Plenty Potent

Years ago, in a book about sailing, William F. Buckley, speaking about the legalities of passage between certain Caribbean islands, described a scheme to facilitate such passage, and concluded the life would be ever so much simpler were he granted plenipotentiary powers in such matters. ( The book is Airborne; feel free to look it up. It's a decent book.)

The concept stuck with me, because it describes my view of many things. Even when I grudgingly admit that there actually are reasons -- defensible reasons, not that anyone's defending -- why the world acts as it does rather than as I think that it should, I still find my self thinking that life would be ever so much simpler, cleaner, more logical, more satisfying if things were just done my way. I honestly don't think that I'm being egotistical when I say that.

Here is the most recent example. I've known of this for a while, and I may even have mentioned it before, but my knowledge of it was refreshed today.

I work for a computer company, the Biggest Little Computer Company in the World. You've likely heard of it. If you think 'computer', odds are very good you thought of us. Its a decent place to work, but it's also very complex - - quite the anthill of activity, on multiple levels, from the most prosaic and basic to the most ethereal and theoretical. One of the consequences of this gihugic structure is that there are parts of it that exist purely to service the needs of other parts. Their customers are all internal. They are not, in the current buzzword, 'customer facing'. (I don't know what that means, not to be that; I suppose 'showing your butt to the customer' isn't a nice thing to say, so I won't. 'Hidden from the customer'? 'Customer-invisible'?)

Because people tend to use these services without regard to what they cost, organizations make up arcane 'internal billing' schemes to 'recover' what it costs them to produce their output. Vast ledgers are created to do this, and people worry about those costs incessantly. (I once knew of a manager who always moved all of his group's files from direct-access storage to tape, once a month...and then back, two days later. Why? Because he did not get charged for tape usage...and on that one day, the data center scanned the direct access storage to see who was using it. That his organization was impeded by this was immaterial; the point was to avoid those internal billing charges.)

One of the customer-invisible organizations in my company generates reports of change activity on our many systems. In order to recover their costs, they charge for creating these reports. If you want one that's already being created for someone else, there is a minimal charge; if you want a custom one, theres a big charge -- and not just one time, either, but forever. So when my group's manager's manager decided she needed to know how many changes are being done , and how successful they are, did she go to the group that would charge her? Or did she set up a scheme where many people in her organization manually collect this information, forward it in emails, transcribe it to spreadsheets, reformat it into presentations? Computerized, or manual? Automated or time-consuming? Extra-charge or people she's already paying for?

Does the Pope excrete in the woods?