Dilbert is a documentary, not a comic

Scott Adams is a genius. I've been a corporate cubicle jockey for six years now, and every year I could swear that he works for the same company I do. His comics just hit so close to home it's amazing.

Or maybe there's a flip side. Maybe, the cubicle life is so inherently ridiculous that the jokes just write themselves. It seems like, no matter which former place of employment I think about, no matter which manager, no matter which project, there's a plethora of Dilbert jokes sitting there writing themselves.

For example, let's look, say, three days back...

Background
First, I need to set the stage. My job is that of the mighty Quality Assurance Analyst. In a nutshell, I review the programs that computer programmers create, and I tell them where they've messed up. It's a delicate job that involves stroking egos the size of Buicks while pointing out the shortcomings of others. Then, once I've found all the mistakes, and they've been fixed, I ship the program off to our customers who lavish us with praise and money.

(At least, on paper, that's what I do. The actual job is much less glamorous, but I'll save that for another time.)

The particular piece of software I'm currently testing is, in effect, a specialized search engine. Our customer gives us the data to search on, and we provide the software that actually does the searching.

Thursday
Right, so now that you have the background, I can get on with it.

I got to work on Thursday feeling pretty good about life. The sun was shining, birds were singing, it was like I was living in a Disney movie except that my parents had not been horribly killed.

I got to work, and checked my email only to discover that the customer had logged 35 bugs against the software we had released to them on Monday. "Crap!" I thought to myself. Then I added "This sucks" just for good measure. Attached to the list of defects was a scathing letter accusing us of not even testing our software before sending it out. This had all been forwarded to me via email by my boss who had also added a comment or two of her own asking me how I missed so many bugs.

With my ego in tatters, I started the process of logging each of these bugs into our internal bug-tracking system so that the developers could start fixing them. In my mind, I started trying to figure out what could have gone so horribly wrong.

I opened the first ticket. They noticed a really obvious error that I somehow missed. I mentally flogged myself as I logged it. One down, 34 to go. This was gonna be a long morning.

I opened the second one. "Wait a minute! This isn't my defect." This defect involves a misspelling in the data that they sent us. They made this mistake, not me. (whoohoo) "At least I don't have to type this up." I thought to myself.

I opened the third one, another misspelling in their data. Fourth, fifth, sixth, theirs, theirs, theirs. To make a long story short, thirty four of the thirty five defects were not my fault. Testing their data is the job of their staff, not me.

So my company lost a half-day of my productivity while I went through these, and no doubt, somebody on my client's side lost three days finding and logging them in the first place, but none of that matters because, for the most part, none of it was my fault.

It made for a good chuckle, and I thoroughly enjoyed being able to go back to my boss and point out that the customer is logging defects against themselves.

The most difficult part was writing a diplomatic email back to the customer explaining that, while they have every right to be annoyed, they should redirect that annoyance internally. Fortunately, that job didn't fall on me.