More Real Life "Dilbert-isms"

When I first started as an Oracle developer fifteen years ago, I was assigned the task of developing a CASE tool.  What I didn't know at the time was that the agency for whom I worked was too cheap to buy Oracle's product.  It was a great way to learn Oracle (v6) and, unlike the rest of my team, kept me out of the COBOL code.

About two months into the project my manager asked me to prepare a report of "everything that’s not in the database."  I smiled, went on my way, and considered what I could do with all the time it would take to develop the report.  About an hour later I went over to the recycle bin and grabbed a stack of discarded output, newspapers and magazines which I promptly deposited on his desk.  His puzzled look told the story as he questioned what the heck I was up to.  With a perfectly straight face I told him that this was the first installment of the report he requested.  About every two weeks I'd drop off another update.

The best part was when I walked into a new job years later to find this guy working there.  A couple of days later I dropped by his office to catch up - with the long overdue next installment of his report.  Its amazing how much isn't in that database!

- Thomas de Groot

The company I currently work for announced a mandatory salary cut late spring. The follow week, management passed the word that we'd have visitors in the office measuring for new carpet.

 - name withheld

I thought I would share a real-life Dilbertism with you from a few years back. I was in a meeting and my Director was trying to put together some information on current projects. He went to one of my colleagues and got what information he could from him. Since I was in a meeting and he could not speak to me directly, he asked my colleague: "Is there anything that John is working on that you're not aware of?" If he was not aware of it, how would he know?!

- John Geisler

"Assumptions identify things that we are considering and not taking into consideration."
- From a Year 2000 Contingency Planning document

I overheard one manager bragging to another in the hall at Lucent Technologies: "With a team of four programmers, in just six months I
reengineered a new software paradigm. Now everybody is using it". I always wondered why some people memorized buzzwords.

At Lucent Technologies, we spent all day effectively babysitting the ancient systems they didn't want to take the trouble to replace. We were bored. One day, we were idling talking about how some printers were fairly isolated at one fringe of the network, and printing to them was unreliable, even with (or perhaps because of) the new print spoolers recently installed. One engineer heard us talking and came up with the kernel of an idea to fix the trouble, by reconfiguring a few of the network servers and restructuring that part of the network. The idea had merit, and we excitedly improved upon it until we were ready to test out the idea with an experiment. You never really know how fruitful an idea will be until you run some sort of experiment to see how things will behave. We were all ready to give it a shot when our manager happened to overhear us. He was curious what we were discussing, so we filled him in. "Write up a proposal before you do anything", he instructed us. He took the wind right out of our sails. We shrugged and went back to our regular duties.

At Changi Internation Airport (in Singapore), our field engineer installed a new circuit breaker, transformer and Bitbus connection for a backup generator. I made the necessary software changes, and wrote a test spec to cover the operation of the new generator. The field engineer called back the next day to tell me their was a bug in my new program because the circuit breaker failed to close when commanded to do so from the control panel. I was on the phone (long-distance) with him, and I was remotely viewing his control display on a local monitor. I noticed that the circuit breaker was flashing yellow, meaning "unknown state". I also noticed the one-line error message at the bottom of the screen (which everyone learned to ignore when the system worked correctly). The message said "Unable to Close circuit breaker". I suggested he had a hardware problem. "No way! K_ [the engineering firm to whom we subcontracted the work] signed off on it!". Still, I recommended he trace all the hardware from the CB to the Bitbus. Next day he called me up to tell me he had discovered that the subcontractors had never attached the data cable between the CB and the Bitbus. Fearing an end of the contract and the need for their services, they had deliberately left it off so they would have something to "troubleshoot" later on.

At one company, the president (who was formerly VP Marketing at Apple Computer) gave us T-shirts with "5280+1" printed on the front, and "Go the extra mile" on the back. I pointed out that 5280 was the number of feet in a mile, so really he's saying "Go the extra foot". He said, "Hey, what do you want? I'm from Marketing! We can't do math!".

When I was at AEG Transportation Systems, the Marketing dept decided not to bid on several mid-sized projects, because "we have more work than we can handle right now". Then the Honolulu Downtown project (which was an enormous project) got scuttled by the Honolulu city council (it was an election year, and nobody wanted to be remembered as having raised local taxes). Suddenly, we were faced with no work on our plate for about a year, in an industry with lead times measured in years (it takes 2-3 years to design, build and certify a mass transit system). The clients we had passed up even told us they had wanted to hire us, but we never bothered to bid on those projects. We were facing massive layoffs. 90% of Manufacturing was let go, and 1/3 of Engineering as well. Then the Marketing dept decided to lease a fleet of Cadillacs, so they could drive clients around town in style. We were furious. "That money could've been used to retain engineers!". Marketing replied, "Oh well. Too late to do anything about it now. We signed the lease so we're stuck with the cars".

I was providing technical support at an industry trade show. I had my demo (which showed the Denver Airport People Mover system in action, live via remote hookup) all setup and I was excited to show it off. Yet, nobody seemed interested. Finally, I asked the Sr. Marketing guy why that was. "The first day of a trade show", he explained, "is for social networking. Everybody is just interested in meeting other people, and drinking".

- Dan Clamage