CSotD: 5 to 9, baby, 9 to 5
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If it worked as easily in real life as it does at On The Fastrack, I'd have been a video star at one paper.
As it was, management did have someone go around identifying and marking spots for cameras and we all got appropriately indignant and paranoid, but it never happened.
I suspect they discovered that it would cost money.
I'm not sure what they expected to see anyway. If we were sitting there keying things into our computers, fine. Ebay was blocked, as were several sites that reporters actually needed to access for reporting, and everyone in advertising had bootleg Gmail accounts because the graphic files from the ad agencies were too large to fit through the funnel in our approved, secure email.
Hands on keyboards is a sign of productivity. Actually using the computers, however, is a security risk.
And, if we were seen kicked back talking, I'm sure they'd have assumed we were just yakking, not actually discussing how to approach a work-related issue.
Incompetent management can't be cured by surveillance. Even when they're at the next desk, they can't always figure out what you do for a living.
I had one editor who objected to my starting each morning by reading the Wall Street Journal.
I was the business writer.
When the suggestion was made that I read it at home instead of at my desk in the newsroom, I asked if they were going to get a second subscription and have it delivered there, and noted that, wherever I read it, I was going to consider myself to be on the clock.
That was the end of that. Power trumps wisdom and logic, but money trumps everything.
Which reminds me that it's about time for Challenger, Gray & Christmas to roll out their annual "How much work time is wasted on the NCAA tournament" press release.
The alleged analysis is ridiculous, but putting it out each year is not. It's a fool-proof way to get the company's name in the paper, just as surely as Lake Superior State gets in each year with its increasingly petulant and tiresome list of banished words.
And in looking for that March Madness report, I stumbled over this, which isn't what I wanted but did contain this dire warning about the tournament: "I think the biggest mistake is not checking
your company policy and jumping to the conclusion that you can go ahead
and decorate your desk."
Heaven forfend!
Meanwhile, over at Pardon My Planet …
In "Catch-22," Lt. Scheisskopf works his way up to general through his obsession with not having the men's arms move when they march, and every organization has some similar scheisskopf with just enough power to impose his own ridiculous trademark fixation on the place.
Toilet paper is just that sort of petty thing.
People do steal toilet paper, I'll grant you. But nobody is going to steal the single-ply, non-absorbent butt rasp that beancounters consider to be "toilet paper." Especially when, as Vic Lee points out, it's encased in steel.
It isn't always toilet paper, but it's always something, and this particular example is excellent because of the direct lesson that can be drawn: When it's easier to swap out people than rolls of TP, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
I have met the Bobs.
They came in from corporate to look over our circulation department and see how we might improve things. One was an actual VP, the other a publisher at one of the company's many papers who, for some reason, was smiled upon by HQ.
So when it was time for them to assess my educational program, I assembled my little show-and-tell on the conference room table and they came in, but then the VP's crackberry rang and he wandered off to take the call. After he didn't return for awhile, the publisher and I gave up and I showed him what I did and how it all worked, and he got really excited.
"Is there any way we could share this?" he asked. "I'd love to have this stuff at my paper! Could we work out something?"
And I said that would probably be pretty easy, and he said that they had been prepared to give me some boilerplate recommendations about how to run my program but that what I was doing was so excellent that I should keep it up and he'd get back to me about doing it for his paper, too.
And then the other Bob came back in and started to say something, but then his phone rang again and he left and that was the end of my meeting with the Bobs.
The next week, my boss got the boilerplate recommendations about how to run my program and I began the process that led to my editing of a small paper in Maine.
But that's a story for another day.
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