Just out of curiosity - has anyone ever embedded a Dilbert strip - or any other source of comedy - in a status report, just to see if anyone would notice? (I did, they didn't)

I once had to rewrite a system, and through automation, managed to reduce a very complex task to a few simple steps. The 30 page manual was reduced to about 2 pages. One day, a few months later, some manager in some group that used the thing was complaining that the system was too complicated and needed to be simplified. My boss just looked at me and started to ask "Didn't you already..."; I cut him off and asked the other manager if he'd read the status reports. Of course, he swore that he did. My boss just tossed the status reports for the past 2 months at him and laughed.

On one project I began to suspect that my project manager was either ignoring my reports or green-shifting the statuses, ie. changing my red (in the shit) or orange (close to it) tasks statuses to green (all rosy).

I filed the same report for some 2 months to test this out (didn't even change the date embedded in the filename) before some one higher up the food-chain noticed.

It was cruel but funny.

Our HR department recently came out with a related idea to keep themselves in work - weekly "illness/holiday last week" reports. I.e. rather than reporting the exception of when you're ill or on holiday, you effectively report the opposite, thus wasting a few minutes of everyone elses' time every week to keep an HR droid in employment correlating it all. Go team!

Worse still, it almost totally negates the point of having illness reports and holiday requests. Oddly, my suggestion of "why don't we just tell you our planned dates of illness?" didn't go down so well.

snoofle:

Just out of curiosity - has anyone ever embedded a Dilbert strip - or any other source of comedy - in a status report, just to see if anyone would notice? (I did, they didn't)

I once included two pages of Lipsum in an anual report, nobody noticed. It sure feels good to be appreciated.

At my last job I reported directly to one of the owners. One day he got a bug up his *** and started demanding daily activity reports at the end of each day. About a year before I finally left for good I realized he probably wasn't even reading them so I ran a test. Instead of spending the last 45 minutes of the day writing the pointless report I just sent him the same one over and over again. Nothing. Then I just stopped sending it. A week later he asked me why I hadn't been sending my daily reports in. I said "oops" and started re-sending the same report again and continued sending him the exact same report every single day for the next 8 months until I left. I even wrote a cron script to send it out for me at 5 PM sharp every day. He never said a word about the content. I think he just wanted to see that it was there every day.

Over the past 30 years, I've developed a sort-of-guide by which I gage the importance of tasks assigned to me.

1. If it's on fire, it's an actual emergency
2. If blood is spouting from it, it's an actual emergency
3. If a spouse is using "that tone of voice", it's an actual emergency
4. If neither (1), (2) nor (3) and a project manager is involved, it is not only an emergency, but the work will become easier if you let it sit for a few days

More often than not, it works (at least for me).