I’ve always been a fan of the Dilbert comic strip. I think it’s because Scott Adams bases every strip on his own experiences in the rat race, and supplements it with examples submitted by readers who are still suffering. In other words, it’s pretty much true to life.
I updated my book collection recently with some new Dilberts. As a result, I had a few nasty nightmares at the reminder of what I had to put up with. This one deserves some comment:
I have forgotten now the number of times that the idiot managers at the idiot company I worked for behaved exactly like this. Most of them had read about computers somewhere, but that was about as far as their knowledge went. In the latter days I was trying to get them to accept electronic signatures, but this was opposed by the Quality Control department (who effectively bottlenecked everything we did) in favour of antiquated pen and paper.
Most of the senior QC people couldn’t use email properly, and they therefore refused to answer any question via that method. Their messages – if you ever got one – were restricted to short one liners, or entire cut-and-pasted documents from their secretaries. The other problem was that these people lived for meetings and you could rarely catch any of them in their offices. Getting quick answers was impossible, and scheduling a meeting with them was equally frustrating since you were after an answer today – often, for a job that was sitting half-finished in the factory – but couldn’t get on their calendars for a week or more. All the QC people authorised to sign off paperwork only ever attended meetings – they had no other obvious function, and it was often years since they had held a test tube or carried out any sort of chemical analysis. Then, when you finally did get hold of someone (and I have one particular guy in mind here), instead of an answer he would give you “something to think about”, which was bloody useless.
In fact, this guy was virtually (but not quite) the only approved QC signatory for all of the production paperwork we had to write, primarily as a result of the general ignorance of the rest of them outside their rigid empires. You’d write a production process document for a new job, run it past everyone and his dog, get them all to sign it (a total of at least six signatures were required, sometimes including several from the customer), then submit it to this guy in QC. It would inevitably come back with a load of major “think about this” comments scribbled all over it. He did this even on documents which were merely copies of ones he’d approved previously (i.e. when we were doing a repeat job). Customers were doing their nuts over it, never mind about me.
These QC people were the same ones who had argued that all pocket calculators had to be properly validated – every single one of the thousands that were in use, and the tens of thousands that would have been used in the next few years. It would have required validation protocols in huge numbers. It never happened – and there was no way it ever would have. But it provided the opportunity for hundreds of meetings on the subject.
It was these technophobes in QC who called the shots over electronic signatures. The most technophobic were also the most senior, and arguing with them was heresy in itself. Let’s just say that I was definitely a heretic. The irony is that you can be certain that they are now accepting electronic signatures. The company that took them over will almost certainly have insisted on it.