There are a few things I do at work that resemble art. And when I talk of art, I am really only talking about two things. Either the movie Office Space, or the comic strip Dilbert. For fans of the movie Office Space, I only have this to say.
You hear the jokes about TPS reports… I really have to do TPS reports. EVERYDAY. For those you who are curious as to what TPS actually means, well, it simply stands for Tracking Payments System. I don’t have to attach cover sheets to these, and I don’t staple them with my red swingline stapler, I simply look at payments we have received on certain days and then calculate what percentage we are getting and when, and try to apply that to a forcast of payments. I do have a couple of bosses looking over me to make sure I have done it correctly. Usually it looks horrible.
Dates are out of place, numbers don’t add up, and percentages look like crap. But now that I have taken the time to rethink how I do these reports, they have started to look better. And today, I can gladly say that I have gotten the stuff corrected, numbers look good, and I won’t have to clean off fish in my office to feel better about myself.
I do want my red stapler back though.
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Ha! When I worked at WABB in Mobile, we used to tease the receptionist about TPS reports. We’d call her randomly and ask if she’d done them yet… for a while she pretended to know what we were talking about. After a day or two, we really got on her case about finishing them (of course, there was no such report to be filed, we were just taking advantage of the fact that she had not seen Office Space), to the point that she finally admitted she had no idea what a TPS report was and even broadcast over the station intercom, “WILL SOMEONE PLEASE COME TO THE FRONT DESK AND TELL ME WHAT IN THE HELL A TPS REPORT IS? THANK YOU.”
Damn, it feels good to be a gansta.