"Work cheaper, not smarter."

Times are tough, and senior management responded in the time-honoured tradition by calling a two-day workshop for all senior management and team leaders in my division, so they could discuss yet again how to wring blood from a stone. All well and good, and nothing out of the ordinary ... until they also declared that everyone at my level also had to attend, and offer up a PowerPoint presentation on things we could do to make things better.

I stopped laughing at this point but, in the end, the whole thing didn't turn out too badly.

Firstly there was the amusement factor involved in holding a workshop about productivity and seeking to do more with less at a golf resort 50 miles away from where most of the attendees live and work, forcing the majority to spend an extra hour traveling each way just to get there. On top of that, no-one was really that keen to use their own cars, so everyone booked out work vehicles for the entire day and ran up extra fuel costs across our division.

My inner cynic was already feeling revitalised.

Then someone else "borrowed" the car I was supposed to travel down in, forcing a hasty scramble for alternative transport and ensuring we arrived fashionably late. The individual who'd stolen the car was already there, so when the facilitator decreed we should introduce ourselves with name, team, and an interesting fact about ourselves, one of my colleagues decided his interesting fact would be "and I'm late because some bastard took the car I'd already booked." But he's almost due for long-service leave, and doesn't care who he offends anymore.

Two presentations later and we were already behind schedule because senior management keep forgetting that (generally speaking) your average support tech doesn't know how to write or pace presentations, and will prepare lots of content and then simply read it out. Suddenly everyone's presentation timeslots were slashed to get things back on schedule.

Gimli and Marvin (his counterpart, responsible for managing a team that does similar things to Gimli's) used their joint presentation to engage in a territorial dispute disguised as a discussion on the importance of communication and cooperation, presumably under the orders of their manager in an attempt to make them play nicely with each other. Marvin opened with a recitation of the many ways in which Gimli's teams failed at communicating anything. Gimli countered by relentlessly quoting from past policy statements to show that the fault really lay with Marvin's teams' - and therefore Marvin himself. Then we were all told it's now a hanging offense to travel to any of our sites without informing the team leader at that location, presumably so he can follow the interloper around and freshly mark his territory all over again.

Sometimes it's more obvious than others that IT remains a male-dominated industry.

At the end of the day, our Director arrived to give a presentation on the opportunities for productivity awaiting us all. He opened with several slides of statistics explaining that our organisation is, essentially, doomed. The high Australian dollar means revenue is dropping because we can't compete with the international market. But that's okay, because we're charging the remaining ones more to compensate - how can we go wrong with that? Our domestic clients are leaving us for our local competitors, so we're not retaining any of the local market, either. A visible cloud of impending doom descended over the room.

Then Gimli asked the Director where he saw us being in five years' time. "This is a visionary question," he declared.

"It's funny you should ask that, because I was going to address that in my presentation tomorrow."

He was genuinely surprised when he was told two-thirds of his audience wouldn't be there in the morning and he'd only be talking to team leaders and management, so clearly that communication thing is working well for us.

"Ah, okay. Well, I have a slide showing the range of services we support now, and I have one showing what we'll be supporting in 2025. And there's a big red 'X' through everything you guys do."

Silence. Deathly silence. At-least-he-went-out-with-a-bang-Mrs-Cobain silence.

A team leader pipes up, trying to dispel some of the Mordor-like cloud of despair enveloping the room: "Would that be a good 'big red X' or a bad 'big red X'?"

The Director seems to realise that, just maybe, he could have phrased things better* and tries to salvage the situation.

"Now I'm not saying you won't still have jobs," he begins ... and while I can't remember what his exact words were, it translated as something like "but we don't know what they're going to be, and we're pretty sure they won't be here."

Surprisingly this neither lifts the mood nor reinvigorates discussion of the many "opportunities" awaiting us. But that doesn't really matter, because the driver of my car has had enough and wants to leave now (see previous about long-service leave and not giving a damn) and I get to escape before sitting through any more presentations. It means I miss seeing how The Invertebrate goes with his, but it also means I avoid having my cynicism buffers overloaded by another manager's spiel on his virtualisation project, which I suspect will boil down to something like this:

Step 1: Virtualise!
Step 3: Rainbows & unicorns for everybody!

which is what every presentation I've seen about virtual desktops in my sector comes down to in the end.

So as far as productivity goes, it was every bit the tragic and inevitable waste I expected, but it wasn't without its unintended highlights.

And there was hazelnut gelatto at lunch. I'll put up with a lot for that.

---

*Although he still has a long way to go before he reaches the standard set by his predecessor, who famously described us all as "bottom-feeders" at the annual staff recognition and rewards ceremony and then wondered why people took offense.

Recursion: it's like Inception, but stupid.

La Mondaine is slowly - very slowly - cataloguing our far-too-large software collection. It's only taken a year to reach this point, during which she's worked hard to find other things she'd rather be doing (and it's only been five years since I first said this really needed to be done so we knew what we actually had).

Unfortunately, instead of simply weeding out the duplicates*, she's also decided that for "old" software (and her definition of "old" is highly variable, completely subjective, and based almost exclusively on what she sees as her extensive and detailed knowledge of software) she "needs" to ring the original client to see if they still want it ... kind of overlooking the fact that even if they still work here, the odds are good they're no longer the person using it and probably can't say whether or not it's still in use.

(Yes, we have tried telling her not to do this and that it's unnecessary for what we actually want. Even direct instructions don't work - they just impact on the swampy surface of her brain, and are quickly sucked beneath the mire.)

She's using our puchasing database to discover the original user, and is assuming that where she can't get hold of them, the admin staff who placed the request or the manager who approved the expense are the obvious fallback positions. This led to her finding some requests created by our much-missed (by me, at least) hyper-efficient team-member of a couple of years ago when she was cleaning up a lot of the errors in our systems. La Mondaine knows about this staff member but failed to either recognise her name (halfway understandable) or notice that The Invertebrate was recorded as the approver (*not* understandable. In fact it's borderline retarded).

She found the former team-mate's extension number and began trying to call her. La Mondaine was convinced she was still working here somewhere, because every time she tried to call, the line was engaged. After this happened a few times, she concluded there must be something wrong with their phone and wandered around to the telecomms team to report the fault with the number. They checked the extension in their system ... and inform La Mondaine that it was her phone number.

Yes, that's right. All this time, La Mondaine has been sitting at our former team-mate's old desk, dialing her own phone number repeatedly, and wondering how someone could possibly be busy on the phone every time she called.

(Presumably because anyone with any common sense normally pretends they're simply not there at all.)

---

* We have many, many needless duplicates of so many things. Not only does the team have a long and deeply-entrenched culture of never throwing anything out, it also used to run on the theory that you can never have too many duplicates of something. I tried several times to call them on it, pointing out we had multiple physical copies of the same minor piece of software and producing said copies to illustrate my point.

"No, you're wrong," Ted E. intoned smugly, "It's different software. You can tell, because the label is different. See?" And he pointed to the Purchase Order number printed on the label.

"We put that on the label. It doesn't come from the vendor like that. The actual software - and I've checked the disc contents, and what we actually ordered - the actual software is identical across all of these."

Ted shook his head condescendingly. "You're not used to how we do things here, so you wouldn't understand. You see, the number is different."

They're not getting any smarter

3.29pm: the client submits a request to have a new computer set up.

3.33pm: the client remembers they've nominated themselves as the financial approver for their request, and self-approves.

3.38pm: the client calls me to ask how their new computer is going, and whether it's nearly ready.