Negative work

**Madrigal** · 07-15-2014, 01:26 AM

This is a thread about bureaucratic bullshit at work.

If a task is mis-assigned to me, I don't get to tell the mistaken person that they are mis-assigning the task. I have to generate a case, a report that will be picked up by some useless idiot who in turn reports this internationally to another useless idiot who then contacts the mistaken person's useless fucking idiot supervisor and that supervisor contacts the mistaken person I was just speaking to about what they did wrong.

In other words, I need to set in motion a global chain of 4 or 5 useless morons just to tell someone something that I can tell them myself.

What, my God, is the point of this? Punishment. They want to know everything everyone is doing wrong, because all of the pointless work this generates and time it wastes and paychecks it feeds to unproductive bureaucrats is absolutely nothing compared to the need to assert total control over every fucking little thing that is being done within the company. These geniuses need to generate a database of pointless information to administrate because they fucking love administrating pointless information. They can't fucking live without this database of bullshit details to administrate.

These are the same assholes that count how many minutes I spend on my breaks because this is wasted time for them. They are the same misers who say they don't have the money to keep our wages up to inflation.

I want to smash skulls right now.

**corporatewhore** · 07-15-2014, 02:51 AM

This is a thread about bureaucratic bullshit at work.

oh my.

I've had the same meeting four times in a single day all with the same people. It's beautiful.

If I approve something the email chain is downloaded and saved in a word doc that is then uploaded to a sharepoint site 'as proof'. It's like they want these things available when the war of the worlds type shit breaks out.

We're all mad down here.

**Phreon** · 07-15-2014, 04:35 AM

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains. The stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.

Think of the purpose you give those pointless automatons by setting in motion the useless system they've built to obfuscate their own irrelevance. In winding their useless clockwork of redundancy, you are their false god.

~Phreon

**Hephaestus** · 07-15-2014, 05:43 AM

There was a job I used to have. I worked in quality control. I was an inspector. The first year or two I worked there, I did some magic. My supervisor loved me because I made her job easier--I just casually did things that otherwise she might have had to do. These were just things that made sense to me, they really weren't anything special.

I got to know the people on the line. I made contacts at various places on the lines--don't as me how, I just did it. When you have a question, you start digging until you're told to stop or you get answers, and in the course of those hunts, I ended up cultivating contacts who, like me, had a work ethic that revolved around doing the best work they could.

This allowed me to save the overburdened rework department a fair amount of work--which btw, the guy who did rework was literally thrilled about. He was a cool guy, and another hardcore introvert with a good social game face.
At any rate, I save him gobs of extra work by taking parts back to where the screw up happened and getting them inserted mid-flow for fixing. 10 minutes of my time could get a pin in a PCB that would otherwise spend days in rework if I did things "by the book".

Personally, I thought that if you had a ton of pieces of the same type coming through with the same defect, especially if it was a biggie, it made sense to do more than write a report and send it to be reworked. I mean, I had boards come through that looked like they hadn't been through the wave solder machine yet--doncha think the guys operating said machine might be people to let know about that? And soon?

As a result, of my investigations, I even made contacts in engineering because I traced a problem to a faulty insertion program. This lead to people coming to me with questions about things from time to time, and concerns to pass on. Now, colour me stupid, but I thought making the face of QC an approachable one was a pretty good accomplishment--and my supervisor agreed so much she asked me to write my own review and gave me the biggest raise she could... by the book.

But then upper management changed. The plant was having some difficulties. I could tell you some of the reasons why--but their solution sure as hell wasn't going to fix it.

They hamstrung me. They didn't want me walking the floor getting things fixed. They wanted me to sit in my corner and write defect reports and never fix anything, because to their mind, the time I spend getting batches of boards fixed would be better spent sitting at my station, possibly getting other boards out.

If they'd had some other intermediary to run around and do what I did, maybe that would have worked. But they didn't. It killed the best part of the job, and I suddenly became more aware of how ridiculously poor I was when I suddenly had an utterly shitty job, rather than merely a kinda shitty one that was sometimes interesting.

I quit.

**jamesgold** · 07-15-2014, 06:47 AM

Negative work - when an object is moving in a direction opposite a force being applied to it.

**ACow** · 07-15-2014, 09:22 AM

I've already blogged about it, but I think it deserves repeating...

The HR department said my resignation letter didn't sufficiently follow the correct format and procedure for a resignation letter....

**ACow** · 07-15-2014, 09:30 AM

Actually, jesus christ, i'm going to have to restrain myself so that this doesn't become my blog this month.

So the public service is firing (sorry...offering "voluntary" redundancies) several thousand people in my country. This involves a year or so of salary being paid to redundant incompetent twats that management hasn't had the guts to fire so far but who haven't done any work since 1980.

The rest of us, to reward us for staying around so long, will get real wage cuts, i'm sure.

Like some kind of twisted "haha, suck it gen Y!" ritual, the Australian Public Service is now advertising its "jobs" on apsjobs.gov.au like they're supposed to, but practically all of them have the addition of: only current APS employees may apply for this job.

So the unemployed public can search the website and express the joy at finding all those jobs that they can't apply for because some dingus says that all jobs have to be advertised, even the ones that the people being advertised to can't apply for.

And don't think that it is even better for those within the public service. Oh no, there's different levels of incompetence and political bureaucratic rules going on once you're on the inside that I won't waste your life detailing...

This is of course, all "merit based"...whatever the fuck that means any more...

**Senseye** · 07-15-2014, 03:59 PM

Every time I see one of these threads I chuckle a bit. I could go on for days.

At least I take some solace in the fact it happens everywhere (sometimes I get the feeling it is just my bad luck). But it's inescapable. I'm not sure if there is a corporate size threshold (say 100 employees or whatever), but at a certain point bureaucratic bullshit becomes inevitable. It's like Dilbert's 1st Law of Corporatism or something.

**Hephaestus** · 07-15-2014, 06:01 PM

Originally Posted by Senseye

I'm not sure if there is a corporate size threshold (say 100 employees or whatever), but at a certain point bureaucratic bullshit becomes inevitable. It's like Dilbert's 1st Law of Corporatism or something.

You're actually onto something. There is a number of people where civilization starts to require more than people just not being dicks. Or rather, there is a number of people where it starts to become more difficult for people to not be dicks to each other.

The principle is similar to the ol' chestnut about how big a circle a person can draw around themselves and call that "me and mine". At a certain point, a community grows too large for everyone to have established (and maintained) friendly terms with everyone. When a community has grown too large for everyone in it to feel communal ties to everyone else in it (barring the occasional utter belligerent, cases of gross superstition, and the normal conflicts that simply happen from basic social friction even among friends) then things start to get ugly.

At that point, you start needing bigger structures to bind things together, things that encourage the members to treat strangers at least as politely as they do their known comrades. This is where bigger ideologies and -isms step in. Religion, creeds, laws and government--and of course, they come with the whipping boy of bureaucracy.

So, I'd say that you are absolutely correct. At a certain size of company, the company needs to create some system of self governance or it will crumble. They come up with bureaucracies, but because of their motivations, they don't start with examples like the Magna Carta. I'm not sure what they start with, but I suspect it's receipts.