and return it. He didn't see the joke. At Tedious Systems we actually design network cabling for our customers. No wait, that is our sideline business. Our cash crop is making up internal processes and their associated files, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, reports, readouts and reconciliations and, of course, conference calls, lots of conference calls. This report is the final accounting stuff for these projects. I try to finalize the paperwork for my projects as they close, so that I don't wind up with a sh*tload at once. Some people let them slide, hence we have a spreadsheet and its babysitter. No matter how diligent a guy is though, a few will be a problem and appear on the list, because of the complexity built into the tracking systems. That is why my few were on the report. If you are a procrastinator, you will have hundreds. I put in a call to the person who compiled the beast, May Askfor, B.S. and she set in to 'splainin' it to me. A conversation that went something like this. Her: Blah, blah, change the date, blah, blah, then go into blah, enter the close date, delete the work order number and your done. Simple. Me: Okay. By the way the guy listed after me on your list died three years ago. He may not be able to fix his lines. Her: Well, someone will have to complete his list. Maybe you could do to. (I had 6 entries, he had over a hundred, since they have been accumulating as his old projects finished since he died). Me: I have been working here 38 years, I don't do stuff like fix other people's problems, unless I get some big reward for doing it. Her: Well, I've worked here a long time too and when I see something that I can fix, I just fix it. I don't worry about who is responsible for it because I want to make Tedious Systems number one (I'm not lying). Me: Well, bless you, you sound like the sort of employee we need more of here at Tedious Systems. Her: I try and do what I can to make a difference to the company. Me: Uh.... (struggling to figure out whether she is kidding me). Me: Okay, I'll fix my stuff, thanks. Her: Thanks for getting right on this and call me if you need anymore help. The last thing I want to do is to be known as a guy who makes a difference. My goal is to be known as the guy about whom the big bosses ask, "Which one is he?" Merle. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgemental and cranky Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor