JP, what a fucking character!
OK, I guess you can tell that I’m having one hell of day so far. Did you ever work for someone who you’ll swear just makes you change the way you do things to make your life a living hell?
If this rings a bell then you know JP.
We have a lot of monthly reports and analyses that we put together. After much fanfare and discussions between myself and JP and my team, we’ve gotten the monthly analysis down to a science. So this morning I’m sitting with JP reviewing the monthly processes and he gets that look. That fucking confused, stupid look on his face and I just know that my life is going to get a lot harder for absolutely no reason.
“What if we…”
That’s the way it always starts. We get a process perfected, we are able to get things done timely and accurately and then I get the fucking WHAT IF WE…
This happens at least every 5 or 6 months, it’s almost like JP sits up at night thinking, they’re way too efficient and they’re not working ridiculous amounts of overtime so how can I change everything they do from an automated process to be the most manual method that can possibly be done?
Here’s the thing, this has gone on for years. It’s always the same thing. He gets a fucking bug up his ass to shake things up but then next month we’ll take twice as long to get things done and he LOVES his data. So he’ll start to get (what I call) data withdrawal and after he sees how long his brilliant new methods actually take he makes us go back to the old method the following month.
(If I had to guess, The Gestapo demands information that JP doesn’t have yet so JP has to scramble and he doesn’t want to have to scramble the following month so he makes us go back to the original (perfected) procedures. (Until about 5 or 6 months later when he must get an idea and then he totally forgets what he went through with The Gestapo a half a year ago.)
After the big meeting I’m the one that has to spread the good word to the rest of my team. They know it will eventually happen but they still freak out when it does. (Imagine being able to put in a date and push one button to run a report but now, since you work for JP and that fucking bug crawled up his ass, he makes the process so antiquated that it would be like writing out a huge report by hand, in comparison)
JP is a data freak, he loves data so he asks us to provide ridiculous amounts of details (so much that he’ll never have enough time to go through it all even if he closed his office door, opened a cot and spend the entire week living at The Company.)
He’s like a hoarder, a data hoarder.
So I tell the group JP’s new plan.
“THAT FUCK!” screams Skank Sister # 2.
Now here’s the thing (and I’d never admit this to JP) but the Skank Sister # 2 works for me but her sister works for The Gestapo, so when she is really pissed it’s easy to convince her to mention things in the vicinity of The Gestapo (if not outright telling him.) Remember Skank Sister # 2 always rats on the lower man on the totem pole. (So she’d rat anyone in my department out to me, she’d rat me out to JP, and she’d definitely rat JP out to The Gestapo.)
So my plan was the next time JP got the data bug to casually “suggest” to Skanky # 2 to tell The Gestapo (you have to make her think it was her idea or she won’t do it, at least not willingly.) So by firing the group up and mentioning that I hoped The Gestapo doesn’t think it’s us causing the hold up next month, I think I planted the seed.
I hope she mentions it to him before next month’s reports are due. If The Gestapo reminds JP not to be late then JP will rescind the new details before we actually have to do them.
It’s not like I don’t want to do my job, but doing busywork just to make sure we’re busy isn’t productive, it’s a bullshit waste of time if you ask me.
The lesson learned: Data Hoarding is not cool.