April 2, 1993
Dear Everyone:
The attached example of "lawyer bashing" comes compliments of “Jeannie”,
who received it from someone who got it from someone who doesn't like
lawyers (who does?).
Well, March was certainly a month of meetings, a meeting being defined
as any congregation of two or more persons during which minutes are kept
and hours are lost. Scarcely a
day went by without at least one "short" meeting that usually manage to
gobble up at least half a day. Voracious
little beasties!
I've been trying to get RACS to declare April a "Meeting-Free-Month",
with a singular lack of success. Everyone
keeps giving me that "Heavens! What
planet are you from?" look. However,
I at least, may be able to cut back on meetings this month because
(cross your fingers!) my Destruction Approval Quality Improvement Team
is t-h-i-s c-l-o-s-e to actually launching the 1993 Annual Destruction
Review.
The use of the word "annual" is, of course, more of a tradition than an
actual adjective. Our last
"annual" review took place in 1990. You
will observe that a few years have expired since then.
And, if you pay attention to that
sort of thing, you will also have observed that we started this Project
last summer. It has taken us 9
months to get to this stage of the "improvement", a fact that “Murray”,
the “Livermore” Records Center supervisor, takes pains to point out
repeatedly, conveniently forgetting that it was at
his insistence that we cut
our Team Meetings down to only 2 hours per week, because two of the Team
Members work for him and he couldn't "spare" them for the improvement
process more than that.
Obviously, if we'd had more time to work on it, we could have completed
the Project sooner. Axiom:
The less work you have to do, the
more you can accomplish. Corollary:
Any work, no matter how trivial,
will expand to fill the time available. Just
look at housework.
In other news…
Remember "Ogden", the little laptop computer that belongs to RACS?
I checked Ogden out last October
to use at home, and at “Livermore”, when I'm working there, and he
hasn't been back into the office since, except for this Tuesday.
Ogden is
very helpful to have at home.
I use him at least once a week.
Of course, truth to tell, that
once a week is usually writing one of these letters in the evening,
which is probably not what the department had in mind when we purchased
Ogden.
However, I also use Ogden frequently to connect with (by phone line) and
work on the company mainframe computer on the weekends, usually running
tests or special reports. So it
pretty much comes out even. I get
to work on weekends without having to spend half the day getting there
and back on BART; and Ogden doesn't
have to spend all of his time locked up in a filing cabinet, which
doesn't sound like much fun.
But the arrangement hasn't been without problems.
You see, Ogden has some
personality disorders. The
cursor, for instance. The cursor
tells you where you are on the screen. Except
that Ogden likes to playfully make the cursor
disappear at times.
Without warning.
This can be annoying.
Also, Ogden can be a picky eater.
You hook him up to the battery
charger, but he doesn't suck up much juice.
Then, at the
least convenient moment,
he'll suddenly start beeping at you that he needs to be fed
NOW, or he'll drop all your work on the spot.
Just about the time that I started thinking seriously of taking Ogden
into the office to arrange for a computer doctor to take a look at him,
I got a message that Ogden wasn't alone in his difficulties.
It seems that so many other
Company people who also have Ogden's (or Ogden cousins) have registered
so many complaints that the manufacturer offered to
replace the laptops with new
ones at no charge to Company.
Hence, Ogden's special trip into the City this last Tuesday.
The replacement has arrived.
New computers for old.
I spent most of the afternoon
with a PC coordinator, loading software on to the new Ogden and erasing
the same software from the old one. Then
I took the new Ogden home and hooked him up to the phone line and dialed
into the mainframe.
Not only did new Ogden managed to talk to-and-from the mainframe, but he
does it much faster than old
Ogden, possibly because we didn't load him down with a lot of
unnecessary software like
Windows®, which I never used for anything except to play an
occasional game of solitaire. Or
maybe he's just faster because he's a newer generation.
However, new Ogden isn't perfect. He
stutters. Which is to say, he's
so fast that he tends to repeat letters that I didn't intend to repeat.
The keyboard is a trifle too
sensitive.
But I'm sure we'll work something out.
Love, as always,
Pete
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