This story reminds me of about thirty years ago, when I was pulling an all-nighter at Rockwell to finish a major deliverable to the Air Force on a study contract on launch systems. PCs were a relatively new thing in the workplace then (at least that one–I’d been one of the forcing functions to get them), and I accidentally munged a file on a floppy, apparently the only copy of it. Fortunately, I had a printout of the pages that I could insert into the document, but it had one section in it that contained the phrase “[Go ask [name of one of my colleagues]].” There was no way I was going to retype the whole thing — I had too much else to do to finish it, and I ended up just inserting the page as is (in a document of several hundred pages). I figured it would be an interesting test to see if anyone actually read these things. I never heard a word from the Air Force about it.
3 thoughts on “Careful With Your Drafts”
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I used this like the famous “brown M&M” provision in rock band Van Halen’s contract. Sometimes the business processes I wrote would include taskings like “During phase two implementation, Management agrees to be responsible to purchase 1 six pack beer per 3 employees on-task in circumstances requiring more than 2 hours overtime.”
The managers who remarked upon the requirement had read the process.
For the last several iterations, my resume has included “siege engines” in the list of hardware I work with. I always figured that I didn’t want to work with people who had a problem with that.
FWIW, it is strictly true in that my father in law and I build a pickup-mounted trebuchet to fling the garter at my wedding.
I once left ONE BILLION DOLLARS as a placeholder in a penalty order,