Obnoxious Librarian from Hades (13 page)

Every year the ritual of preparing next years budget starts in March. I have barely had the time to spend this years budget,and then I have to prepare for next years budget. It is a familiar ritual between my manager and me: he wants a lower budget, I want more budget. Hence I ask for twice the money I really need, he then dissects the budget and challenges every line item, planning to reduce my budget to almost zero. We go back and forth, until I get half of the budget I requested, which is precisely what I need and my manager has the satisfaction of being a cost focused manager who cut away half of the requested budget.

However, like all things that work well, this had to be changed. Our über finance lords now want to get involved in all the details of budget planning, right down to the paperclip level.

I am now placed at the challenge to get my budget plans approved by my manager and the finance manager for overhead functions. To make things a bit more exciting, both are in different locations, different timezones and they have overloaded calendars.

My mission, which I was forced to accept: get both managers into the same teleconference to get agreement on my budget plan for next year. Let me explain to you the process of getting that meeting organised:

- I e-mail the finance manager requesting a brief phone call to explain the purpose of the meeting and share background information before I plan the budget meeting

- The e-mail is refused as "the recipients e-mail box is full"

- I call the finance manager and leave a message in his voicemail box.

- I wait for three days without any response.

- I try to call once again and the finance managers' voicemail asks me to contact him via his new secretary as he is overloaded with meetings requests and e-mails following the new company procedures.

- After numerous attempts, I get through to the finance managers' secretary and we set a date and time for the conference call a week later.

- I confirm the time and date to my manager, the finance manager and his secretary.

- My manager calls me two hours before the scheduled meeting telling me he cannot attend the meeting, kindly asking me to reschedule.

- Working with the finance managers' secretary, we find out there is not a single opportunity in the next two weeks where both are available in the same time slot (some say this is coincidence, I say it is coordinated sabotage.)

- I finally find a slot that suits everyone and send out the new meeting details: date, time, dial in number and pass-code.

- At the agreed date and time, I eagerly wait for both managers to dial in.

- My manager calls me on my cell phone asking me for the conference pass-code, as he has forgotten that. He dials in and we wait for 10 minutes for the finance manager. We decide to hang up.

- I get an angry e-mail from the finance manager saying he was in the teleconference an hour ago and why weren't we there? I call his secretary and find out the finance manager is on a
business trip to another region in another timezone, hence he mixed up the time for the meeting.

Just when I am ready to pull my hair out and scream out in frustration I see the urgent e-mail coming in from our CEO: "In order to respond to the falling share price, our disgruntled shareholders and my desire to be a true leader - I announce a complete reorganisation of Hades Inc. More details will be announced soon, but for now do not start new projects, hire new staff or plan next years budget. There will of course be layoffs, but I trust all of you will 'keep your eye on the ball' and make sure your meet your targets this year while you worry about your job."

Mmmm… . saved by the bell?

As all of you know, I have many special system privileges and wide access to all information within Hades Corp. Yesterday I noticed that many meetings are now recorded for audit purposes, so I can be a "fly on the wall" in many interesting meetings.

I would like to give you an exclusive, behind the scenes look of the meeting where the new out of pocket expense claim management system was discussed.

Project manager (PM)
: People, welcome to the kick off meeting of project "cost-busters". As you know, we are on a relentless drive to drive down costs in our beloved company. Our project will focus on the out-of-pocket expense claim system. Right now that is too easy for the end users, basically they just fill out a simple form, sign in, attach the receipts and within a week the company reimburses them.

Compared to industry benchmarks, that is JUST NOT ACCEPTABLE!

Think of our motto "CARE for our users": Confuse, Annoy, Rile and Enrage the users. If we "care" enough, people will stop submitting out of pocket expenses and we save many pennies.

So, guys, tell me, what will the new system look like?

User interface design (UI):
you will be pleased to learn that we have gone out of our way to annoy the user with the interface. We have at least twice the number of buttons and options than needed, the important icons are tiny and just below the viewable screen area.
Our ground rule was: "the interface should hurt the user". Hence, the screen colors are puke, drab and washed-out. Also, the order of menu items and buttons will change at least randomly every week. To top it off, the expense claim form has to be filled out in 5 minutes otherwise the form is reset.

Process engineer (PE):
we have also looked at best practices. The new expense claim process is unrivalled in the industry. If you look at the process drawing hand out, you will see we have a multi-step process with many steps being dead ends. So if the user goes wrong in one step, they have to go back to the beginning. Just to make sure we reach optimal frustration, we only explain half of the process in the brochure and online training.

Once a claim has been entered, we will automatically generate a number of useless status updates via e-mail and text messages, preferably to users personal phones.

Customer disregard centre (CDC):
I am pleased to announce that the new expense claim system will be fully supported by our off shored, underpaid and overworked service centre. End users will only be able to communicate with the service center by filling out another form! In return they will get a ticket number and a promise that a service "agent" will contact them in 48 hours. Of course, that excludes UK bank holidays, all major religious holidays and officially recognized US holidays.

The big secret is that every request form is ignored first. If it is really important, the end user will be motivated enough to fill out another form. Then we assign the service request to either the clueless intern who hasn't got a clue or to the disgruntled service agent who has just given up smoking. In either case they will send a standard e-mail back to the end user, suggesting they look at the frequently asked questions or follow the online training.

User acceptance testing (UAT):
it should be no problem getting approval from the end users. We have found a group of end users that are willing to give their approval if we buy them lunch and give them a free web cam. And no, it's not bribery - we think of it as encouraging end user buy in with incentives.

So knowing all of the above about the new expense claim system, I decide it's better to avoid using it. I will just add up all out of pocket expenses over the year, and then send myself invoices from my own company (obnoxious librarian inc.) at the end of the year. Just make sure the invoices are below the threshold that I can authorize myself, and I have saved myself a lot of frustration and time..

It used to be that once every year, the ethics, compliance and diversity manager would gather all of us in a meeting room for 10 minutes to give us a reminder: "Folks, you are all adults and professionals. Behave well, act as adults and don't do anything that would make me ashamed of you. If you have questions, call me. Any questions?"

But the ethics, compliance and diversity manager retired last year and of course HR saw their chance to collect a huge budget to build an online ethics, compliance and diversity learning website. All staff now has to undergo the online, 2 hour mandatory training with a multiple choice test on the end.

The course is developed to "engage" us in an "interactive simulation" of the appropriate behaviour. Well, if you ask me - the course is an insult to all staff as it clearly indicates how HR thinks of us…

A few examples:

First of all, all videos and images during the presentation are politically correct and reflect no real office life at all. So in every video and picture there is gender and racial diversity: at least one female, one Asian, one African American and one Caucasian staff member. Furthermore, it is required to show standard images of colleagues standing around a computer with one of them pointing to the screen and the others look very interested.

What highly annoys me is that the "interactive simulations" use dramatic story lines which could be taken from made-for-TV drama's:

"During this course you will follow the story of Joe Schmo, engineer at ACME Inc. His lack of interest in company ethics and conflict of interest resulted in DOOM for him, his family and all future generations of Schmos! Don't be like Joe and pay attention during the course!

[Joe is invited to meet the company VP]

Joe: Hi Mike, good to see you - what do you want to talk about?

Mike: Joe, I am very disappointed in you. We saw you as an honest, hardworking engineer who knew what it takes to raise in the ranks. You worked late, took all the shitty jobs I gave you, laughed at all my stupid jokes… but you violated our holy policy on accepting gifts.

Joe: Mike… I… I don't understand… .

Mike: Joe, you know how I share your passion for crushing the competition and squeezing every penny out of our vendors. I don't mind strong arming the competition or doing some creative bribing to get a deal. But as I have always said: "don't get caught"!
Your secretary reported to me that you have received and accepted two tickets to an amateur performance of "A chorus line" from vendor X, worth 51 dollars! That is a violation of our rules. I see no other way than to fire you!

Let's now go back in time to understand what Joe did wrong and what he should have done… "

Or an example from the diversity & inclusiveness course:

"This course will explain how to behave in an ultra-political correct manner. We begin this course with the story of John Schmuck, who meets his new colleague from France. First we will explain how NOT to behave and then the proper way.

WRONG:

John: Oh hello there, you must be the hot new transfer from Paris! Oh la la! I am John, the office Don Juan!

Louise: Hi John, it is nice to meet you. I look forward to working with you on project X.

John: Louise, Louise, you will be working under me and that will be a mutual pleasure!

Louise: Pardon me!

John: Well, Louise, I also love literature. Perhaps you and I can discuss "Casanova" over candlelight dinner tonight at my place?"

RIGHT:

John: Hello miss Boursain. My name is John Schmuck.

Louise: Nice to meet you mr. Schmuck.

John: Do call me John. I look forward to working with you in a professional, gender neutral behaviour without any jokes, fun or other silly stuff that our corporate ethics clearly forbid."

Disclaimer:
this post and all others are the product of the authors' imagination and any resemblance to real situations is purely bad luck. This article does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my Elvis doll. Do not read while operating heavy machinery. Contact your congress man for instructions.

Ah, how good it is to be a librarian – right now I am reading the Artemis Fowl fantasy series while sitting at the library desk. To hide what I am reading, I have wrapped the book in a fake cover with “Library 2.0 – Hype or reality?” on it. On every page I frown, pretend to scribble something on the page or highlight a paragraph. This way nobody notices I am actually reading for fun, and librarians are supposed to read of course. Anyway, I was supposed to network and have fun at the annual regional library conference, but the central training approval team denied my request.

Every year I have to fill out a proposal to attend the regional library conference and submit that to the central training approval team (a bunch of HR control freaks). When I just joined the company, I innocently asked permission to attend a national library conference like ALA or SLA. In those days I would actually go over to a person in the office to request permission, so I had the opportunity to see them snicker at my request. “A national library conference? Gee – three whole days? What do you talk about? Books? Hahaha. Forget it”.

Nowadays the process has improved as everything goes through web forms, so I am spared the in-the-face humiliation. I was however allowed to attend the regional library conference every year, as long as I drove back and forth every day since the company would not fund lodging.

This year the central training approval team was thrilled with the global credit crisis – another reason to deny more outside training! Another argument to turn down training requests and save money! They actually suggested to that instead of attending the conference, I would buy the conference proceedings and “acquire the learnings” that way.

Oh come on. Conferences to me are 25% about the presentations, 10% about seeing the latest and greatest from the vendors, 15% about being away from the office and 50% about networking. Conference proceedings capture less than 5% of the conference value, as usually they are just prints of the slides which are meaningless without the actual talk.

And while I am on the topic of presentations at library conferences, I think we should do a greatest hits conference. I see quite a lot of the same presentations every year, usually with a different template or title, but the essence stays the same. Also, there are some classics out there that I would love to hear again – some have reached cult level in library-land.

So why don’t we do a “Library conference – the best of 1980 – 2010” next year?

Why cataloguing is still relevant in an online world (1993)

Fighting the “shushing” and bun stereotype (1985)

Why we are so much better than AltaVista (1996)

Library 2.0: more hype and fluff to make us seem hip (2005)

This whole web thing is just a hype and will never go anywhere (1994)

End user tagging: the beginning of chaos (2003)

Taxonomies – the next big thing to save our profession (2002)

CompuServe - the primary information network (1985)

Dialog command line searching – obscure tips and powerful tricks (1981)

As networking is for many attendees the most important aspect to a conference, I would have breaks every hour, plan long lunch breaks and bars everywhere to hobnob.