Go v't Stupidity /was: Yearly TV Licence? ...Really? Digital and Cable

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

"anne_t_squires" wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/37237>:

<< In the county where I live you have to pay your ad valorem (tag
sticker) on your car on or before your birthday.  They mail out your
bill about six weeks before your birthday.  You are not allowed to pay
before you get your statement because...? Well, I'm not sure why.  I
think they want the money to come in at a steady pace or something. >>

I sympathize with everyone about weird due dates. I speculate that the
reason they won't you pay before you get your bill is that they have a
stupid computer system with no ability to query a customer record by
anything except Customer ID, an arbitrary number which is printed on
the bill. So they can't data-enter your payment without your Customer
ID, which either they get from you sending back your bill with your
payment or they keep a hardcopy of in a physical file by birthday and
hand-search all the documents for the customer's birthday until they
find one that matches the customer' name and address, and searching a
whole month of hard copies would take 30 times as long as searching
one days' worth.

One upon a time in the early 1980s, a friend of mine had a painfully
stupid job in the New York City government's payroll department. He
was part of a group that hand-copied numbers from a green-bar report
onto keypunch entry sheets to be given to keypunchers to punch into
IBM cards that would be entered into the next fortnight's payroll run.
I suppose they were the Year To Date totals. 

Over two dozen jobs (data entry clerks and key punch operators) could
have been eliminated if the computer system sent that report to a mag
tape insted of a printer and read that input from a mag tape instead
of cards. Besides changing the JCL cards that specify the devices, the
output program would need a small change to remove all that program
logic to count lines on a page, print page headers at page breaks, and
so on. 

My friend explained to me that the above had been the original plan,
but the project ran out of money just before making that improvement.

This same friend had previously worked as an interviewer for Social
Security. All his colleagues interviewed applicants without taking
notes and wrote up the interviews from memory at home at night and had
enough errors in the write-ups that the applicants had to be called
back for a new interview at least once, often more. My friend took
notes while interviewing and used the notes while writing up the
interviews at home at night and all his write-ups were accurate and
complete enough that none of the people he interviewed had to be
called back for another interview.

So his supervisor ordered him to stop wasting time taking notes so he
could complete as MANY interviews a day as his colleagues. He objected
that his interviews might take longer but they were better interviews
that never required calling the applicant back for another interview. 

The supervisor shouted at him, approximately: "You idiot! Don't you
understand that I want this office to be rated the most efficient
office in the agency, and they rate efficiency based on the NUMBER of
interviews we do every month, not the number of applicants that have
to be called back."

My friend was soon thereafter fired for insubordination. He had
written a sarcastic song about that supervisor which his colleagues liked.

But that particular piece of idiocy is not just the government. I've 
heard of publically-traded corporations making a similar mistake,
judging their workers on the wrong criteria. Perhaps the most famous
is Tech Support or other call centers that rate workers on how few
seconds they spend on each phone call rather than how few seconds they
spend on each *problem* as the customers keep calling back with the
same problem and ever more frustration.