Thursday 28 August 2008

Another Day At A Medium-Sized International Investment Bank (III)

Monday. Email: please can we convene to discuss an immediate problem with mission-critical implications?
Tuesday. ...
Wednesday. ...


Of all the various CYA political ploys, side-stepping stratagems and decision-avoidance tactics employed in the perpetual management bun-fight, the one that really, really gets up my nose is "if in doubt, maintain radio silence." If it's tricky, ignore it. Pretend it never arrived...


Now, I have no doubt that in the gazillion messages that whiz around the Internet a few get eaten by the gremlins (they could even be the same ones that hid Jay's linen ;-). But the truth is the delivery rate must be as close to 100% as makes no difference. And it's funny that it's never the emails with humourous youtube clips, or the Ebay purchase confirmations, or invitations to lunch that go astray. Nope, it's only the ones that contain specific, important, urgent requests for decisions or action that seem to mysteriously fail to arrive. Even though I can see it sitting there in my Sent folder...

At the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan physicists have spent billions of dollars and 12 years trying to find evidence of nucleon decay - proof that things can simply and spontaneously cease to exist. They should try working here.


Dr: "Who's the patient, nurse?"


Nurse: "Herr Gitschleimer. Middle-manager at a medium-sized investment bank."


Dr: "I see. Contusions and laceration to the side of the head... requires surgery for foreign body extraction... What happened?"


Nurse: "Apparently told one too many porkies. Tried to bullsh+t a slightly unstable spot monkey that he hadn't received an important email. Had a wireless bluetooth headset ripped out of his ear and brutally inserted.."


Dr: "Thanks, nurse. I get the picture."


3 comments:

Daddy Papersurfer said...

Ahhhh, the *snap* of a marigold .......

Anonymous said...

I tried to post this morning but seems the message spontaneously combusted. Must be a MSIIB thing.
Anyway, the gist of my message was that if I ever do any bluetooth headset removal / reinsertion work that doctor is going to need to long forceps in that gloved hand.

(That chubby MD, who saved our MSIIB world recently, is wandering particularly close to my desk recently and one day he'll take a liberty too far with his explanations of just how brilliant his idea was...)

Somnambulist said...

@DP - close to snapping myself I think...

@UDH - Never seems to be any shortage of self-professed brilliance does there?