A Blank Slate Versus A Bank State

If You Want Me To Be A Bit More Pseudy -

You can substitute 'Tabula rasa' for 'Blank slate' as it's the <hack spit> Latin for the same meaning.  Aristotle, being Greek, would have used the phrase 'Agraphos pinakas'.  He was referring to a metaphor where the human mind was perceived as a blank wax tablet, unmarred by the marks of any styli*.   Which we will surely come to later on.  Art!

     A wiki written in blood, sweat, tears and oil, the 't' being missing as someone's just gone off to make it.  We will come back to this later.

     OKAY so our tale of both manglement and malicious compliance is today taken from one of 'Ripe's 'Malicious Compliance' vlogs.  It's narrated by DEVeloper Instigating Overall Undoing Software, hereafter DEVIOUS.  Not foreshadowing too much, am I?  He worked at a Mid-Sized Software Company, hereafter MISSC, totalling no more than 40 staff, working in his IT team of 8.  Art!

IT teams are boring.  Have a giant atomic tank invading the Phillipines

     DEVIOUS informs that his team generated about 75% of the company revenue, an interesting metric if 20% of the staff are achieving this.

     ANYWAY statistics aside, DEVIOUS had the manager from Heaven, whom he could not praise highly enough, and who had built the team from scratch, supporting it and helping to hit splendid targets - 98% client retention rate amongst others.     

     What usually happens in situations like this is that the boss is promoted upstairs to a different environment, or gets poached by the competitors.  Not here.  Their manager was killed in a Road Traffic Accident when hit by a jack-knifing truck, which came out of left field and flattened his team.  Art!

IDIOT at the gates

     Here is where MISSC manglement proved to be bottomholes.  They had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how their expired manager had built, supported and run his team.  They had options: promote one of the team to a management position, training them into the role; move in one of the other managers from within MISSC; bring in an outsider skilled in the same role; bring in an InfilleD Industry OuTsider, hereafter IDIOT, with no experience of MISSC's business.

     The C-suite selected option four.  VERY WELL YOU HAVE CHOSEN DEATH!

     IDIOT proved they were a blank slate in short order.  As insecure bottomholes looking to make their mark tend to do, they wanted to imprint a lasting presence on their MISSC IT team, and did it by denigrating the team at their first meeting.  Way to build morale, dude.  The Hannibal Lecter And Machiavelli School of Management Development, hmmmm.  Art!

Conrad unsure which is Macchy

     IDIOT began to institute changes, such as time-tracking, and CC-ing e-mails, which the IT team found both needless and demeaning, as they were all consenting adults capable of managing their own affairs workloads.  

     Then IDIOT called the team into a meeting, where he had decided to reduce their salaries from between 18% to 25% and tol

     DANGER WILL ROBINSON!  DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

     Conrad guarantees he did not run this past HR, because doing this is - how can I put it? - HIGHLY ILLEGAL.  You cannot arbitrarily reduce people's salaries, even if you want to as a South Canadian manager whom sees all employees as indentured servants.  Art!

"But it will save costs!"

     Then, four months into IDIOT's reign of meh, came one of the semi-annual problems that occurred every so often amongst MISSC's customers - a database crashed.  Not merely crashed, crashed at the weekend.  DEVIOUS to the rescue; they logged-on and reconstituted the database within a couple of hours. 

     Of course - obviously! - IDIOT took offence at this remediation being carried out without them being informed, because a manager with absolutely no experience in the field and no idea what's going on needs to be involved thanks to -  thanks to - no, I have no idea either.

     They were incandescent with rage, which is a bit out of order, as DEVIOUS might well have called IDIOT to come sort things out, them being a manager and all.  Art!

IDIOT at the scene

     You are surely aware of the rubric 'If it ain't broke don't fix it', which of course an idiot like IDIOT ignored, because he had to justify his existence and salary, so he gleefully informed the IT team that he was going to replace them with an outsourced agency at a fraction of their salary.  This was six months into his reign of meh, and all his petty interference and malice had been totally unchecked by senior managers, who seem to have simply let him do whatever he wanted.

     Well, it's not wise to let an inexperienced numpty make technical decisions over work he does not understand, and this is going to be proven in Part 2, as I leave us on a cliffhanger.    I bet you can hardly wait.

"21 Days" By Angelo Caravaggio

Why yes, I do have a criticism of this work that I'm currently reading.  Ol' Ang does subscribe to one of the canards about the Normandy campaign in that he blithely mentions that Canuckistanian Sherman tanks were inferior to the Teuton models.  Despite mentioning Prof Buckley's 'British Armour In The Normandy Campaign', which completely rebuts any such claim, as defending, especially in the dense bocage country, was always a lot easier than attacking.  

     Oooooh thunder!

     ANYWAY Art!

A Sherman

     One training innovation the 4th Armoured Division's Lake Superior Regiment carried out was to strap rifles firing tracer bullets to their anti-tank guns on exercises.  Fired at tanks on the move playing the part of the Teutons, they showed how accurate the anti-tank guns were.  They also made a loud noise when hitting the tank, meaning that the crew got to appreciate how accurate anti-tank fire could be.

Bring It On!

I was browsing my news feed and of course King Piggy is in there, hogging the limelight as he is wont to do, except it's not in a good way.  Art!

     That's quite a mild photo of DJ Tango, considering.  

"Sudden end forecast: Michael Wolff says Trump’s presidency could end without warning, driven by his taste for drama and desire for historical legacy."

     I've read the article but, Mr Wolff doesn't explain how the sudden end might come, either as a physical or political falling off a cliff.  Apparently Fat Caligula is lonely, the poor dear, and paranoid, which is not to say that everybody doesn't hate him, and what bothers him most of all is not being able to run for a third term.  Although he did make a recent crack about staying in office until 2032.  Make it to the end of 2026 first, Decaying Orange Landwhale.  Which term lament is why he's resorting to vanity architectural projects.  Dunno why because he'll be out of office, a drooling vegetable or dead before any of them get completed.

     So, Mr. Wolff, will it be window or teapot? O how silly of me, that's in Ruffia!

Back To Charley And His War

We return to the fag-end of the Somme campaign, where Charley and his mates had been trapped in a dugout by the Teuton 'Judgement Troopers' and things were looking very grim.  Art!

Sterling art by Joe Colquohoun

     For your information, that's a Teuton 'Minenwerfer', of medium class, a small artillery piece they used in lieu of a mortar proper.  It was a massy beast, and could not broken down as per the British or French mortars.  So, it could be mounted on two wheels and be hauled around by the team, using a leather harness.  They were usually dismounted before firing, otherwise they were unstable and this one as depicted must have had excavations under the wheels to accommodate.  Art!

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Repentance,n: A sentiment which rarely troubles people until they begin to suffer."

*The plural of 'stylus'