So, the company I work at as a contractor likes to quantify everything we do over the course of a day. While I can understand this up to a certain degree, the trend has accelerated over the past couple years, somewhat beyond the point of mania in my opinion. At present, we have to fill out a "productivity sheet" each day, in which we denote how much time we spent on each task (down to a quarter-hour), the number of personnel actions completed, etcetera and so forth. Some time ago, I made a joke that management's efforts to refine the accuracy of this reporting would not be complete until there was a column on the productivity sheet for time spent filling out the productivity sheet.
This finally happened.
What happened next was probably inevitable. Someone raised the question of how much time we should report for doing productivity, since the sheet itself only allows for increments of time equal to or greater than a quarter of an hour and we generally spend less on it daily.
...
You are entering another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of micromanagement. That's the signpost up ahead, your destination:
THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
(Obligatory "Repent, Harlequin" reference goes here).
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I'm not sure whether the next anecdote is more or less disturbing, but! Another one to file under "The subconscious of the Cid is a scary place to live." C+P from an IM conversation with my brother (names changed to protect the innocent):
The Cid: So, I had a Star Trek kinda dream last night. You're probably going "Ew" right now, and for once I agree with you! I mean, it started innocuously enough. I was on this artificial planetoid populated by fake people, and they needed actual humans around for some reason (this is a pretty standard setup for the original series; the world design was actually pretty cool, and I should remember this). Despite giving off creepy conformist vibes, this was comparitively okay. Eventually it came time to wreck the place and leave; since the inhabitants didn't want us to do this, it came down to screwing with the environmental controls and burning out the planet's power generator.
The Cid: What is not so standard, as far as Star Trek goes, is that the environmental controls took the form of a really comfy armchair with a control panel on it. Not to mention the fact that when everything went haywire, the fake people started disintegrating most graphically.
The Cid: To make matters worse, they could still talk and lament their sorry fate as this happened.
The Cid: Also, there was a fluffy kitty there and the kitty melted.
The Cid: That was the worst part, lemme tell you.
Brother of the Cid: i don't even know what to say to that
The Cid: Well, that makes me feel like I did something right, then.
