[Yes, that's a contradiction.]

There's been a bunch of emails going round from our managers recently. 
Apparently we had "a really excellent month" where our profits "vastly 
exceeded the budget".

Gee, could this be because this month they had the budget set absolutely 
as low as the policy makers would allow?

You know, I think it might be...

So they set the budget as low as they could possibly get away with, and 
we actually made a bit more money than that. Woo-friggin-hoo. What's 
gonna happen next month, when we're not moving buildings and the budget 
is expecting us to produce "real" numbers?

For that matter, the top-management plan is to increase profits by 20%. 
I have yet to hear anything about *how* this is supposed to happen. 
They've muttered something about "oh, uh, yeah, we're going to hire more 
sales staff". But so far, I've yet to see anybody hired.

What I *have* seen is that virtually every week we have a new lab worker 
starting here. So we're hiring huge numbers of lab staff, but from what 
I hear, our lab is a bit quiet at the moment. And there's not much 
future work showing up on the horizon either.

So... uh... WTF?

We already have far more lab staff than we have lab equipment. And we 
already have the lab running at below capacity. Adding more staff seems 
to me as illogical as adding more CPU cores to solve a I/O-bound 
problem. It's likely to hinder, not help. (All these new people have to 
be trained, which means somebody has to stop doing their real job to 
train them.)

It's a mad, mad world...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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