Apparently, they had a huge corporate inspection coming up and no one had done the changeover reports for three months. The changeover report was this form where you were supposed to take heat measurements of the first run of meat off the grill, the first batch of McNuggets out of the vats, make sure the oil had heated up to the right temperature, etc. This seems like a pretty basic health assurance, but they hadn't been done in three months. And there sat my new bosses, making up numbers to appease the gods of compliance.
One of our new job responsibilities on after hours has become to enter personnel training records into this web-based tracking system. And at my new job, we bow to the gods of QMS compliancy. We are getting audited next week and thousands of training records have been entered in over the past few weeks just so that we can appear to be compliant. We want to look good. We don't want to get in trouble.
But in all reality, we're more like children who have been asked to clean their room and solved the problem by shoving everything in the closet. We don't much like to think about the closet. We don't like to admit how complicated QMS makes everything. We don't like to admit that keeping a room clean is not a necessary evil, simply an arbitrary preference. But sacrifices have to be made to the great golden gods of corporate America. Our offering is in the form of wasted time and productivity. Entering useless information into useless forms.
(One of the most appalling, I think, is that one of the training classes I've been entering in is actually called "Control of Nonconformity" - something about that really rubs me the wrong way.)
When will they figure out that it's all a big joke? That no one actually cares about this bullshit? And when will they wise up and realize that all the busy work isn't worth it? And that if you're not going to take the time to sort and organize the mess in the closet, it makes more sense to leave it lying on the floor. Because at least then you have time to go outside and play whenever you want.