The one where we take ethics, compliancy and diversity training

It used to be that once every year, the ethics, compliance and diversity manager would gather all of us in a meeting room for 10 minutes to give us a reminder: "Folks, you are all adults and professionals. Behave well, act as adults and don't do anything that would make me ashamed of you. If you have questions, call me. Any questions?"

But the ethics, compliance and diversity manager retired last year and of course HR saw their chance to collect a huge budget to build an online ethics, compliance and diversity learning website. All staff now has to undergo the online, 2 hour mandatory training with a multiple choice test on the end.

The course is developed to "engage" us in an "interactive simulation" of the appropriate behaviour. Well, if you ask me - the course is an insult to all staff as it clearly indicates how HR thinks of us...

A few examples:

First of all, all videos and images during the presentation are politically correct and reflect no real office life at all. So in every video and picture there is gender and racial diversity: at least one female, one Asian, one African American and one Caucasian staff member. Furthermore, it is required to show standard images of colleagues standing around a computer with one of them pointing to the screen and the others look very interested.

What highly annoys me is that the "interactive simulations" use dramatic story lines which could be taken from made-for-TV drama's:

"During this course you will follow the story of Joe Schmo, engineer at ACME Inc. His lack of interest in company ethics and conflict of interest resulted in DOOM for him, his family and all future generations of Schmos! Don't be like Joe and pay attention during the course!

[Joe is invited to meet the company VP]

Joe: Hi Mike, good to see you - what do you want to talk about?

Mike: Joe, I am very disappointed in you. We saw you as an honest, hardworking engineer who knew what it takes to raise in the ranks. You worked late, took all the shitty jobs I gave you, laughed at all my stupid jokes... but you violated our holy policy on accepting gifts.

Joe: Mike... I... I don't understand....

Mike: Joe, you know how I share your passion for crushing the competition and squeezing every penny out of our vendors. I don't mind strong arming the competition or doing some creative bribing to get a deal. But as I have always said: "don't get caught"!
Your secretary reported to me that you have received and accepted two tickets to an amateur performance of "A chorus line" from vendor X, worth 51 dollars! That is a violation of our rules. I see no other way than to fire you!

Let's now go back in time to understand what Joe did wrong and what he should have done..."

Or an example from the diversity & inclusiveness course:

"This course will explain how to behave in an ultra-political correct manner. We begin this course with the story of John Schmuck, who meets his new colleague from France. First we will explain how NOT to behave and then the proper way.

WRONG:

John: Oh hello there, you must be the hot new transfer from Paris! Oh la la! I am John, the office Don Juan!

Louise: Hi John, it is nice to meet you. I look forward to working with you on project X.

John: Louise, Louise, you will be working under me and that will be a mutual pleasure!

Louise: Pardon me!

John: Well, Louise, I also love literature. Perhaps you and I can discuss "Casanova" over candlelight dinner tonight at my place?"

RIGHT:

John: Hello miss Boursain. My name is John Schmuck.

Louise: Nice to meet you mr. Schmuck.

John: Do call me John. I look forward to working with you in a professional, gender neutral behaviour without any jokes, fun or other silly stuff that our corporate ethics clearly forbid."

Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my Elvis doll. Do not read while operating heavy machinery. Contact your congress man for instructions.

Library satire news: Local area librarian looking for romantic clues

From the Library Satire News Feed:

Local area librarian John "J.J." Jessel has been looking for clues in the behaviour of patron Patricia Porcaro to find out whether she is attracted to him.

J.J. first noticed her when she asked him a quick reference question: "This beautiful angel came over to the reference desk and at first I was blinded by her beauty, the twinkle in her eyes and the sound of her lovely voice. I realized this was the woman of my dreams." Ever since, J.J. has been looking for clues whether the patron also has strong feelings for him.

"I looked in the log files of the library computer she used, and she spent 25 minutes looking for keywords like 'romantic restaurant' and 'flirting tips'". That same day I was at the check out desk and she checked out "25 delicious recipes to win a man's heart" and "Seducing your soul mate". I noticed she was blushing a bit when she handed the books over to me - so I knew that was a sign".

When later that week Patricia came back and borrowed several cd's with titles like "Soft rock ballads" and "Steamy soul classics #4", J.J. was totally convinced she was into him. He then used his online research skills to learn all about his love interest: "Well, of course I started with her Facebook account, subscribed to her Twitter feed, downloaded all her Flickr sets and then set up alerts on several other social media to stay up to date on my future wife." His solid belief that Patricia was also interested in him was confirmed when he read several entries on her Facebook page indicating that she was falling for a new mysterious man.

J.J. is currently preparing himself to overcome his natural shyness, fear of failure and known habit of falling apart when facing women to ask Patricia out on a date.

When asked about her interest in the local area librarian, Patricia Porcaro replied: " Who? That creepy guy - yikes, no, thank you! But I do have a big crush on that hunk at the Starbucks next to the library!"

Disclaimer - this post and every other posting, paragraph, word and syllable on this blog is a product of the author's imagination and overdose of cappuccino.

The one where we take a look behind the scenes

As all of you know, I have many special system privileges and wide access to all information within Hades Corp. Yesterday I noticed that many meetings are now recorded for audit purposes, so I can be a "fly on the wall" in many interesting meetings.

I would like to give you an exclusive, behind the scenes look of the meeting where the new out of pocket expense claim management system was discussed.

Project manager (PM): People, welcome to the kick off meeting of project "cost-busters". As you know, we are on a relentless drive to drive down costs in our beloved company. Our project will focus on the out-of-pocket expense claim system. Right now that is too easy for the end users, basically they just fill out a simple form, sign in, attach the receipts and within a week the company reimburses them.
Compared to industry benchmarks, that is JUST NOT ACCEPTABLE!
Think of our motto "CARE for our users": Confuse, Annoy, Rile and Enrage the users. If we "care" enough, people will stop submitting out of pocket expenses and we save many pennies.

So, guys, tell me, what will the new system look like?

User interface design (UI): you will be pleased to learn that we have gone out of our way to annoy the user with the interface. We have at least twice the number of buttons and options than needed, the important icons are tiny and just below the viewable screen area.
Our ground rule was: "the interface should hurt the user". Hence, the screen colors are puke, drab and washed-out. Also, the order of menu items and buttons will change at least randomly every week. To top it off, the expense claim form has to be filled out in 5 minutes otherwise the form is reset.

Process engineer (PE): we have also looked at best practices. The new expense claim process is unrivalled in the industry. If you look at the process drawing hand out, you will see we have a multi-step process with many steps being dead ends. So if the user goes wrong in one step, they have to go back to the beginning. Just to make sure we reach optimal frustration, we only explain half of the process in the brochure and online training.
Once a claim has been entered, we will automatically generate a number of useless status updates via e-mail and text messages, preferably to users personal phones.

Customer disregard centre (CDC): I am pleased to announce that the new expense claim system will be fully supported by our off shored, underpaid and overworked service centre. End users will only be able to communicate with the service center by filling out another form! In return they will get a ticket number and a promise that a service "agent" will contact them in 48 hours. Of course, that excludes UK bank holidays, all major religious holidays and officially recognized US holidays.

The big secret is that every request form is ignored first. If it is really important, the end user will be motivated enough to fill out another form. Then we assign the service request to either the clueless intern who hasn't got a clue or to the disgruntled service agent who has just given up smoking. In either case they will send a standard e-mail back to the end user, suggesting they look at the frequently asked questions or follow the online training.

User acceptance testing (UAT): it should be no problem getting approval from the end users. We have found a group of end users that are willing to give their approval if we buy them lunch and give them a free web cam. And no, it's not bribery - we think of it as encouraging end user buy in with incentives.


So knowing all of the above about the new expense claim system, I decide it's better to avoid using it. I will just add up all out of pocket expenses over the year, and then send myself invoices from my own company (obnoxious librarian inc.) at the end of the year. Just make sure the invoices are below the threshold that I can authorize myself, and I have saved myself a lot of frustration and time.

*** Don't forget about the contest

Where were you on July 25, 2007?

On July 25, 2007 I posted the very first episode on this blog. Remember this one?

Now, almost 2 years later I am a little amazed I have kept up posting regularly and having fun doing it. Currently a little over 440 subscribers and judging from the page views also quite a number of people regularly surfing by. Thanks to all of you, as said, writing this blog is cheaper than therapy ;-)
No need for sending flowers or cakes, although I do appreciate link love (i.e. linking to the blog on your website).

To celebrate 2 years of surviving clueless managers, reorganisations, pointless meetings, l-users (library users) and bureaucracy in general I have started a contest.

Send me your "obnoxious librarian" anecdote (real or made up) about your manager, the soul crushing experience with the help desk or how you fought the evil spells from the accounting department. The deadline is July 25, 2009 and a week later I will announce the winners.

Winners deserve prizes! I have two prizes here in the library vault waiting for the winners:

- one signed copy of the "obnoxious librarian from hades" book
- one signed cd of music that I played during the writing sessions

Send your contributions to dennieheye at gmail dot com.

The one where we plan a budget meeting

Every year the ritual of preparing next years budget starts in March. I have barely had the time to spend this years budget,and then I have to prepare for next years budget. It is a familiar ritual between my manager and me: he wants a lower budget, I want more budget. Hence I ask for twice the money I really need, he then dissects the budget and challenges every line item, planning to reduce my budget to almost zero. We go back and forth, until I get half of the budget I requested, which is precisely what I need and my manager has the satisfaction of being a cost focused manager who cut away half of the requested budget.

However, like all things that work well, this had to be changed. Our über finance lords now want to get involved in all the details of budget planning, right down to the paperclip level.

I am now placed at the challenge to get my budget plans approved by my manager and the finance manager for overhead functions. To make things a bit more exciting, both are in different locations, different timezones and they have overloaded calendars.

My mission, which I was forced to accept: get both managers into the same teleconference to get agreement on my budget plan for next year. Let me explain to you the process of getting that meeting organised:

- I e-mail the finance manager requesting a brief phone call to explain the purpose of the meeting and share background information before I plan the budget meeting

- The e-mail is refused as "the recipients e-mail box is full"

- I call the finance manager and leave a message in his voicemail box.

- I wait for three days without any response.

- I try to call once again and the finance managers' voicemail asks me to contact him via his new secretary as he is overloaded with meetings requests and e-mails following the new company procedures.

- After numerous attempts, I get through to the finance managers' secretary and we set a date and time for the conference call a week later.

- I confirm the time and date to my manager, the finance manager and his secretary.

- My manager calls me two hours before the scheduled meeting telling me he cannot attend the meeting, kindly asking me to reschedule.

- Working with the finance managers' secretary, we find out there is not a single opportunity in the next two weeks where both are available in the same time slot (some say this is coincidence, I say it is coordinated sabotage.)

- I finally find a slot that suits everyone and send out the new meeting details: date, time, dial in number and pass-code.

- At the agreed date and time, I eagerly wait for both managers to dial in.

- My manager calls me on my cell phone asking me for the conference pass-code, as he has forgotten that. He dials in and we wait for 10 minutes for the finance manager. We decide to hang up.

- I get an angry e-mail from the finance manager saying he was in the teleconference an hour ago and why weren't we there? I call his secretary and find out the finance manager is on a
business trip to another region in another timezone, hence he mixed up the time for the meeting.

Just when I am ready to pull my hair out and scream out in frustration I see the urgent e-mail coming in from our CEO: "In order to respond to the falling share price, our disgruntled shareholders and my desire to be a true leader - I announce a complete reorganisation of Hades Inc. More details will be announced soon, but for now do not start new projects, hire new staff or plan next years budget. There will of course be layoffs, but I trust all of you will 'keep your eye on the ball' and make sure your meet your targets this year while you worry about your job."

Mmmm.... saved by the bell?


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my Elvis doll. Do not read while operating heavy machinery. Contact your librarian for instructions.

The one where we benefit from bureaucracy

I received a call from Scott Patterson, the slick salesperson from vendor OverPricedContent Inc. As always he tried to schmooze me by pretending to know me very well and being a "friend". That always irks me, as he would be the last person I can imagine to do fun things with that I do with friends, like guessing Dewey codes, discussing library 2.0 and bashing Google. After not getting anywhere with his small talk, he told me he had been enjoying "interesting" discussions with one of our leading scientists, Adam N. Douglas about a global subscription to OverPricedContent Inc.'s flagship database "HapHazard-Bag-Of-Content-With-Flashy-Features".

Ok, now all alarm bells go off...

End users and sales people should never ever be allowed to talk together. In this case particularly, Adam N. Douglas may be a top-notch scientist, but he has no clue about databases, quality information or our limited library budget.

Scott Patterson is overly excited: "Mr. Douglas said that after the free trial he was very interested in our database, and that he would arrange for you to handle the global license! So, shall I pop over to your office say tomorrow to discuss the size of my bonus... eh.. sorry, the details for a global contract?"

With some effort I manage to get rid of Scott Patterson, as I first want to deal with my distinguished end user. Since 1996 strangling of end users has been prohibited unfortunately and I have been told not to whack l-users (library users) with rubber stamps anymore. I pop over to the research lab and find Adam N. Douglas behind his desk, almost hidden behind printouts, empty coffee cups, dusty binders and lots of broken pencils. He looks up, flinches, remembers he has not got his glasses on, looks for his glasses, puts them on upside down, looks bewildered, realizes his mistake, puts on his glasses on correctly, realizes it is me and smiles: "Oh hello librarian, am I overdue again with my books?"

"Adam, of course you are, but that is not the reason why I am here. You have been talking to a sales person called Scott Patterson?"

"Yes, what a very interesting fellow. He has a wonderful database you know. I tried it and as it has all my articles in it, so that database must be really good. Also, you could change the font size and background color - very handy. Also, mr. Patterson was very interested in hearing my feedback as well known scientist, and he asked me to be on their advisory board that meets at exotic locations annually. I highly recommend you set up a global deal, mr. Patterson would work that out with you."

"Adam, do you know that over half of the content in mr. Patterson's overpriced database is already available via databases I licensed for you? And why didn't you bring me into the discussions?"

"Mr. Patterson said he already had spoken to you, and that you would be ok with my evaluation - so you think that database is not good value for money...? Do you think it is a bad thing that I confirmed to Mr. Patterson in an e-mail that Hades Corp. would sign a global contract pending some small details?"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

This calls for action, as this could get really messy. Luckily I know just what to do: "if you cannot beat them, wear them out". So I quickly head over to my good friend Xander de Beaufort in the contracting and procurement department. Xander by day is a supply chain engineer, using his creative talents, knowledge of contract details and skills in manipulating internal processes. At night and in the weekends he is a forest ranger, driving his Landrover through the woods to help the animals and chase vandals who do not respect Mother Nature. I explain the situation to Xander and he suggests that we employ our bureaucracy tactic to wear the vendor out: "we may not be top quartile in cost management or performance, but we are second to none in bureaucracy!"

Xander will send mr. Patterson a nice e-mail, explaining to him the simple, 12-step program to reach that contract. We'll start with a requirements and opportunity statement review, followed by a portfolio match and market scan based on industry specific benchmarks, leading to either identification of levers in the supply market or the assessment of new suppliers, which surely will bring up a 3 month tender process, resulting in a lenghty tender board meeting to determine the short list. Nearly there, we move on to discussion about price strategies, risk reward models and detailed review of the proposed contracts with the sharks from legal, tax, insurance and intellectual property involved. The surviving lucky vendor, who still wants to deal with us, then has the last hurdle to clear which is to get the right signatures of Hades Corp. top managers. Due to the ongoing re-organizations and managers fear of committing to costs, plus the fact that this process of getting the signatures is handled by our off shored financial services group who cannot ambush the senior mangers in hallways or meeting rooms, chances are slim of this deal ever happening.


Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my LinkedIn profile. Avoid contact with eyes. Do not read in the dark.

The one where we take a day off

It is Thursday evening in the library and I am tired of working all day to update the records management system with the new retention rules made up by the legal department. I put my feet up on my desk, turn up the speakers to hear the fabulous song "Bodhisattva" from Steely Dan and check the weather forecast. It looks like it will be a beautiful day tomorrow and it would be nice to go to the park with a good book (I found a thriller entitled "Dewey decimated" which sounds intriguing).

But taking a day off in Hades Corporation however is not an easy feat. Far from that, it actually is quite discouraging and makes you think twice if you really have the time to arrange that day off...:

- first you have to navigate to the global HR portal, log in with your user id and password (which you have to change every 3 months and must be 12 characters at least, so you write that down on a post-it note somewhere... spend 5 minutes looking under keyboard, in the drawer and underneath a stack of old Library Journals)

- open the "leave request" form

- fill out your name, department, select your manager from a drop down list (which starts at "A" and you must scroll all the way down), select the leave date requested

- close the HR portal

- open the departmental team calendar in Outlook and block the day you are on leave

- go to the project team "leave overview" spreadsheet on the intranet, try to download the spreadsheet, find it is reserved (i.e. blocked for editing) by a colleague, call colleague to release the document, download the document, enter the leave in the spreadsheet, upload the new version to the intranet

- open the time writing application. Find that the password you have in your list is not the right one. Call the help desk to have the password reset. Log in to the time writing application successfully and realize you don´t know what time writing code to use for "unplanned leave". Make up a code. System rejects code. Call colleague. Enter right code.

- at the end of the year you get a request from the finance department to explain why the time writing overview of leave requests and the overview of the HR department is off by 30 minutes.

- my manager has one week to approve leave requests. If he is on leave, deletes the e-mail or in general does not feel like logging on to the HR portal to approve my request, my leave request is denied. Then what do you do when you already have taken that day off?

That process takes roughly an hour and sucks away all the good vibes in the room. It's not only me who has to waste time and energy to satisfy the bureaucratic processes, oh no, my manager gets involved for approval, bean counters in different off shored locations look at the request, route it, stamp it, validate it, forward it and lose it somewhere. So I estimate that following the process of requesting the day off costs my organisation at least $750. I can also just take the day off and don't follow the process. Either way I will take the day off. Hmmm.... what did we recently get brainwashed about?

Save costs
Think out of the box
Challenge bureaucracy
Avoid lenghty procedures
Work smarter

Hey, I can tick all the boxes above by just taking that day off and forgetting about all those procedures, forms and timewasting.....

Disclaimer: this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my time writing code. Avoid contact with eyes. Do not feed after sunset.