Logic Takes a Holiday

I’d like to request a few days off from work, but my company’s vacation request process has more wasted effort than a Peter Jackson film.

I’m sure our method of asking for days off began as a simple, straightforward process but over the years the layers of added beauracracy have mutated it like nuclear experiments in the Sea of Japan and turned it into some sort of green monster that periodically rises from the depths and goes for a leisurely stroll through Tokyo.

Let’s say I want to take off next Friday. Here’s how this system works:

1. I walk down to my boss’s office, say hello to Marla, his lobotomized secretary and proceed to the “wall of forms” where we have paper forms for just about every employment practice imagineable. At the wall I find that we are out of Vacation Request Forms as we always are because Marla thinks photocopying 20 forms is 20 times the work of photocopying two forms.

2. I turn to Marla and ask her for a Vacation Request Form whereupon she must ask me, “Don’t we have any up there?” and I have to ceremoniously answer, “No, I don’t think we do.” Next she says, “Hmmm” to herself and asks me if I’m sure that there are no forms. I nod my head patiently and answer “I can’t find any.” Satisfied, she pulls out the original Vacation Request Form , treating it like the Shroud of Turin because it is probably that old, from her filing cabinet of treasures, puts it in the photocopier and pushes the copy button exactly twice. She gives one copy to me and puts one on the wall of forms.

3. The form has exactly four lines and was obviously created on a simple office typewriter (when “Courier” was the only font you had unless you took the thing apart) and then mimeographed (remember those?) and photocopied for decades, outliving the original machines and all of the staff that once created it. On the form I fill in my name, the days I want to take off and whether the days are vacation or sick days. There’s one more blank line, but that’s for my boss, Dick Lumbergh, to sign.

4. I put the form in Dick’s mailbox and go back to my desk to read the want ads.

5. A few hours later Dick checks his mailbox and pulls out my Vacation Request Form. He signs it immediately, photocopies it and puts one copy of the form into a “Vacation Binder” for the year and gives the other copy of the completed form back to Marla.

6. Marla then takes this form and writes in my name on a large dry-erase calendar that hangs in her office. Her copy of the form gets filed in a different “Vacation Binder”.

7. The day before I take my vacation day I have to email our entire department, telling them that I’m not going to be here the next day. These emails are all marked “Vacation Request” in most of our Inboxes.

Up to this point the process is fairly simple if not a little heavy on photocopying. We have two copies of the vacation form in different binders (I never actually receive any sort of confirmation or denial), a note put on a dry-erase calendar in the secretary’s office and an email about my vacation day.

Finally, I take my day off, usually for an interview. At the end of the month the process gets truly out of hand.

8. The end of the month comes and Marla sends out an email to everyone in the department asking for a summary of the vacation days they took in the last thirty days. She could reference any number of the multiple resources at her fingertips (the email that went out, the dry-erase boards or the two different sets of photocopied forms), but she doesn’t.

9. We all email into Marla a summary of the days we took off. Marla then goes through each and every email from us and checks it against the long list of “Vacation Request” emails she received over the month. If she finds any discrepancies she sends us another email asking about it.

10. Marla then takes all her findings and writes them down on another piece of paper, a Departmental Vacation Summary Form and sends it to our Human Resources department via interoffice snail mail.

11. Over the next month Human Resources gathers all the summary forms and manually enters them into a mainframe software program that makes the Vacation Request Form look shiny and new. This mainframe program was written at a time when an electronic calculator filled a small room and those rectangular punchcards with the little square holes were an “up and coming” technology.

12. Finally, once all the vacation data for the entire company has been entered the data is “submitted” to another mainframe software program where employees can look up how many vacation days they had left…as of 30 days ago. To see remaining days you must press P then 2 then R and then you must type in the unix name of your printer, but only if your printer is an older one because the newer printers don’t work with the vacation system. A report will then print out for you, listing all the vacation days you’ve taken up to 30 days ago. If you want a more accurate or up to date count of your remaining vacation days you just have to take the days remaining in the mainframe software and then go through your vacation emails and subtract any additional days from that original number.

Simple…

I’ve mentioned to my boss that maybe, just maybe, we could streamline the process a litte bit, seeing how we have a staff of 40 people including network administrators, programmers and computer support experts. He nodded and agreed and here we are six months and countless meetings later. I’m happy to report that the new process has been greatly improved:

Marla will now use colored markers on the dry-erase board to indicate what days you’re taking off.