I’m NOT commenting on the assassination attempt for 72 hours, so you get humor…
YOU MIGHT BE IN THE AVIATION/AEROSPACE INDUSTRY IF …
- You sat at the same desk for 4 years and worked for 8 different managers. Or have moved 10 times in two years and have never known who your boss was.
- Your resume is on a jumpdrive in your pocket.
- Someone asks you what you do for a living and you lie.
- You get really excited about a 2% pay increase.
- Your biggest loss from a system crash, is that you lose your best jokes.
- You sit in a cubicle smaller than your bedroom closet.
- Its dark on your drive to and from work.
- Fun is when “projects” are assigned to someone else.
- Communication is something your “group” is having problems with.
- You see a good-looking person and know it’s a visitor.
- Free food left over from a meeting is your main staple.
- All art involves a white board.
- All real work is done prior to 8:00am and after 4:30pm.
- You’re already late on the assignment you just received.
- Dilbert is your favorite cartoon.
- Your boss’s favorite lines are …
“When you get a few minutes …”
“I have an opportunity for you …”
“Cross-charging is forbidden.”
“…the directional truth in a white water world …”
“We have a new culture that will enable us to …”
“We have a new engineering vice-president.”
“This reorganization will allow us to streamline our way of doing business, of becoming more competitive.”
- 99% of the people in your company do not know what you do.
- 99% of the people in your company do not care what you do.
- Vacation is something you rollover to next year or a check you get every January.
- Change is the norm.
- Nepotism is strongly encouraged.
- Your company announces no pay increase because it is investing money in a new aircraft development.
- Your company announces no pay increase because the airline industry is in a downturn. And your boss gets voted “man of the year in aerospace “
- Your fear to fly is becoming even worse.
- Everyone at the company says that without his work there would be no aircraft.
- An ordinary secretary has more power than an old engineer.
- You read this entire list and understand it.
- Not allowing firearms on company property is seen strictly as a suicide prevention measure.
- The only people you forward this to are in aerospace too because no one else would understand!
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A metaphor for our government
The tribal wisdom of the Lakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”
However, in government, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead
and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And, of course…
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position!!
And
30. When you visit a test site or subcontractor site, and subconsciously think about driving a rental car “home” to your usual motel.
31. A coworker asks for your opinion on his project. The next day you have inherited his project and the boss want’s to know why it is six weeks behind schedule.
Sadly the Nuclear industry works(?) much the same way as Aerospace. Not only did I understand them I’ve experienced most of them.
Regarding re-orgs, never spoken but always understood, it confuses the regulators, and gives the illusion that the problems have been solved.
Re:21…
After an “H.R. manager” hired their spouse (over many more qualified…) for a position, I asked about nepotism.
“I don’t know what that means.”
The SAD thing? The quality of H.R. “manager” has dropped precipitously since.
I was hanging out in Vegas at with colleagues and we looked at something. One of us looked at se recently-opened project and commented on it. Another commented that our company had done the design and construction. Glances were shared. We all went the other way and gave it a skip.
OR:
(For aerospace)
1) You sit at the same desk for 3 years and work for 4 different companies – while on the same project.
And I have seen the dead horse and been forced to ride it, more than once.
Humour is good. It helps keep perspective. If we can laugh at it, it is not overwhelming.
But yeah, I’m very glad that I’m self-employed. My Boss is a bastard and hasn’t given me a decent holiday in 15 years, but hey, at least I like where I work.
All- Sigh… yep… One last one- Your nameplate for the desk has velcro backing…
Peter- Oh yeah, you’re really working for an asshole! So am I. Slave driver…
Oh my …
32: Security calls you to their office to sign an NDA. You ask what the briefing covers, and realize you’d signed one for the same classified project several years ago for another company, and they failed to debrief you when you changed companies.
Wandering Neurons
Security calls you to get briefed on a new project. You discover you were cleared 6 months before and no one told you. And you are 7 months behind. Lived that.
Maybe it should be a dead donkey!
Lots of overlap with Govt. Contractor.
Smarter Half worked in same building for 26 years and had 6 company names. I had only 3 company names in 15 years.
When I started at the Medium Sized Defense Contractor (swallowed by the Great Big Defense Contractor 20 years later) in 1975 I had 9 direct supervisor changes involving 7 different managers in the first 21 months I worked. Made me a little skeptical of management. When I started we didn’t have cubicals, just a large open office area with battleship gray metal desks.