For some unknown reason I recently remembered a wee episode from my working days.

I used to have a supervisor who to put it very mildly was a world class wanker.

For the sake of anonymity I'll call him PJ.

Now PJ was of of those supervisors who wanted to be everybody's friend while at the same time was apt to stab anyone in the back if it suited his purposes.  He was one of those "office speak" twats which really was his only redeeming features as we used to collect his sayings and play Office Bingo.  He was forever "thinking outside the box", "taking the helicopter view" and "putting things in the toaster to see what pops up".

Now PJ did everything by The Book, and this was a source of constant friction between myself and him.  Say for example two calls come into the Computer Support area at the same time.  One is from one of the "Executives" who wants a piece of software installed on his personal laptop, and the other is from a radio studio who are just about to go live but their network has sat down.  In my book, the radio studio gets priority, but in PJ's Book the "Executive" gets top billing.  In other words, he was an industrial strength arse licker on top of being a Grade A wanker, which is an impressive achievement.

One day he sent me a memo.  He wanted me to write a time keeping programme where everyone in the office had to fill in precise details of what they were doing at any moment of the day.  They had to mark in the start time, how long they spent doing paperwork, how long they spent out of the office, what they were doing out of the office and even how long it took them to get there.  It was a simple enough project and I whipped it up and installed it on everyone's PC.

Naturally there was uproar.  Everyone refused to fill in their timesheets and I got it in the neck for even writing the damned programme.

I explained to them quietly what I was at.

Every day, they dutifully filled in their sheets.  They were so keen they even reminded each other to do them.  At the end of the week I would print off a summary of how long each person had been doing things, complete with lovely coloured pie-charts [PJ loved pie-charts], and beautiful statistics full of percentages and shit.

PJ was impressed.  He finally thought he had tamed me.  He could now impress his bosses with detailed time-flows and bar graphs and lovely statistics.  He had his minions well in control.  He was happy and we were happy.

After a few months of this, I launched my secret weapon that I had told my colleagues about.

You see, as well as itemising what people were doing, I had added a simple bit of code to tally precisely how many hours and minutes each individual was working.  And it worked out the we all, without exception had worked well beyond our allocated times.  We didn't get overtime, so any excess hours could be claimed back in days off.  I printed off each individual's overtime complete with the number of days off they were due.  And they all trotted in and demanded their dues, which in some cases ran into weeks of due leave.

There was fuck all PJ could do about it.  It was after all his idea to run the system, and the fact that I had generated some extra tallies was outside his control.  The records were there and having already accepted them he couldn't dispute them.  And The Book said we were due time off in lieu.

He told me to shut the programme down.  I told him the staff were very happy with it and were demanding it be kept up.  They said they would write their own tallies if my programme went, so it stayed.

One aspect of myself I am immensely proud of is that I never licked arse.  Bosses only got my respect if they earned it, and PJ never did.  He was a sniveling little wanker.

I wonder where he is now?

On second thoughts….

No I don't.