wow, after reading this I realised that I used to work for a public sector group that was in fact the most dedicated and effective guerilla fighting unit on earth!
What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?
Don’t wish me a Happy New Year: it doesn’t work. In fact, I think your annual good wishes may be hexing them. There have always been anni beati and horribiles but things really started to go downhill after David Jones escaped back to his home planet 10 days into 2016. Since then, it has been regularly proposed that each …
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Friday 1st January 2021 12:12 GMT Shadow Systems
I've got a better list...
My Skippy's List.
Of course I'm Not Allowed to DO anything on it, but if I'm going to start breaking those rules then I've got an AWESOME todo list!
Just out of curiosity, do you know where I can find a gross of tea candles, a giant roll of all cotton twine, and about a trillion swizle sticks? Asking for a friend. *Cough* =-D
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Friday 1st January 2021 13:34 GMT Chris G
Re: That list!
That list, sounds very much as though it is a fundamental part of both MBA syllabuses (syllabii?) and civil service promotion exams.
For anyone who would like to be part of a list, I have a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook that I can lend you, that I have had since the seventies when I was a keen squaddie.
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Friday 1st January 2021 13:59 GMT GrumpenKraut
Re: That list!
About the Anarchists Cookbook: Last time I looked I spotted so many places where I thought "You should NOT do this the way described" that I assumed it was to trick wannabe anarchists into blowing themselves up in their homes. Stuff like totally neglecting cooling when cooking certain things (nitroglycerin IIRC). Runaway heat when making explosives can easily spoil your day. Also your neighbors day.
Kindly never share that thing without a warning along those lines.
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Friday 1st January 2021 15:58 GMT Dr. G. Freeman
Re: That list!
During the house arrest we've been under since March, been writing a version of the Anarchists' Cookbook that works, mostly out of sheer boredom, and to see if I can.
Apart from the spiced prawn* recipes, going quite well.
(not in the original cookbook, but was in a similar "underground" publication.)
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Friday 1st January 2021 12:55 GMT Whiskers
Re: passengers?
Calling them "passengers" implies the acceptance that at some stage, travel will be involved. "Customers" are merely applying for a service or goods; delivery is at best negotiable. ("Patrons" are even worse off; they are expected to pay, but delivery is largely a matter of chance).
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Friday 1st January 2021 12:38 GMT Neil Barnes
It is certainly clear
that the behaviour described in that charming little booklet continues to this day. And I thought it was simple inefficiency - have they perhaps not noticed that the war ended in their fathers' or grandfathers' time?
I wonder if the makers of Chinese tools have read the bit about blunt and soft cutting tools?
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Saturday 2nd January 2021 09:16 GMT Aussie Doc
Re: It is certainly clear
"I wonder if the makers of Chinese tools have read the bit about blunt and soft cutting tools?"
As a frequent user of such kit I can confirm that they seem quite apt in this area.
Indeed, some of my tools even come pre-broken for my convenience.
Better ones in my other pocket -----------------------------------------------------------------^^^
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Saturday 2nd January 2021 02:49 GMT Yes Me
Re: Which country are we at war with?
I am greatly deceived. I understood that unicorns would be prancing on the fields above the White Cliffs of Dover by today, but instead I read in the Grauniad that the fields will become a lorry park instead. Perhaps my calendar is mistaken about it being 2021?
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Friday 1st January 2021 14:19 GMT Howard Sway
Reads like a guide of how to achieve maximum possible efficiency rather than sabotage
At least in a company of more than 2 employees, following this will get you to a level of market-competitive efficiency as nowhere else will be much better.
However if you want to actually sabotage things, there's one guaranteed way to do it. Introduce new systems and procedures as part of an "efficiency drive". Nothing succeeds better in reducing efficiency in a big company than a conscious top-down attempt to improve it.
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Friday 1st January 2021 15:43 GMT Norman Nescio
Re: Reads like a guide of how to achieve maximum possible efficiency rather than sabotage
However if you want to actually sabotage things, there's one guaranteed way to do it. Introduce new systems and procedures as part of an "efficiency drive". Nothing succeeds better in reducing efficiency in a big company than a conscious top-down attempt to improve it.
In addition:
1) Re-organise to improve efficiency. Preferably every half-year.
2) Take a flexible manual process and insist that people use an inflexible computerised process as its replacement. For bonus points, computerise an existing process without talking to, or taking advice from existing users, but only from their managers.
3) Require people to account for time used in 15-minute intervals in a mandatory time-recording system, and ensure that minor administrative work has no cost-centre or booking code, so teaching people to be creative (lie) and causing untold strife over which codes to use and who administers what. For bonus points, the time used for completing and reconciling time-sheets has no associated time code, so management have no clue how much time is wasted. Apparently all employee time is chargeable and people are mightily efficient...
4) Ensure that retention periods for the organisation's email (for arse-covering reasons) is too short, so important information goes missing.
5) Mandate that all important information is placed in SharePoint, with no control over the structure, so you end up with a massive hairball of interconnected documents, most of which are out of date and/or irrelevant.
6) Mandate the use of the organisation's document templates, for which there are several incompatible versions, all of which set up by trainees with no knowledge of document formats. For bonus points make sure they are not available on the Intranet so that various different people swear they have the original source document to be used.
NN
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Saturday 2nd January 2021 22:42 GMT Robert 22
Re: Reads like a guide of how to achieve maximum possible efficiency rather than sabotage
"Mandate the use of the organisation's document templates"
The organization I worked for improved on this.
There were forms for everything and you had to make sure that you used them if you wanted to get anywhere. However, they were always being changed and it was possible to find different versions of the same form and none of them were dated. And there was always someone along the line who would insist (after several weeks had gone by) that you needed to resubmit with the correct forms.
Then some outside consultant dreamed up an incredibly complicated format for our internal publications. It was quite possible to find yourself trying to put together a technical document in MS Word only to find that the formatting was not only complicated, it was extremely unstable - that last trivial change would cause everything to move around.
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Friday 1st January 2021 15:39 GMT macjules
Home Broadband
At the moment I am contracting to a client that requires me to use a Citrix receiver to logon to their VPN, then to log in to a remote virtual desktop and THEN login in from there to a virtual development environment similar to Amazon Workspaces. Metering this I discovered that my broadband can just about handle this during the daytime so long as the children are at school. I am seriously considering setting up a separate billable zone with choked bandwidth and speed in order to be able to charge the client and to be able to produce a monthly expense report for usage.
Anyone know of software that can do this, including the reports? I am thinking along the lines of a new router reflashed with DD-WRT, since it can produce the zones and a full activity report.
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Friday 1st January 2021 17:11 GMT Stoneshop
Re: Home Broadband
My VDSL modem has the option of setting one of the LAN ports for guest access, disallowing access from that LAN to the common one, but that requires a separate machine, or one with a second network card that you assign to a VM running that client's software. Which you would be able to throttle as well as log data use under control from the VM host.
I've also used a smallish but sufficiently powerful OpenBSD box when we were sharing ADSL with two other people. Of course these were different machines on separate LANs, and the OpenBSD firewall (with a quad port network interface) not only kept them all isolated, it also allocated bandwidth with a guaranteed minimum[0] of 25%[1] of the outside speed and up to double that if that much was available. If I'm not mistaken it can log bandwidth use, but I wasn't using that.
[0] unless they hadn't paid their share of the subscription, then it would be throttled to 56kbit. Good luck playing online poker over that.
[1] pay for 25%, you get 25%.
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Friday 1st January 2021 15:53 GMT taxman
21st Century Quibbles
Sorry, I can't work from home due to the Tier restrictions on travel. Oh, you want me to work at home not from home! Why didn't you say so. You were going by the HR instructions? Well, if you think about it the only folk here who work from the office are those who travel about. The rest of us work in the office. So yeah, really we should be being told to work in the home or at home.
Do you think we should get something put together to present to HR so that we can have clarity on just where they want us to work: at home or at the office or from the office or from home depending on what the job role is and tier restrictions are?
Are you really sure you meant that?
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Friday 1st January 2021 19:35 GMT cd
Obviously lazy satire...
The original manual is obviously either the product of...
a) a lazy jobsworth who merely took examples from the hierarchy they worked in and typed them up, sanguinely aware that they would not be comprehended as criticism by those in charge.
b) a master satirist, perhaps descended from the Swift bloodline, who also realised that the targeted would not grok the aim and that it would serve as a subtext for all practical people.
c) all of the above, but I wasn't alive then.
On another note: One fortunate thing about 2021 is that it cannot possibly be worse than the preceding years, we are now on track to have a splendid year of great relief. The polar caps will not continue to melt, causing a rotational imbalance and a 90 degree tilt of the planet. No explosives will go off without deliberation. No further plagues or virii will visit. Those earthquakes/unexplained loud booms in the southwest United States that aren't showing up on the USGS reporting are a mere figment, not a sign of the impending separation of California from the rest of the continent along the Walker Lane and the resulting incursion of seawater on all lower elevation cities in the region.
Everything will be perfect this year.
/s (which stands for sincerity)
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Friday 1st January 2021 22:17 GMT Fruit and Nutcase
Brexit Due Diligence
Have the Legal Beagles of Vulture Central looked at the Brexit implications of Alistair's contract for [SFTWS]? Just wondering if the appropriate forms have been filled out, clearances obtained, qualifications (what qualifications hear you say) checked for EU/Blighty equivalence and recognition etc.
Otherwise I fear this may be the last [SFTWS] that we see until all that is sorted out
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Friday 1st January 2021 23:59 GMT Irony Deficient
7th century quibbles, ab Urbe condita edition
There have always been anni beatum and horribilis
Anni beati and horribiles — the adjectives also need to be masculine nominative plural, to match anni.
Anni mirabiles instead of beati would have been a nice nod to Dryden’s poem:
In fortune’s empire blindly thus we go,
And wander after pathless destiny;
Whose dark resorts since prudence cannot know,
In vain it would provide for what shall be.
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Saturday 2nd January 2021 00:19 GMT John Brown (no body)
Buggerit!
"Stop being productive! Destroy morale! Cock everything up, time and time again! Do all this and your promotion is assured!"
I've been doing this for years and I'm still awaiting my promotion. <sigh> I guess my boss never read The Manual. Mind you, that's not surprising. Some of the words were more than one syllable and there's no pictures.
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Sunday 3rd January 2021 21:57 GMT jake
Re: I read that book when it was declassified
I'm pretty certain that book was posted to Usenet long before it was declassified.
I don't know anybody who claims to have invented most of that stuff ... but I sure as hell have met some management-types who seem to have it embedded in their DNA.
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Monday 4th January 2021 08:33 GMT KittenHuffer
Re: The Way of the Weasel
I remember reading the Dogbert's [Top Secret] Management Handbook nearly twenty years ago.
My comment to friends was that I wish I'd read it five years earlier, cos I would have been able to figure out which chapter my then Mangler was on, and could anticipate his next 'wonderful' command!
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Monday 4th January 2021 12:34 GMT Potemkine!
No Future
"Do I feel lucky"? Well, do you, punk?
Other fragments of wisdom:
- Never do something today that you can do tomorrow.
- Don't nap in the morning, you won't know what to do in the afternoon.
- Rephrase what people ask you to do with a slight variation making them understand you did not understand their request, and forcing them to repeat. If possible, do it the day after their request, to add a delay.
- Use extensively the BOFH excuse generator.
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Monday 4th January 2021 17:17 GMT Cynic_999
Silver lining
While the number of covid-related deaths is large, the covid virus seems to have been a cure for both flu and pneumonia, both of which have seen a massive reduction in the number of seasonal deaths usually attributed to those causes every year. The number of industrial accidents has also plunged, especially in the catering & restaurant sectors.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
