Life of Brian

At ASCO, management takes communications seriously. Once every other month the Director of Operations, along with the HR Manager meet with a dozen or so randomly selected hourly employees to answer questions on issues of importance to them. The names of the employees chosen to participate are posted on the bulletin board so anyone who has an issue can bring it to one of the chosen to be presented at the meeting. Some questions get handed in after the meeting for various reasons, chief among them for anonymity. The questions run the gamut for why don’t we get bigger raises to we need more chairs on the assembly line. A couple weeks after the meeting the minutes (both the questions & the official answers) get posted on the bulletin board for all to see. Sometimes they make amusing reading, but this question handed in anonymously at the November meeting takes the cake:

16. While I would not overtly accuse anyone within this establishment of prevaricating, there appears to be an effervescence of obfuscating in regards to these interrogative vituperations. Incredulous though it may be, the difficulties with the Communicator-Hub (programming upload/download system as mentioned in the previous two communication meetings) have, for the most part, mysteriously made their egress. I submit, that the system as of yet is still not functioning as advertised?alternative means have not necessitated themselves of late. I maintain that protestations to the contrary as previously disclosed, are controvertible at best.

Managements answer, basically, “Huh?” I would have chosen to quote Captain Barbossa here, “There are a lot of long words in there, Miss; we’re naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?”

The person who wrote that also penned a half dozen other questions in a similar vein, those were decipherable, and were answered. At one point management decided to fight fire with fire:

19. I may merely be a cognitively challenged troglodyte lacking a diurnal existence, but I found myself in somewhat of a quandary within the stockroom. There was placed a sign, upon what I presume to be the appropriate document table, requesting that any papers, once completed, were to be filed into the yellow bin. Imagine a simpletons chagrin when, after reading these instructions, they are confronted with not one, but 3 yellow bins with a variety of papers within each. Whilst pondering this newfound dilemma, it occurred to said troglodyte to perhaps label the aforementioned bins, apropos to their pertinent documents.

The answer this time — The amber bins interpolated in the depository have been incontrovertibly identified to abrogate any misconception that anyone may have in the morrow. Or I think we changed the bin color.