A Day in the Life (original) (raw)

"Joe, that is one butt-ugly car you got!"
"It's an Audi!"
"Joe, it's an orange-yellow Audi."
"Yeah, well... what are you gonna do?"
"Your wife made you get that colour?"
"Aw, hells no! She's still pissed off at me because she wanted metallic charcoal. Truth be told, so did I."
"But you got it in orange-yellow because... why?"

"There are five charcoal-coloured cars on this street already!"
"And that's a reason to get that butt-ugly colour because...?"
"Well, we need a normal distribution."
Hummina-hummina-hummina
"There are a lot more red, black and blue cars than will fit to a standard bell curve here in our neighbourhood. We have some green and purple and white cars but no one has yellow or orange and so I had to get that in order to at least get closer to normalising the colour distribution."

- -

Is it possible there is anything more uninformed, miseducated and unrealistic than an MBA? A bell curve is a description not a target. Demanding that 12.5% of my tickets (not 10% and not 15%) be turned into Knowledge Base Items is nonsensical. The number comes from a six-month window when there were half as many of us here and we had just completely changed the entire software architecture. We were therefore publishing a lot. About 12.5% of all new tickets as it turns out.

But if I publish 12.5% and each and every one of my cow-orkers also publishes 12.5% of our tickets $PeterPrincipleManager will have numbers matching a 7-year-old cherry-picked and completely meaningless curve no matter how fine-grained his sample might be.

Five seconds ago I remembered the only reason I'm still willing to put up with this shit: I looked over at the Puppy. She's currently trying to eat her toenails and doesn't understand why the foam letter floor tiles don't melt in her mouth the way that the cream of broccoli pasta does. I'd be even happier about this but she's making a particular noise which lets me know I have even more shit to deal with.

What I think sucks most of all is that I still have 14 more tickets to deal with today and any noise BadPuppy makes will be about 183 times as sensible as whatever the fuckwits want from me now. "We have a new guy in the server room and he wants to know why Apple ][ Aliens won't run on the 64-way Xeon cluster."

Labels: bell curve