Bulldozer00's Blog

A lot of people have heard of the blockbuster movie “Four Weddings And A Funeral”, but no one has heard of the cinematic release in incubation titled “Four Managers And An Engineer“.  The story line goes like this:

• One manager calls a “planning” meeting and invites three peer managers (actually two peers and one pseudo-manager) and one enginerd.
• The meeting host manager presents an initial powerpoint plan to the group.
• At the bottom of each and every plan page, the one enginerd’s name appears in a colored box coupled with a non-trivial task to do and a critical “need by” date.
• The enginerd points out the irony of the four-to-one ratio of managers to enginerds present at the meeting when other more important managers up the chain are crying out for higher profit numbers.
• To further build tension in the melodrama, the enginerd asks why no one else on the team was assigned any of these critically important tasks.
• One more Hershey kiss is added to the pile of poop when the enginerd graphically shows that sequentially placing the task boxes end-to-end (since they’re assigned to one bottleneck taskee) would blow the “planned” schedule out of the water.
• As the coup de grace, the enginerd asks what non-technical management tasks the managers assigned to themselves, and why they’re not in the plan with their names next to them.
• In a coordinated rage, the managers attack the engineer and bludgeon him/her to death with their blackberrys and leather bound Covey planners.
• The managers then; hide the body, replace the name of the deceased engineer on every page of the powerpoint plan with that of another enginerd, call another meeting, and invite themselves along with the next victim to their group-conspired serial killing spree.

Like another blockbuster movie, “Ground Hog Day”, the cycle repeats itself ad-infinitum. Unlike Ground Hog Day, there’s no breaking out of the loop and no transitioning to a happy Hollywood ending. The movie drones on until the audience gets bored to death and leaves the theater or the projector breaks down, whichever comes first. Wanna role in my movie? Wanna be the director? Wanna finance it?