ATTN JAYNA: PLEASE SHOOT ME IN THE FACE.

[Zan]

Content removed.

Zan,
Is nobody's 2d class citizen.

[Jayna]

BUREAUCRACY. 

Systems of pointless makework.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Bureaucracy has its uses, the main one is covering somebodies @$$.

Sadly those reports don't seem to be covering yours Jan...

[Zan]

Bureaucracy has its uses, the main one is covering somebodies @$$.

Sadly those reports don't seem to be covering yours Jan...

Who's Jan?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Oops, sorry, wrong key (like 6 to the left...), I meant you Zan.

[Opsa]

Can I be Jan? She was the middle girl on The Brady Bunch, and I always related to her. Too plain to be the glamorous Marcia, not cute enough to be Cindy! 

There is balance, somewhere.

[Zan]

There is balance, somewhere.

Where?

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Somewhere in the universe...?
--
Seriously though, I learned painfully that bureaucracy has its uses, sadly those rarely are real honest work. Surely someone needed to place a report in someone else's desk and you had the misfortune to be the one making them. I've been there more than once and I'm sure many siblings that have had the 'pleasure' to deal with the standard corporate culture have been there too.

[Griffin NoName]

Who was it said computers would lead to less paperwork?

[Zan]

Who was it said computers would lead to less paperwork?

Someone seriously lacking in imagination and/or foresight.

[Opsa]

Or seriously abundant in wishful thinking.

Probably a salesperson.

Bureaucracy never sleeps.

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

'Tis an evil thing. And turns people into DMV-ish creatures. Perhaps you can push some of it on the filthy assistant?

[Aggie]

You have my sympathy - I spend hours agonizing over precisely wording reports that ultimately will not be read by the client, other than perhaps the executive summary, the conclusions and a quick glance at the tables to see what failed criteria.  Yet I refuse to turn out crap, because ultimately there is an audience - the person (often at a different company) who ends up picking up the report in a few years time to do the next round of busy-work because the client doesn't want to spend the BIG money cleaning up the site.  It's easier to throw $30,000 at a site every 2 or 3 years than to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars digging out the problem (and sticking it in another hole in the ground somewhere else - landfilling is almost always the cheapest, quickest option for contaminated soils ).  It's a small industry, and I'll be damned if anyone takes a look at my reports down the road and thinks they were complete trash.

Zan, I recently made the move from the Big Evil Corporation to a small company (20 ppl, give or take) and it's bliss.  So much of the paperwork I did at the Corp was just making numbers flow upwards to the next few levels of management, and dealing with crap that had nothing to do with my job - really, we have accounting and billings departments, but they pushed all the basic accounting, invoicing, project tracking etc. down to the ground level - and often threw it back down after we were done with it because it didn't match the 'standard' numbers they had in their systems (OK, not my fault if we give different rates to every client and y'all don't have it in your system - if I don't give them the correct rate they WILL NOT PAY IT, so add it to your system already!).  At the same time, our chargeability targets were 80 - 90% (i.e. 80 - 90% of your workday had to be directly billable to the client) - so spending hours every week pushing around invoices for some file that is closed (can't bill more time) was doubly frustrating when it meant you'd get grilled on your low chargeability.  Oh, and budgets must be met too...  so doing those reports correctly doesn't count for much when you are expected to toss them out at the same rate as the idiot who doesn't think correct spelling, grammar, formatting or data is a big concern.  Lots of unpaid OT on a voluntary basis to get what I want out in the time they want, and the #$(*&% thing still goes over budget because of all the paper-pushing you had to charge to maintain chargeability, so you get a grilling when you turn in a writedown request (which are stated to be "just for tracking purposes, nothing to be ashamed of").  Our division might have been profitable if we hadn't spent so much time figuring out if we were profitable. 

One very complex report earlier this year nearly killed me - I didn't think there was any way in hell the client would actually pay for the amount of (necessary) hours I put into this sucker, but they did. Can I offer anyone else a $10,000 bundle of paper? Dunno if they would had I included all the after-hours I actually spent on it - I was sweating buckets turning in that invoice as it was. 

I cut my teeth in a very small company (2 people  ), so being back to a situation where I can talk to the owners directly at any time, and the paper flow is small enough that they can dedicate a couple of people to taking care of it, is great.  I get handed work, I do it efficiently because I have few distractions, and they actually notice when I do a good job. Weeeeeird.... 

I know that the prospects of changings jobs is dismal at the moment, but for the long term, can you reasonably find a new niche in your industry/job function?  Burnout happens, and even if the job ends up being somewhat similar, a change is nice.  It might be worthwhile if what you were doing actually served a purpose, even if it still involved writing enormous reports.



_{I also have the luxury of getting outdoors and getting my hands dirty (figuratively speaking, they are usually encased in multiple layers of nitrile) and actually doing something of benefit for the environment, even if it's in direct support of Big Dirty Oil.  14 hour days aren't so bad when you are out doing something instead of sitting at a desk. Oil's pretty cheap to pump the first time, but it costs WAAAAAAAY more to extract the second time around.}

[Zan]

Tell me about it.  I am a whore for Big Oil.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

Who was it said computers would lead to less paperwork?

I'd bet money it was either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.... 

[Aggie]

Tell me about it.  I am a whore for Big Oil.

At least they have plenty of lubricants handy.