Including Manglement, Bus Factors And The Bitter Taste Of Regret
This one is from 'Ripe's Youtube channel and concerns A Major South Canadian Corporation, whom the narrator wisely leaves vague, as South Canadian companies are litigious. He described it as being involved in commercial and industrial processes, with different divisions across the country. We shall call it Colossal Corp, because I can. Art!
Allow me to introduce our narrator, Competent Logistics Expert And Relater, hereafter CLEAR, who related how bad matters were in the division, which did servicing and repairing of their equipment used by clients. The picture is not pretty. For a start, there were only two Operations Coordinators in the whole division, CLEAR and VAlued Colleague, hereafter VAC, which is a dangerously low Bus Factor total. Art!
When they both started things were bad, with a capital BAD. The standard turn-around time for a repair was 8 days, which was sending clients around the bend and leading to extensive cancellations thanks to the aforementioned bend-navigating situation. Our dynamic duo sat down and plotted and planned. They sorted out priorities, meaning calls were not merely being taken in the order they came in; repair technicians were assigned jobs close to each other, instead of all over the state; parts were shipped out to those techs overnight, or the client's premises, so they had what they needed for the next day's work.
CLEAR and VAC were the organisational heart of the division, responsible for dispatching, scheduling and parts co-ordination. The dashboard they used for D&S was a custom-created complex piece of software, made by the division's software developer years before. To explicate somewhat, it used a series of alphanumeric codes to run D&S, factoring in geographic location, the service level issue involved, parts availability and tech skills required, and there were many hundreds of variants. Art!
It took CLEAR a month's training to acquire the skills to use this platform, which I will now dub Colossus. He filled a notebook with - you may be ahead of me here - notes.
Here is a fact that comes into play later on. There was no documentation. No guide or process diagrams or charts of anything, the dev had kept it all in his head, which is another Bus Factor problem management SHOULD have seen coming. But no. Eighteen months later, the dev keels over and dies young, leaving CLEAR the only living person who understood Colossus. Ooops. Art!
No, VAC knew to do no more than the most basic of tasks, he hadn't been trained on Colossus, and the six times CLEAR asked for another person to be trained, he got turned down, either because it wasn't in the budget or 'Later'. A later that never came.
Then disaster struck in the arrival of a new manager for the dynamic duo, as the previous experienced manager had been poached by another division, a sad testament to capability. We shall call the new manager Bottomhole Boss as is our proud tradition. He had absolutely no idea what either CLEAR or VAC did, no background in operations, dispatching, service management or the technical details of what equipment was being serviced. He was a truly glorious example of Golf Buddy Appointment Strategy, since being three under par befits you for any management position. Or, in this case, any manglement position. Art!
There is a saying I have just invented about this, being 'A new broom sweeps stupid', because when manglement like BB are appointed, they immediately start to change things. To show their majesty and power and how important they are, shizzle like that.
Here an aside. In the Comments on this story, one person added in the best speech he'd had from an incoming manager: "I am not going to do anything for a month. After that, we'll expand the good and fix the bad."
Ah, I can see CLEAR shaking his head. BB wanted to end the overnight parts shipment, because it was expensive. He wanted to reduce the number of routes the techs used, because that was expensive. He believed the logistics budget was too high and needed reducing, not caring that service volumes had increased a lot and generated a lot more profit than expense. Art!
CLEAR e-mailed BB's boss with a detailed rebuttal of all the reasons why BB's ideas were highly counter-productive and would lead to loss of clients, to utter silence and inactivity. Looks like BB's boss is also a BB.
THEN BB convened a meeting between himself, his boss, an HR rep and CLEAR, whom was told he was being demoted from Operations Coordinator to Dispatcher, due to 'creating a hostile work environment, inability to work with management and refusing to action directed orders.' No cut in salary, mind.
'Okay,' CLEAR responded, meekly, rather surprising the others. He knew they had just lit the fuse on a bomb that would go off sooner rather than later, and with devastating effect.
Right! I'm going to call time on this tale as there's a whole lot more to regale you with, which will have to wait until tomorrow. I bet you can hardly wait.
A Bit Of Leavitty
Karoline Leavitt, that is, the official White House Press Secretary, whom is the public mouthpiece for the Trump administration, and who must go home and weep at the thankless job she does trying to big-up King Piggy. Art!
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| The cross is to ward off Stephen Miller |
The hardest part of her job is trying to square what Donnie Dorko has been braying about with individual news organisations and the official White House stance. DJ Tango just rings up newspapers and journals and says the first thing that comes into his head, and it's different each call. So far in April he's rung nine different news organisations and given nine different answers to 'When will the war end?' including 'Six weeks', 'Four or five weeks', 'Two or three days' and my personal favourite, 'When Johnny comes marching home'.
Not sure about that last one. Let's have a photo of Pumpkinhead looking awful. Art!
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| Alive or dead? Only you can tell! |
One cannot help but feel bad for Melania.
Number 7 In 'Rotten Tomatoes' Top 10 Worst Films
Another one that I haven't seen, nor heard of either. 'National Lampoon's Gold Diggers' of 2003. Art!
Two losers plan to marry rich old women and live on their inheritance once they die. As a plot it sounds rather thin. The film is supposed to be a comedy - the 'National Lampoon' might have hinted at that - but is horribly unfunny. I did a bit of digging and it made $830,000 globally, with no details about the budget, but I guarantee it was more than the box office take. Which is why you've never had to endure 'Gold Diggers 2'.
DO YOU WANT SKYNET? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET SKYNET!
During the Special Idiotic Operation in Ukraine, it is becoming ever-more deadly to move about in daylight hours within 10 kilometres of the front lines, thanks to the ever-present FPV drones, and we're talking about both sides here.
The Ukrainians, ever mindful of the need to preserve lives, in stark contrast to Mordorvia's utter indifference, have now set themselves a target for producing UGVs, 'Unmanned Ground Vehicles'. By the end of June this year they intend to have 26,000 UGVs doing one hundred per cent of front line deliveries. Art!
They aren't going to be autonomous - not yet! - and require an operator to remotely drive them to deliver food, water, ammunition, medical kit, spare parts, etcetera. By the second half of 2026 we may see them equipped with AI and no human supervision, hence that item title.
Finally -
From my QI Banter Book.
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's is her work of fiction." Oscar Wilde. O Oscar you wag!
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