The evil Next Byte

Back when I was work­ing at NB we had these forms we had to fill in and read out our answers at the week­ly tele-con­fer­ence meet­ing with the upper man­age­ment types. I think the idea was to let the upper lev­el guys delude them­selves into think­ing they were play­ing an active part in the run­ning of the com­pa­ny, while at the same time milk­ing any ideas out of the staff for free rather than pay expen­sive con­sul­tants for ideas on how to improve things.

It was a joke, the staff nev­er took it seri­ous­ly, most of them would just rat­tle off the same answers they gave the week before. The whole time i was there I nev­er once answered ques­tion 3, I was­n’t being paid enough to do every­thing else they want­ed me to do, let alone sug­gest ways to improve any­thing. (for the record, my rates for cor­po­rate con­sult­ing are $150 per hour).
And on top of all that, when­ev­er any­one did try to make a sug­ges­tion, or worse, crit­i­cize the sta­tus quo, they would just get shout­ed down with rea­sons as to why that would­n’t hap­pen, with the ideas ever being giv­en any thought. (Includ­ing things like “no, we wont do that, the staff will just have to work faster, rather than us try­ing to make things more effi­cient”.)
Any­way… I was look­ing through some old paper work and found one of these forms I’d filled in one day with the answers I’d like to give, rather then the ones I always did.

1. A pos­i­tive out­come for myself and/or oth­ers.
   Piss fart­ed about for a week.
2. An out­stand­ing indi­vid­ual or team effort.
   All the guys here for turn­ing up late and leav­ing ear­ly every day this week.
3. One sales growth idea!
   Sell stuff cheap­er.
4. How do you rate the cus­tomers view of naxt byte?
   The are hap­py because they don’t realise how much they are being screwed.
5. Any com­peti­tor news?
   They do stuff worse than us, which makes up look good.
6. My goal for the com­ing week!
   Be hon­est with the cus­tomers.