TriumphAnt

I work for a team in a unit of a branch in a department of the federal government (and the wheels on the car go round and round) whose boss has just recently informed all of us who labour therein that we have an “Agenda for Excellence”. (Let’s just call it our “AFE” from this point on.)

The document that specifies the details of our new AFE apparently is so important that the copies handed to us at a recent staff retreat were printed in colour – English on one side, French on the other – and laminated. Now if that doesn’t say, “We mean business!”, well then I don’t know what does.

First of all, the layout. Picture this: start with a large box divided into six smaller boxes, three across, two down. Outside the large box at the top is a title: “Agenda for Excellence”. Outside the large box at the bottom are two lines of text. Line 1: “Drivers: Leadership, Accountability, Creativity, Communication”. Line 2: “Next steps: Identifying objectives, activities and benchmarks”.

Also outside the large box on the right is: “Toward Policy, Program, and Service Excellence” What is that, a motto? (“I don’ know, paysan, what’s a motto for you?” Hahahahahahaha… er… But I digress.)

Inside the large box is a line that divides it horizontally through the middle and which is over-captioned with an all-capital-letters word, “EXCELLENCE”.

(Hmmm… I’m beginning to think there’s a concept here they’d like us to get hold of.)

The top line of three boxes is identified with the word, “Internal”. So no bonus points for guessing that the bottom line of three boxes is labelled “External”. Now, each column of two boxes is labelled, in turn, “People”, “Partnerships”, Knowledge”. (Still with me here? If you want to take a sheet of paper and draw it out, I can wait.)

The point is that we have been determined to be fulfilling a six-part mission: Internal People, External People; Internal Partnerships, External Partnerships, and finally, Internal Knowledge, External Knowledge. (Four quadrants were enough for populist management guru Stephen Covey, who made a bazillion dollars telling people to classify everything that they do as one of: Important and Urgent; Important, but not Urgent; Urgent, but not Important; and neither Important nor Urgent. But we’ve got to have six. Well take that, Mr Seven-Habits-of-Highly-Effective-Whatevers!)

But wait, there’s more! Here is what we will do under each of those points on our AFE:

For Internal People: “To create a healthy working environment where all employees are enabled to learn, contribute to the organization’s mandate, and be leaders”;

For External People: “To engage, inform and serve Canadians using an accountable, citizen-centred approach that focuses on results”;

Over to column 2

For Internal Partnerships (but not, presumably, with people, who are already covered in column 1): “To build a culture of teamwork within the organization toward innovative approaches to common goals and objectives”;

For External Partnerships: “To encourage partnerships by creating the strategic capacity to manage a spectrum of external relationships in order to better position the Department as a leader in knowledge, policy, and programs”;

And finally, in column 3

For Internal Knowledge: “To build the capacity to create, share, and use knowledge to enhance organizational productivity and effectiveness”;

And last, but not least, for External Knowledge: “To generate, contribute, and share knowledge that will support and inform decision making, as well as engage Canadians in creating knowledge”.

I’ll pause now while all you Baby Ducklings go apply a soothing poultice to your stinging eyes. Not to mention while you grab the nearest piece of anything textual – even a TV Guide! – in the possibly vain hope of re-assuring yourself that the English language still retains an ability, somewhere, actually to say something clearly. Or actually just to say something.

Anything at all.

Our “mission” is a veritable thesaurus of weasel-words: “To build a culture”, “To build the capacity”, “To encourage”, “contribute”… To me, they all smack of, “We won’t actually do anything; we’ll simply get ready to do something”. It’s what we do best in government… strategize… plan… brainstorm… consult (internally AND externally)… “blue-sky”. But “do”??? Who do you think we are, Yoda? (“Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’.”)

Will someone please tell me just how anyone actually “creates knowledge”?

Just what the hell is someone expected to do when told you will “inform decision making”?

And I’m sorry, but I can’t hear “Engage…” anything or anyone without hearing Enterprise Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s famous signal, “Inform Star Fleet – we have engaged the Borg”. (Don’t laugh. There’s more that is relevant to the Government of Canada in that bit of Star Trek dialogue than might be apparent at first glance.)

And so we soldier on.

= = =

Meanwhile, from the tooth-gnash-of-the-day file:

Recently – also at work, of course – I had to seek out a new workstation to use because my own had suffered the temporary loss of its computer, which our techs had hauled away to try to discover why my video card had pretty well died. At my new workstation, I found myself sitting down to a computer whose keyboard appeared to be missing several of the characters I use routinely in my day-to-day work. And nothing wildly unusual – but characters like an apostrophe, and quotation marks.

After a while, I gave up the “pick a card – any card” random approach in my efforts to determine what keystrike would instill them into my documents. So I typed each and every character, line by line, first in uppercase and then directly below it in lowercase. And I was truly boggled by how many characters actually produced things on the screen that simply did not appear on the keys.

For example, I found that when I typed a key adorned with a capital E with a “grave” French accent (that’s the one that leans to the left) – nothing else – I got a single quotation mark (not the apostrophe – see below). And coincidentally, it was the same key, except when typed in uppercase, that yielded up my missing double quotation marks. Directly beside it was a key indicating a capital A, also with a “grave” accent on it. In uppercase, this would produce a thin vertical line and, in lowercase, a solidus leaning to the left (backslash).

Still with me? Well, I don’t blame you a bit. Doing this was ridiculous enough. Reading about my doing it must be just paralyzingly dull! But don’t let that stop me from rabbiting on a bit more about it…

Without making up a darned thing, here are a couple other peculiarities of this particular keyboard:

The “tilde” was hidden (that's the “ ~ ” mark -- I call it a Victorian hyphen) as were the curly brackets, square brackets and, as noted, the apostrophe. Other unlabelled surprises turned up my question mark, left and right arrows, and a solidus (forward slash) in places other than where the key symbols suggested they would be.

But not just characters. The standard keyboard abbreviations CTRL, ALT and DEL had vanished, and been replaced by, respectively, a ship`s wheel (for “CONTROL” – get it?), a symbol that looked like a sign meaning “railroad siding ahead” (“ALTERNATE” – get it?) and three diagonal lines that look like a weather map’s sign for rain meant “DELETE” (Rain washes away all sins?) And there are symbols that make no sense whatsoever to me: an almost fully completed circle with an arrowhead pointing through its gap at 11 o’clock (push this key to give you a one-hour warning for lunchtime?); a lowercase “a” nesting inside a large downward pointing V (your ass is down here, you dummy?). The keyboard has no brand name on it, but I’m not surprised. The design company probably consisted of two teenagers with fine paintbrushes who sold $1,500,000 worth of these things to the federal government, than promptly sold their shop, and high-tailed it for Bora Bora, there to watch in happy amusement at the antics of Keith Richards and his Rolling Stones bandmates.

= = =

Thanks so much for clearing that up…

This almost makes one long for the good old days when the Allies were fighting a host of mono-syllabic, typically insulting names that were used to identify the enemy. Recently, I was reading a website (globalpolicy.org) that identified the groups the US is fighting in Iraq. Here’s the key passage: “its four main groups: Tandhim al-Qa’ida fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, Jaysh Ansar al-Sunna, al-Jaysh al-Islami fil-’Iraq, and al-Jabha al-Islamiya lil-Muqawama al-’Iraqiya”.

Kind of makes it hard to find a modern equivalent to the old fighter pilot’s admonition to “Beware of the Hun in the sun”, doesn’t it?

= = =

Thanks so much for clearing that up (2)…

The Guardian online on Thursday June 15 published the following correction:

“The Nazi laws prohibiting Jews marrying aliens, mentioned in the Writ large column, page 13, June 12, banned marriages with Aryans, not aliens.”

So memo to Fraulein Helga “Buzz Bomb” Herrenlieber: That little elopement you were planning with the Gorn? Looks like it’s a go after all. * phew *

= = =

And finally, I’m not sure but I think someone at work recently called me a tongue.

(Recorded for posterity)

The real irony here is that the unit I work for is officially a communications division. Recently, the entire team received this painfully worded message of thanks from our director. It includes one of the most memorably bizarre metaphors I have ever read:

“In short, I would like each and every one of you from all of my teams to know that you are very, very appreciated! The accomplishments I’ve named as well as the countless ones unmentioned are the muscles of the Department’s mouth: they all work in unison to continually give the Department the strong, confident voice for which we are recognised throughout the government.”

To be fair, I suppose it’s possible that the text was rendered by someone whose first language is French, and who perhaps was challenged by the boss (the author of the message) to come up with a colourful, quasi-Churchillian way of saying, “You give power to our messages”, or some such thing. It’s possible, I suppose.

But while that might be a darned good reason, it’s no excuse. And “You are the muscles of our mouth” really lacks the pizzazz of, “You are the wind beneath my wings.”

I can’t help thinking that, were I ever to be asked to produce a message on behalf of our unit and responded by asking, “So do you want me to put my muscle in your mouth?”, I would be in front of the Ontario Human Rights Commission the very next day.

At the latest.

I remain orally yours, etc... etc.