Corporate idiocy

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In addition to the idiocy of the multinational company I worked for that constructed its entire database follow only the US style of addresses and phone numbers, I heard an absolute beauty the other day:

The CTO of the company I work with was once asked by a very major Irish ISP to write the proof-of-concept for an executable that it could send its customers, in order to automatically change the phone number for their dialup service. So off he goes and writes the program, but since this was for future use only, and was only a proof-of-concept, he used a number that he’d just plucked out of his ass - something like 01 123 1234. The ISP tested it and was very happy, and paid him for his work. End of story.

But not quite - because a year later, they did indeed have to update their dialup phone number for all customers. So some bright spark in management says “aha, we’ve prepared for this - we already have a program to update people’s numbers.” The company proceeds to email the program to every single customer. Except they’ve sent the proof-of-concept. :smack: Without checking it. :smack: :smack: Within minutes, their call center was deluged by irate people who had run the program and could no longer connect to the internet. Management realised its mistake - and emailed an apology and an updated program to them. :smack: :smack: :smack: Which, of course, none of the customers could pick up because they couldn’t connect to the internet. :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: In the end, they had to hire a call center to call every single customer at home and talk them through the manual number change. It took months and thousands of euro to fix.

:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :rolleyes:

Anyone else got an example of large corporates acting dumber than a box of rocks?

2

Well, this isn’t a large corporate, but it’s a good example of companies acting like idiots.

About ten years ago, I worked for a small company with an owner who was absolutely clueless. Not coincidentally, the company was having a hard time making money. Our salespeople wanted to get some little “bonus” items to send to clients - the idea everyone liked was a pen with the company name and phone number on it. Purchasing a box of pens imprinted with the company name would have cost maybe $200.00.

The owner didn’t want to spend that kind of money. Instead, she suggested that maybe we should give each customer 5% of the next job we did for them.

Mind you, the jobs we did generally were billed in the $50K range. She couldn’t afford $200 for a box of pens, but 5% off a $50K job was OK.

3

Jaysus. False economy syndrome. I should in this thread mention the most serious corporate misjudgement ever in the UK - Hoover’s free flights fiasco in 1992:

4

Our department got new management a couple of months ago. Shortly afterward, the new management laid off the entire team that handled one type of data. The usual route data takes is this: An account executive gets a contributor to send data. We don’t buy it, but offer incentives on our products to get them to contribute. The contributor sends the data to our data centre where it is uploaded onto the mainframe. Our department processes the data (writing programs to reformat it, fix problems, etc., and validating the quality of the data) and then gets it loaded into our database. The other data are collected directly from the contributors – Secretaries of State, county clerks, etc. We have to pay for that data.

So we still need to get the data, and we still need to process it. Not only that, but Corporate have decided that every vendor needs to be set up on Oracle before they will be paid for data. We used to get the data, fill out a purchase order, and Purchasing would send a cheque. But Purchasing decided that vendors must be set up on Oracle, and no one who isn’t will be paid. Basically, “We have a new purchasing system. You need to go online and fill out the enrollment form, or we will not buy your data anymore.”

The problem with that is that we’re dealing with civil servants. They’re likely (and this has been proved true) to say, “Well, in that case we won’t sell you our data.” Never mind that we need the data!

So the whole team that knew anything and everything about this data have been sacked. I had a devil of a time just finding out who we get data from. Now I need to individually contact over a hundred vendors to get them to fill out a form so that they can be entered into Oracle. No luck so far. I’m working with Purchasing to see if they have information on another system that they can just transfer into Oracle. I can probably find most of the information I need by going to the paper files and filling out the forms myself, but what a pain!

I know nothing about this “special” data we need. I have never worked with it. I have never talked to any of the vendors. So naturally, I’m the one who got stuck with this job.

But wait! There’s more! We do pay for some of our “normal” data (i.e., the data we’re all familiar with in the department). We don’t pay for it directly, but we pay a commission to resellers who get it for us. The department director was the one who handled payments, and that was done win an in-department program. He was offered a lower position, or a severence package. He chose the latter. He was the only one who knew how this program worked! And there is a problem with the program resulting in a few resellers not being paid.

In my opinion it was idiotic for the new management to come into a department about whose operations they knew nothing, and to get rid of everyone who knew how to run important parts of it.

Morale used to be abysmal, until we got new management about three years ago. Morale went up, and profits went up. Now morale has plummeted and is at an all-time low, and they have gotten rid of the people who knew how to do things that needed to be done.

:rolleyes:

5

A few years back, I was working in the undersea cable division of one of Japan’s major electronics makers. How incompetent was this company? They were so blatant in the way they overcharged their clients that even the Defense Ministry busted them.

Anyway, we had a major project to lay a fiber optic cable that would loop around the western Pacific to connect Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and a few other locations. The size of the cable wasn’t unusual, but the number of clients was; while most projects had one or two telecom companies doing the buying, this one was being done by a consortium of 26 telecoms from around the world. The meant that absolutely every aspect of the project was spelled out to the letter in the contract, with nothing left to just a nod, wink and a mutual understanding, which is how my boss (and the company as a whole) was used to working.

One of the important points brought up in the contract was the matter of who would be providing the cable. The clients insisted on using a company called OCD, while my boss wanted to go with Pirelli. The clients absolutely refused to agree to this, based on prior bad experiences, and insist that OCD absolutely must be used, and any emergency changes had to be cleared through them first. Boss agrees to this, signs the contract, and then immediately calls up his buddies at Pirelli and tells them to start making the cable. Whenever I questioned this, I was told that I simply didn’t understand the Japanese way of doing business, and was instructed to never mention to the clients that Pirelli was being used. “Yeah, but won’t someone think it’s strange that the ship laying the cable has to start from Italy instead of Fukuoka?” “Don’t worry about that, it’s not a big deal.”

Two months later, there’s a big conference with reps from every client company meeting to discuss the progress of the project, and they’re pissed.

Head Client Rep: “First, why are you subcontracting with Pirelli when we specifically said not to in our contract, and second, why didn’t you clear this change with us first, as is also stipulated in our contract?”

Idiot Boss: “Well, there was an emergency with OCD, and they weren’t going to have the capacity to meet the needs of the project, so really, Pirelli was our only option. As for the second point, this problem just came up, so this conference is really the first oppurtunity we’ve had to bring up the issue with you.”

HCR: “Oh, well, that explains everything. Except… this.”

He then put a slide up on the wall for everyone to see. It was the project schedule report, sent in by Idiot Boss, which did not mention any emergency setbacks, very clearly showed that we’d been using Pirelli as our supplier from day 1 yet were still reporting that everything was going as agreed, and also very clearly caught Idiot Boss in a number of blatant lies.

HCR: “So… please explain exactly what made this change necessary.”

IB: “Ah. Well, you see… This is a very important project to all of us, and so the efforts of everyone involved… Very difficult to bring together so many different groups… Thank you for your understanding… Very long and difficult project. Yes.”

HCR: “Ok, great. Now, please explain exactly what made this change necessary.”

And so on for at least three rounds, with Idiot Boss hemming, hawing and growing increasingly befuddled at the temerity of these rude gaijins for actually asking direct questions and expecting direct answers. Didn’t they understand the Japanese way of doing business?

I, meanwhile, was fighting to keep from giggling like a loon because a) after putting up with months of his smug, belittling crap I was now enjoying watching him getting his ass handed to him in as publicly humiliating a way as possible, b) I had warned him repeatedly that this exact thing would happen, and c) I had gotten a phone call earlier that day from a headhunter telling me that the small internet start-up I’d talked with wanted to hire me at 15k more than I was getting then, so I knew that no matter how he took out his frustration on the rest of us afterwards (which he did), I’d soon be free of him forever.

In the end, the clients accepted Pirelli (since there wasn’t much else that could be done without scrapping everything and starting over), but on the condition that the price be lowered by about 20% and that my company pay to have the new cables fully tested and certified (long and very expensive work). The final kicker was that this project was never going to make money at all, even if it had gone perfectly. It was intended as a loss leader in order to build up our reputation with the clients so we’d get profitable projects in the future. Instead, Idiot Boss managed to shoot himself in the foot in front of 3/4ths of the world’s potential customers.