Work related trivia, in which the value of managers is considered

The length of time it took someone outside our Air Quality Bureau to forward a time sensitive request to our Bureau Chief: 7 days.

The length of time it took our Bureau Chief to delegate it to two managers below her: 20 minutes.

The length of time it took one of those two managers to delegate it to me, requesting that I task one of my employees: 4 days.

(The second manager never did delegate it to his employee, who found out about it from us).

The length of time it took me to delegate it to my employee, and call him to make sure he saw it, and offer to help: 3 minutes

The length of time remaining for the employees to complete the task before the originally specified due date: 3 hours

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On a more amusing note (I hope), every month at work we have a meeting for all the managers in the entire Air Quality Bureau. It’s mind-numbingly boring. The agenda, into which we are all supposed to put our team update every month, can run to 10 or more pages.

The big news for my team is we’ve just managed to hire the first of 4 new employees. I wrote, “He will start on June 30, and will be located in Suite B #30. He has a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where the mascot is “Speedy the Geoduck” (pronounced gooey, like fudge). A geoduck is a type of mollusk. He didn’t mention the geoduck mascot; I just happen to know because I used to live in Olympia. We can all tease him about it.”

The likelihood the goeduck quip will make it past two layers of management review and still be in the agenda come meeting time on Thursday is vanishingly low. But hopefully whichever manager cuts it, will at least have a slight chuckle before hitting the delete key.

At least I didn’t mention WHY Evergreen’s mascot is the geoduck (which is probably not limited to the fact that they live in the local mudflats in Olympia). If you’re curious, just do a google image search on “geoduck”.