After working somewhere for sixteen years, you usually think that you have seen the whole range of possible stupidity. You'd think that it wouldn't be possible for them to spring some new level of world-class stupidity on you.
You'd be wrong.
For the past few weeks, management has been in a frenzy of preparation for an upcoming audit of the facility. Every day, we get new instructions, some of which usually contradict the instructions given on the previous day. There has been an orgy of relabeling of the DPS racks which we use to run the mail and of the dispatch GPCs which are sent to the stations every day. They want labeled trays placed on a GPC for each of the four reject stackers at the end of the machine, even though no mail is ever put in three of them, and many people don't put anything in the trays at all. Little penny-ante stuff. Most of us find this extremely annoying; all we want is for them to leave us the hell alone and let us do our jobs, which we are quite experienced at doing.
As I said, I thought I'd seen all of the myriad types of stupidity over the years, but what I saw last night was world-class, Olympic Gold Medal-level stupidity. As noted above, the DPS racks stay in the building. The dispatch GPCs get sent to the stations, which means that they leave the building. Well, some genius decided to BOLT one of the dispatch GPCs onto the end of the last DPS rack on several of the machines! This made it impossible to move the rack around, since the GPC's front wheels are locked and when the two are attached to each other, it's impossible to steer the rack! Not only that, but they bolted together a piece of equipment that MUST LEAVE the building to another piece of equipment that MUST STAY in the building! Obviously the person who came up with this brilliant idea had never run a piece of mail on a Delivery Barcode Sorter in his life. It's also obvious that this person didn't bother to ask anyone who DOES run the mail whether it was a good idea or not, because after the laughter had subsided, the answer would have been not just "No!" but "Hell no!"
We all had a good laugh about it last night, that's for sure, although the people with the bolted-together monstrosities were also fairly pissed off. Fortunately, I was not one of them.
