B-arking mad

Last week I received a verbal warning in my new job.

The reason? I’d bought a magazine from the company shop at lunchtime, and left it on my office desk. One of the main managers saw this and complained to my manager that it was unprofessional behaviour.

So the law of lowest common denominator in management, seems to remain true no matter the company I work for!

It does make you wonder though about what role exactly managers play in the success of a project. They are the highest paid people in an office – but what do they actually do, what do they bring to the office? Well a typical manager will claim they “leverage your synergy”, yes well quite.

They like to believe they’re all leaders, a group of Caesars of industry, but today’s typical manager really is little more than a bean counter who makes his contribution to the office by making complaints about magazines in the office or some other trivial thing. It’s a power game really – the business won’t collapse from the presence of one magazine (you would have to know the general state of our office to know what a mess it is), but it’s all about showing superiority over “none-managers” by occasionally applying such strange and unpredictable rules to the office.

Engineers create money for the company, but managers seem to take all the credit, bonuses and company cars. Thank God for Scott Adam’s Dilbert then, who acts as the voice of the office warrior by asserting how management are a law unto themselves.

Oddly enough it was another Adams, Douglas Adams who came up with a solution in his Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy stories.

His plan? To build a “B” ark …

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The planet Golgafrincham creatively solved the problem of middle managers: it blasted them in to space.

Golgafrinchan Telephone Sanitisers, Management Consultants and Marketing executives were persuaded that the planet was under threat from an enormous mutant star goat.

The useless third of their population was then packed in Ark spaceships and sent to an insignificant planet.

That planet turned out to be Earth, where the arrival of the Golgafrincham B Ark rather disrupted an experiment designed to find the question to the ultimate Answer.

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I cannot help but think this B-ark was the inspiration behind Channel 4’s Space Cadets, which ran in December 2005.


In it a group of people were trained at a space centre and then sent into space for one week. The catch? They call had to be gullible as the whole thing was a hoax.


Probably the best thing was watching the assortment of admins, recruiters and builders being trained and really believing they had “the right stuff” to be astronauts.

Bet it was enough to drive you to drink hey Buzz?



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