In one of my favorite movies, Office Space, the main character has to produce some sort of useless, timewasting product called a TPS report. It’s become somewhat of an inside joke between me and my wife… when I’m having a bad day at work she asks me if it’s those damn TPS reports again… <chuckle>
In any case what say the teeming masses? Share with all your stories of useless reports, counter productive corporate policies, and inane bosses!
At one point before I left a company, they decided we should report our time down to 15 minute increments, with three code for project, type of activity, and specific activity, took a couple minutes to scroll through to find each code, and totaled about an hour wasted on friday. We all bitched about the time wasted constantly so what did managment do to meet our complaints?.. they added a new addminstrative code to report time spent on time reporting.
[Chandler Bing]
Well, I’m looking at the WENES, and I’m NOT HAPPY!
[/Chandler Bing]
I don’t have much of that sort of thing in this job, but when I was teaching the coaches would send around a sheaf of forms every semester. We professor-types were supposed to fill out how their athletes were doing, so that they could have a talk with their star quarterback or whoever, if he/she was in danger of flunking off the team. I taught some large courses, so this could be up to almost a hundred forms. After I wised up, I started conveniently “forgetting” them until after the regular grade reports came out.