Out to Lunch

It all started with DogEatDoggo (some names have been changed to protect the Guilty). Someone, more probably some committee, high up in the adminisphere of our innovative, people-focussed enterprise had thought that using it would make us all more efficient. So DogEatDoggo it was, because everybody else was using it, and in spite of the fact that none of us wanted it.

Let’s just say that, for one reason or another, it started to fail in its appointed task of making us more efficient. Invoices weren’t being sent out. Bids weren’t being put in. Engineers with 40 years’ experience, who could repair entire power stations just by looking at the plans and making one phone-call, found themselves helpless in front of tick-boxes that wouldn’t tick. My “Computer Says No” poster no longer made people smile.

A colleague joked that he’d left a previous job just to avoid it. And promptly put in for early retirement. I was already working my notice and so could afford to view all this with blissful detachment, which probably didn’t do much for my popularity there. At three in the afternoon one day my boss, having struggled all day until then to accomplish something which would have been the essence of simplicity under the old system, marched out of the office announcing “I’m off for lunch. See you next January; I’m off for a year-long lunch break!”