If A Report Falls In The Forest…

When I got promoted to a new position, I learned that we had to submit a weekly report about how sales were in our division. Never mind that a daily auto report came out stating the day’s sales and how these compared to the same day yesterday, last week, last month, and all the cumulative and projected figures.

It took about two hours, and they wanted it handed in on a Saturday morning.

After a while, I realized that they never actually read the reports, so I stopped doing them for an entire year. I didn’t submit a single one. Somebody else I worked with did send them in, but he just would write this crazy stuff, like “the freak snowstorm in Barbados has affected shipping” or “due to the state of Texas banning all critical thinking, all figures from this state have been calculated by licking a finger and holding it up to the wind”.

Obviously, nobody read his either.

Finally, one day when I was out having a business dinner with my boss, I told her that I hadn’t submitted the report for a year. At first, she about lost her mind, but she and I got along really well, and I pointed out that if it was a useful report, somebody would’ve noticed I hadn’t done it for an entire year.

The report was killed the next week.