From: jeremy@castle.ed.ac.uk (Jeremy Henderson)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Autodesk - AutoDepartmentAdministrator
Date: 16 Oct 92 10:59:45 GMT
Organization: Edinburgh University

~In article <17776@autodesk.COM> booter@Autodesk.COM (Elaine Richards) 

Autodesk. Hee hee. Ho ho. Chuckle.

For some reason I get the mental image of an "autodesk" - a bespectacled
clerk sitting behind a large piece of furniture equipped with all manner
of Professor Branestawm devices - gloves on the end of pieces of broom
handle connected to complicated machinery, pushing around pieces of paper
on the desk top, emptying and filling IN and OUT trays, sharpening pencils,
opening and closing drawers, devices with pieces of string connected to the
hands of a large alarm clock, ping-pong balls running down chutes and
activating clockwork contraptions which operate a filing cabinet.

But I didn't start posting just to poke fun at booter's employer. No sirree.
I have an idea for a product - AutoDepartmentAdministrator. AutoCAD is
all very well, but now we're talking a major project which will catapult
Autodesk into the ranks of the Fortune 500 by this time next year.

Let's take a look at some background material:

All departments, large or small, commercial or educational or (especially)
governmental, have a Department Administrator. Sometimes he's called something
else, but look carefully at your own workplace. You know who I mean!

What are his tasks? Well these are various. First of all there's the 
hierarchy of the department to be worked out. This might be thought to be
simple, but it takes years of experience to create an organizational structure
which pisses off as many people as possible. Got a raw recruit? Put him in
charge of your most experienced hand. Got someone completely anti-social?
Make him committee chairman. You get the picture. Now the skill of a real
top quality DA is not to just construct this tower of irritation one time -
it's to change it at regular intervals - to recognise those areas where
harmony is developing and make a cunning tactical switch which brings the
whole thing to a halt.

Secondly, there's allocation of office space. Take this department (puhleeze!).
There used to be a sort of Exchange Rate Mechanism which defined the relative
sizes of office space allocated to different levels of department member, viz:

1 lecturer = 2 post-docs = 2 post-grads = a zillion undergrads

recently, massive speculation forced a devaluation of post-docs, and post-grads
dropped out of the system altogether and are currently floating at about a
1/10 lecturer level.

Salaries. These should be paid as late as possible, maintaining everyone in a
maximum state of uncertainty regarding their contracts.

Bills for services such as telephones and colour printing. These require
development of a scale of charges which is so infernally complicated that
no-one can figure out how they're being overcharged.

This whole shebang could be taken out of human hands, which occasionally
make mistakes and result in satisfaction, and packaged with a user-unfriendly
interface, say a Sinclair Z88 running VMS, and sold to a waiting world.

Remember, you read it first here.


-- 
===Jeremy Henderson===jeremy@castle.ed.ac.uk=          

"Telling people how to think doesn't work. They always have stupid
 ideas of their own."