I'm happy to report that my copy of OPE has finally made it to my mailbox. It's a long haul to the desert. It promises to be a cold and wet Christmas day here in Hooterville. It rained all day today and it is forecast to continue on Thursday, after a brief break tomorrow. I will be saving OPE for Christmas day, after we come home from our visit to Daughter Sneed's joint. It will make a lovely afternoon reading and rereading this fine publication. You simply cannot get all the chuckles in from a single reading. I hope I can wait until Thursday. I will be leaving OPE out for Santa, along with his cookies and milk. This technically violates Mr. Kurt's rule about sharing one's copy of OPE, but I'm hoping he will cut St. Nick a bit of slack. Santa needs a chuckle after all that gift wrangling. But, let's take a break from all this Christmas related stuff and allow me to complain about a totally different subject. Bosses. Not my boss in particular mind you, but bosses in general. Okay, my boss in particular. Have you ever noticed that one of the tricks bosses use to avoid dealing with a problem, is to make the employees log the occurrences of that problem, knowing full well that we will get tired of logging stuff and they won't have to fix it? I've seen it a million times. Most bosses have their own boss, whom they fear and are loath to upset, lest they find themselves back among the little people...or worse. So should one of the underlings raise a problem, the instinct of a boss is to keep it from reaching the ears of the person they fear most. For instance, suppose you have a piece of equipment that is vital to your job, but about 50% of the time when you need it to work, it doesn't. So you complain to the boss that we need a new one or at a minimum a different one. He or she will first explain to you that 'no one else' has said they have a problem with the device. So, you have round up a few supporting witnesses to corroborate your story. Now the boss has a dilemma. She can go to her boss and tell him that this piece of crap is hosing up productivity, but that risks making the bigger boss mad, because fixing it will cost money. Plus, it was working fine when he bought it. If it's broken, someone must have broken it. At least in the eyes of the big boss. So instead, the wily boss will create a trouble log, where we can document the instances of trouble. That way, we can provide specific information to the big boss and the problem can be handled or so the theory goes. Our log is still hanging on the wall of the back room. We have given up writing the problems up and the piece of crap is still busted. 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 judgmental and cranky