Sensationalism

To reduce visibility I try not to get into very detailed news about work, but there has been an internal issue that has been the subject of rumors for the past few months.

Yesterday that issue has gone public in the Casper Star-Tribune, which ledes with a exagerated headline. I'm not going to comment on it further than this:

• The person responsible for this has been fired (that part is in the article)
• Newspapers are notorious for this sensaltionalist BS, so it should come as no surprise that they lead this article with "Phone Company Illeagally Erected Towers", presumably because it's sexier than "Phone Company Doesn't Get All the Pemits it Needs"

Read the whole thing. The article's headline suggests that Evil Company Ninjas sneaked onto other peoples land and secretly build towers, but the truth is far more mundane. Someone at the paper obviously doesn't like us.

I guess, the lesson is to make sure you do your friggin' paperwork.

Corporate Memory

Imagine a hypothetical company, let's say it's a major retailer with stores all over the place, and it has a distribution system that carries goods and services from their warehouses to its stores. Now lets suppose that the cost of trucks, feul, drivers, etc. is a large expense and this retailer has found a third party transport company that can do the task at one third the price. The director of the shipping department may decide that everyone on his staff that is associated with the transportation part of the business to be obsolete. This is not an unreasonable assumption, so the manager lets those people go.

So, on the day that the third party transporter is contracted to begin, he lines up his trucks, walks up to the shipping director and says, "OK, we're ready to go. Just tell us where to drive these trucks full of merchandise, and we'll get them there by tommorrow at the latest!"

"Um... I thought you, like, already knew where you were going?"

"Well, once we have the addresses of your stores, sure, we can get there fast and effiecntly!"

"Oh, I thought you'd just, like, know that stuff already or something."

"Uh, no... it's in our contract that you'd give us the addresses of your stores and the names of the managers, and such."

"Oh, right. I forgot about that... hang on..." The manager runs back into the office and starts sifting through papers and searching through computer files. He returns in about an hour holding a box of various papers.

"Ok, it's all here somewhere."

The driver looks at the milk crate full of loose paper. "Uh, you don't expect us to go through all this by hand, did you?"

"Well, we kinda forgot that you might need this information." he holds up a ratty sheet of notebook paper. "Aha! I think these are lat-long coordinates for our store in Des Moines. Or one of our Maine locations. I can't quite read the handwriting, but the numbers are pretty clear."

"...and the store manager?"

"Oh, I think I talked to him at the company Christmas party last year. Name's William Something. The Des Moines guy, I mean. I've never met anyone from the Maine stores."

"..."

"Oh, hey! An invoice from a company that did some roofing work on our Ohmaha store! Address and Manager Name right there at the bottom! See? It's all good!"

"...You mean you didn't get a list of this before your last manager left the company?"

"Well, we didn't think we'd need anything they ever did after we brought you on. You can see how the misunderstanding happened."

"You DO realize that we can't do a thing until we know where to send each of these trucks, right? Not to mention which store each one of these is going to."

"Wait, you don't even know which store each truck is going to? Man, logistics is hard!"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we're dealing with right now (The Department has been changed to protect the innocent). We're getting data that someone else used to personally keep track of, and now that he/she is gone, we have to figure out what this person did, and get our contractor data in a form that they can use.

And a lot of it is incomplete, or just dirty. To all the managers out there that have to downsize your departments, take heed: make sure you know where everything is before you terminate positions.

False Positive

Today we learned that several emails and resumes for positions like "Training Specialist" and "Marketing and Statistics Specialist" were getting caught in our spam filter. Can you guess why?

Marketing and Statistics Specialist... maybe they only have experience marketing a different product that does fit in with our business plan. Or maybe their domain was black listed. Another posisbility: maybe there's an undocumented feature* that weeds out bad candidates that have resumes that were poorly worded or unreadable.

Training Specialist

Could maybe the attachment had a worm or something, and the filter caught it. We had that problem before, and it was several months before we could get it all sorted out. Maybe the vendor for our spam-filter isn't an Equal Opportunity Employer, and it was filtering out Women, Blacks, Hispanics, and Handicapped people. Or maybe, it's something most of us would overlook...

Marketing and Statistics Specialist

Did you see it? look again, closely.

Training Specialist.

I LOLed when I heard about this. This is why you need to fine tune your software.

*For those unfamilliar with IT jokes, an "undocumented feature" is a programmer code phrase for "bug that we're trying to pass off as intentional so we don't have to fix it or admit we screwed up."