I guess it is one of those twists of fate, but I recently found myself landed with a small contract for a huge multinational company.
Then it transpired that the structure was more complex, think a layer cake with several overlapping, or not so overlapping, Venn diagram like areas of management.
Then think institutionalised incompetence, to the point where this job is going to go titsup, or provide me with solid work well into next year, the job specification hasn’t expanded mind you, it is just that the PROJECTED work rate is approximately 25x greater than the ACTUAL work rate, still par for the course for a couple of million UK£ worth of new hardware and a Fortune 50 company.
Why should a Fortune 50 company hire people any more competent than the secret family courts, or the local cable company technical support, or just about any other aspect of modern life that you can choose?
The answer is of course that there is no reason it would, or would be able to, given that all of the above take their staff from the labour pool of people currently of working age, which means 90% of them never even had the rudiments of a decent education.
See, unless you teach a person an actual trade, it is flatly fucking impossible to teach them to take anything even remotely approaching a pride in their work, because they won’t have any identifiable work which they own, or can point to and say “all my own work“, rather everything is a collaborative fuck up, for which no-one individually carries any responsibility, and on those occasions where these fuck ups result in someone dying, all you have to do to keep your management job is to trot out the old lines about “far reaching investigations” and “no stone unturned” and finish up with “lessons will be learned“.
It’s all bullshit of course…. so we have in this case (no names and no pack drill) a Fortune 50 multinational financial corporation (5 in the management project team) a Fortune 50 multinational hardware corporation (4 in the management project team) a national service corporation (7 in the management project team) and another assorted 12 people supporting all of the above, which makes 28 management level people in billing full time for this project, plus approximately 25 others in various outsourced and externalized leveraged roles scattered around the globe, so we are up to 53 people, and down at the bottom of the pile there are two people, yours truly and a guy we shall call Fred.
Now me and Fred are the ones supposed to do ALL, and I mean ALL, the actual fucking work in this project, and of course being on the bottom of the pile me and Fred are paid less than anyone else, which is OK, I take the attitude you pay me peanuts, I act like a monkey and chill, but the fact is me and Fred have spent the last two weeks producing sweet fuck all, we have been explaining to 7 managers what the fucking project actually is, what we have to do, how we have to do it, and why we can’t do it yet because the other 4 managers above them, and the 5 managers above them, haven’t done some really, really, really basic things to enable us to do the job….
Think like this, guys need hammers, nails and wood, after a week of asking we get nails supplied, 4 days later we get some wood, 3 days later we get one hammer, but Fred and I are not allowed to share the hammer, it was issued to me… so today we hammered the first nails into the wood… and it takes a team of 28 managers and 25 managerial support staff to fuck up the job to that extent…
Meanwhile exactly the same grade of asshole is in charge of the family court system, the economy, the political scene, and whether we will have a war or not in the country of your choice, and exactly the same grade of asshole is reassuring all the other assholes that the Euro has been rescued, peace and apple pie is coming in Libya, we don’t need no stinking nuclear power plants, house prices will never crash by 75%, and there will not be another land war in europe.
What could possibly go fucking wrong?
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