Anonymous wrote:Fortune 500 employee here. Our company has a lot of 30 person + multi day meetings to work on large scale priorities but they just talk in vagaries and never actually get to the nitty gritty and details of projects with that many people.

Yeah - this setup would crush my soak but not as much as rounds and rounds of reviews and then re-reviews in sharepoint environment where the expectation is you respond to each comment bubble and there are about 100s of them… I become a machine!
And then soul crushed

Anonymous wrote:I used to be a public school teacher. My job was to provide extra academic services to struggling students, but I spent a total of 3 months out of 9 months not teaching, but administering standardized tests and "practice" standardized tests over and over again to these students. They spent so much time taking the same tests again and again that they lost valuable learning time, and I spent so much time on the paperwork and documentation that I only actually taught for 2/3 of the year. And when scores didn't go up, my students and my school were called failures by the same people that made us do that. How's that for nonsensical process?

This one is really sad… I moved my child to a private school this year actually.
Oh - the realization that public middle school is simply too big of a machine to help the 504 kid. Let’s not even talk schoology issues. Basically I gave up there.

*Puzzled passenger (not Filed passengers)

Sorry, I use dictation function

Anonymous wrote:I worked at an office that processed employee parking badges. We would take the employee’s parking information sheet and copy it twice: 1. for a binder labeled ‘Parking Badges’, 2. for a file cabinet folder labeled ‘Parking Badges’ (2 feet away from the aforementioned binder). Then, we would scan a PDF of said information sheet, saved in a digital folder called ‘Parking Badges’. I asked my baby boomer manager multiple times why we were committing this egregious act of redundancy and the answer was “because we’ve always done it that way”.

This reminds me Yeralash funny shorts.
A boy purchase one bus ticket on the bus, then one more. One Puzzled Passenger asks why he bought the second ticket (if he is alone). The boy explains it’s just in case he loses the first ticket. Filed passengers’s first satisfied with the answer, but then comes back with another question - what if you lose the second ticket? The boy confidently answers that for that case he has a monthly pass and he takes it out from another pocket and shows it to her.

Anonymous wrote:I once found a report that was being done every day for 20 years that no one every read. The guy doing it never asked as it was most of his job.

You are joking, right?

20 years?

The reports usually go somewhere???

Then you are evaluated on your reports. So someone must read them (?).

I worked at an office that processed employee parking badges. We would take the employee’s parking information sheet and copy it twice: 1. for a binder labeled ‘Parking Badges’, 2. for a file cabinet folder labeled ‘Parking Badges’ (2 feet away from the aforementioned binder). Then, we would scan a PDF of said information sheet, saved in a digital folder called ‘Parking Badges’. I asked my baby boomer manager multiple times why we were committing this egregious act of redundancy and the answer was “because we’ve always done it that way”.

Fortune 500 employee here. Our company has a lot of 30 person + multi day meetings to work on large scale priorities but they just talk in vagaries and never actually get to the nitty gritty and details of projects with that many people.

Anonymous wrote:I once found a report that was being done every day for 20 years that no one every read. The guy doing it never asked as it was most of his job.

I produce one of these reports. Over the course of 10 years, I've been slowly dropping information from it, and no one's noticed...unfortunately, they notice if I don't send it.

Weekly “prioritization” meeting where progress is reviewed on projects underway and upcoming projects are ranked from 1-5 (or so) based on groupthink. This is supplemented by about two dozen employees with no expertise in these projects evaluating the required financial outlay, labor hours, and importance to the organization - these scores are combined and averaged. The “leader” then takes this information into account and re-numbers the priorities. THEN, when a project is approved to be taken on, a business case needs to be written and approved by a committee before it can move forward.

The person who developed the above “process” is a very well-paid C-suite executive.

It’s ridiculous.

I once found a report that was being done every day for 20 years that no one every read. The guy doing it never asked as it was most of his job.

I used to be a public school teacher. My job was to provide extra academic services to struggling students, but I spent a total of 3 months out of 9 months not teaching, but administering standardized tests and "practice" standardized tests over and over again to these students. They spent so much time taking the same tests again and again that they lost valuable learning time, and I spent so much time on the paperwork and documentation that I only actually taught for 2/3 of the year. And when scores didn't go up, my students and my school were called failures by the same people that made us do that. How's that for nonsensical process?

I feel you. Sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness. Takes some savvy to pull off, not without risk, but results do speak for themselves sometimes. Cultivate good relationships, know what’s going on around you, help people out when you can, and you’ll start to have a little more freedom to operate.

Thanks! Else this soul is crushed.

A couple books:

Jennifer Pahlka
Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better

Marina Nitze
Hack your bureaucracy

Feeling a little suffocated in the bureaucracy… but perhaps this is not the end of the world.

Looking for any stories / examples of nonsensical process — just to know I am not alone!