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Dead wood — 13 Comments

  1. I read an interesting article recently from a woman bemoaning the fact that CV's she gets never mention "the ability to get things done." Instead it's all corporate speak ticking the boxes for the human resources bureaucrat. So, like you, I admire O'Leary simply because he got things done and fuck the begrudgers. Work, by definition, is about getting things done and meetings by their nature are about talking about getting things done.

    • Administrators aren't interested in getting the work actually done.  They love to spend their time working out how long each individual takes to do each individual task, costing each individual item, dividing by ten and subtracting the number they first thought of and the putting the whole lot in a report full of nice colourful graphs.  I get the impression that O'Leary would prefer to see results rather than a graph?
       

  2. I remember having written a comprehensive CV for a job that when I went for an interview that the Personnel Dept gave me a form to fill in whilst I waited.   I refused, telling them that all the info was in my CV.

    When the Technical Director interviewed me he was pleased at my stance and said that the Bloody Personnel Dept were a law unto themselves.    He offered me a job, but was rather surprised that I turned him down telling him that I would not work for a firm where the pen-pushers were in charge.

    • All personnel departments are a law unto themselves.  Aren't they now called Human Resource Management or some such officespeak?  God be with the days when Technical Directors ran the technical businesses. 

  3. "I would leave them with my head swimming with management-speak clichés and a headache."

    Like these?

    Heads up
    Step up to the plate
    Huddle (informal meeting)
    Ball park figure
    Informed choices
    End game
    Vibrant
    Diverse
    Customers (when it should be 'passengers')
    Issues (when it should be 'problems')
    Healthy eating
    Inappropriate
    Unacceptable
    No platform
    Carbon footprint
    Climate change

    • I had another one [yes – I had several] who I swear learned his lines from Gus in "Not the dead donkey".  He was forever running things up the flagpole to see who saluted or dropping things into the toaster to see what would pop up.  His only advantage was that he was a total idiot and it was just too easy to confuse him with a bit of twisted logic.

  4. It was ever thus, they kick the incompetent upstairs to get rid of them and there they stay until they retire on their enhanced pensions. I don't think it is any better in the UK at least it wasn't when I worked in local government.

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