Performance tracking, and how not to Google
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OK, so this is another great tale from WTF Mortgages.
As I've alluded to before, measuring productivity was always a pain, and before we got into the realms of terrible workflow management software, one of the team leaders had a bright idea. Well, I say bright idea. She thought it was a bright idea, and so did the more senior managers.
At the time this story began, there were 4 regional teams, dubbed Red, Yellow, Green and Blue.
The plan was that for each sub-team of the coloured teams that completed their daily performance targets, that team would earn one coloured ball in the team's colour, and these would feed into a 6ft tall clear plastic tube.
The idea being that you can see how your team's performance is working out and you get the motivational thing of seeing it build up day by day, week by week.
Each team had four functions within it, so potential for 4 coloured balls per team per day.
We're all grown adults, performing a crazy melange of grown up activities and suddenly we're back in fucking primary school. But it gets better. For different variations of 'better'.
A few months after this, they rearranged the teams, so there were 6 teams: Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Orange and Pink.
And the company that supplied the coloured balls had all these colours, so no harm, no foul.
Then they had another restructure and there were 8 teams.
Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Orange, Pink, Purple, and Brown.
The problem was that last one, it wasn't a colour that was supplied by the supplier. So one of the Brown Team members had a few minutes spare and thought he would be helpful.
Typing 'brown balls' into Google.
He was shocked to find a phone call to his team leader 5 minutes later.
Ugh. Multiple WTFs but I still snigger to this day about whatever made anyone think searching for 'brown balls' on Google could possibly have had a good result. And no, they never did find anyone that would provide plastic, brown-coloured balls. I think they went with white in the end.
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And no, they never did find anyone that would provide plastic, brown-coloured balls.
You know, there's this ancient secret alchemic elixir that would solve all of your problems.
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This wasn't my team, I wanted as little as possible to do with this whole endeavour. I did not suggest the idea of paint to them - but it clearly did not occur to them either.
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Hell, even taking a brown sharpie to the balls would have worked. Sort of. Or, y'know, picking a color that was actually available in plastic balls in the first place.
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taking a brown sharpie to the balls
Bug: Discourse put me into this topic at this post and I didn't realize which topic I was in until after I read this text.
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Oh there are many WTFs to this little saga. The whole 'brown balls' thing was merely the punchline to it. I mean seriously... coloured fucking balls to represent how each team is doing relative to each other team?
You know the other WTF? One of the sales guys convinced one of our partner companies to do this shit too.
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I still snigger to this day about whatever made anyone think searching for 'brown balls' on Google could possibly have had a good result.
Like that record about doing whatever is necessary to keep your parents off the internet (Dad: "I wanted to paint the garage, but I wasn't sure if latex would bond well with the stucco, so I did a search for 'latex bondage'"....)
I didn't expect what I got a number of years ago when I was having trouble with a stubborn ear infection, and after getting only pediatric results refined my search to look for "adult ear infection". Our old friend goatse is only slightly less SFW than what came back.
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We need a remake of this in TIM.
Now.
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Oh my ... lost a lot of time on that one.
That brings back some very happy memories. Like the perpetual motion mouse machine…
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Typing 'brown balls' into Google.
Strange. I just get a couple of incompetent UK politicians...
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You safe search sissy. Real man search the internet without protection!
Filled under: for real man it might also hurt to pee
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You safe search sissy. Real man search the internet without protection!
Filled under: for real man it might also hurt to pee
I stopped doing that after I got RealPlayer that one time...
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Just use that crowbar and you'll be fine
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I catch myself sometimes when working with a busybox system (i.e. android) without man pages and need more definition about certain switches for a command, etc.
man paste
man bash
man cut
You do get links to the actual man pages, but still must shield your eyes...
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man paste
man bash
man cutYou've likely just added yourself to a bunch of FBI watch lists.
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@DrakeSmith said:
I catch myself sometimes when working with a busybox system (i.e. android) without man pages and need more definition about certain switches for a command, etc.
man paste
man bash
man cut
You do get links to the actual man pages, but still must shield your eyes...You've likely just added yourself to a bunch of FBI watch lists.
man kill
man killall
If you really want to be sure.
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man sudoers
The article starts with an explanation of EBNF, a format used to describe formats.
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Is the explanation itself in EBNF?
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The sudoers man page usually sends me searching "sudoers examples". I want to know how to use something, not an extended definition of what is and isn't valid syntax for it.
All "man ..." searches here so far have returned the desired man pages, and the entire first half page at least was all man pages or discussions of man pages.
man head still finds a man page but first it shows you a bunch of heads.
man tail on the other hand... wait, that returns all man pages too now, but it used to find, uh, something else, and show a bar of images of it at the top too.
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man head
Oddly enough, if you Google for this phrase without SafeSearch, it actually turns up a man page for head.
Also, I just stumbled upon this:
Filed under: the suggestions, however...
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Also relevant: Schweddy Balls.
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I don't get it at all. What is so wrong with a couple of cherries carefully wrapped in a plastic casing?
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Oneboxed Hulu is a barrier to reading. Specifically, outside North America (it's a region-locked service). It just doesn't render properly and the poor browser struggles on as well as it can, which isn't very well at all.
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It just doesn't render properly and the poor browser struggles on as well as it can, which isn't very well at all.
Looks fine here. Other than berating me for being born in the "wrong" part of the world that is.
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Looks fine here. Other than berating me for being born in the "wrong" part of the world that is.
I was getting a non-drawn hole in my browser; a sign of when the video renderer isn't happy.
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@dkf said:
Oneboxed Hulu is a barrier to reading.
Repro'd:
It's true. I see more text in your screenshot than the screen cap for the video. Maybe you guys should move?EDIT: Hey, why doesn't @dkf's avatar show in the post? It does in preview.
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Maybe I'm a barrier to reading too… ;)
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Hulu is a barrier.
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Having Hulu on this topic tries to launch the video player on android nearly making it impossible to view this topic on android. Thanks, @codinghorror and your schweddy balls.
Edit: also, this: