Dorkage goes Personal

Dilbert is so right on so often I’d cry if it weren’t so damn funny. People who do not work in companies do not realize that Dilbert is only a tiny bit exaggerated. It doesn’t even have to be a very big company before the Dilbert Principle kicks in. The instant you have a person in an organization who puts some personal agenda ahead of the company’s agenda, it’s all over. It is well-known that people are one of the biggest expenses of any company, yet it never ceases to amaze me how companies squander their human resources by creating an environment where employees believe that bringing issues to management’s attention is futile at best, or a punishable offense at worst.

Case in point: If you hire a perfectly good employee and then set them in front of a flickering old CRT monitor that gives them a headache by 10:00 and turns them into a quivering idiot by 13:00 what do you expect? Every minute you don’t replace that monitor you are flushing money down the toilet; and it just adds fuel to the fire if that employee knows you are already aware of the sucky monitor. (Yes that happened to me!) Here’s another one: You have a bogged down server and it’s been determined that insufficient RAM is the bottleneck. You are so chintzy you won’t spend $200 for a new stick of memory. Yet you are paying between $30 and $60 an hour for your people to fight fires on that server. While they are fighting fires they don’t get their other work done. Sounds like Dilbert to me!

This is one reason I own my own enterprise. When I found myself spending more time protecting my back, working around stupid workflows that I had no power to change, and trying to second-guess office politics than I did actually working, it was time to GET OUT.