Creating a productivity vacuum

I love how Dimlord thinking operates. When times get tough, simply make the internal bureacracy even more impenetrable. Productivity won't increase, the share price will still fall, but hey - we're doing something about it! At any rate, we're doing something.

Case in point: I was entering a 'Work Effort' into our management substitute application ITBlows earlier, and (after I'd spent twenty minutes staring at the web browser and trying to explain how I was maximising productivity by filling in an incomprehensible form) I got to the end and hit 'submit'.

I wonder if a psychologist has ever investigated why so many bureacratic forms end with a button marked 'submit'. Granted, it's easier to fit on a small button than 'I'm greased - go ahead and do me up the council gritter, big boy'. Still, if the 'submit' button became the 'fuck it, that's got to be good enough' button, or the 'cancel' button were instead marked 'bollocks to this, I'm off for a nice relaxing crap', I'd feel more honest when pressing them.

I digress.

So, I hit 'submit', and as usual was left feeling slightly soiled. My submission, degrading as it was, was not sufficiently abject for ITBlows. I received the following cruel rejection:


What the fuck does that mean? I write software, that's what I'm paid for. Not only do I not know what half of that even means, but the stuff I do understand I can't answer for the simple reason that it refers to stuff I don't know and don't want to know. At all. I mean, 'Relative Annual FTE cannot be blank'. FTE is 'full time employee', what the hell does one make a person annually relative to?

We're all forced to fill in stupid bloody forms all day long, and (apparently) most of them are means by which our productivity can be measured. It seems relatively obvious to this drone that if I have to fill in forms before, during and after doing stuff, and then can't fill in forms because I either don't know what they mean or can't answer the questions, then they already know my productivity level (definition from The Free Dictionary):

2.productivity - (economics) the ratio of the quantity and quality of units produced to the labor per unit of time

Since I can't work without the form, and can't fill in the form, my output is zero. That makes the maths easier, since zero divided by anything is still zero.

Maybe if I use alternative productivity calculation as championed by our traders, I will still get a big bonus. After all, I've only spent my entire working life at MegaCorp frustrated by meaningless bureacracy; those blue shirt, yellow-tie, stripy-suit wearing barrow-boy ponces have properly broken the world economy.

I should get a medal for being merely useless.