Babysitting Your Boss

One of the engineers, Deano, was very frustrated: "All I do is follow my boss around and clean up his mistakes! Babysitting is not part of my job description!"

It was about 4:00 in the afternoon and my sweetheart called to see if I would stop at the store on the way home. "Please pick up some diapers and wipes for the baby," she said.

So I asked Deano if he would like me to pick some up for his boss. He was delighted.

See the cartoon version at
Babysitting The Boss Cartoon

One Face To The Customer?

Yes, we actually paid some bright bureaucrat at corporate headquarters to put together a whole class on "One Face To The Customer." At least it was interesting and well presented.

We wondered about educating 500 people for 4 hours each on a concept that seemed rather straight forward, but training folk need jobs too. If the cost was 50$ per hour or $200 each, that's only $100K. Now if you consider the plant produced $1M per day and we took out 1/2 day of productivity it gets a little more expensive, but a little extra work will make up for that, and management doesn't have to sweat our extra hours.

So enough rambling...

When we were discussing the course among ourselves I asked Twinkles what the customer might think if their "one face" was that of our boss. He agreed that might be a problem, but said it would depend on which of his many faces they saw. Slider was there and he pulled the ugliest face he could make (pretty ugly) and said he likes to keep his "one face" face for the boss. I told him it was better than what the customer usually sees when they face our birds.

Sad but true...

See the cartoon at: One Face To Customer Cartoon

Is your bonus like a cartoon?

Yep, These cartoons are both based on reality. The Swell Company, about 50 miles up the road and a recent raider of some of our good employees, announced their bonus. It ammounted to several thousand dollars and a free computer to most of their employees. Boy were we jealous of everyone who had left us. Then one our customers announced a layoff. We knew they were in trouble so that wasn't a surprise. It didn't really make anyone feel better.

Now there were a number of years that our big birds tried to make the bonus based on some kind of performance. I should say that they always had that stated target. But everyone knew that the objectives were somewhat subjective and if there wasn't enough flexibility in the goals there certainly was in the financial measuring process. And everyone knows that 2+2=5 if the corporate bean counters say so.

So, one year we knew that the performance to goal was incredible, and figured that the bonus would be great. But itwas late. Now why would the bonus be late when it was so obviously good? If it were a bad year and they were just trying to come up with some more mone for the bonus, that we could understand. But in a good year?

The bonus was 6 weeks late and it was good, but did not meet expectations. There were several bad business to write off and so several million dollars hit the bottom line and had a severe impact on bottom line profits.

Oh, you guessed it, executive bonus formulations did not include business write-offs. The birds were flying high! We knew where our extra bonus went!

In this case, 2+2=3 AAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!

Toady's Work R Fun Bonus Cartoon