hrj

 I should have had three Major investigations close this week, but only one did so because the other side of the process is just as overburdened as the investigators are. Still, I'm in spitting distance of being down to only four Major investigations (the difference between Major and Minor is how hard you have to work to justify not rejecting product), three of which are over 100 days old (because they haven't held up the release of any important batches, so they slip down the priority list). This means that it's about time for my boss to assign me a couple of brand new "this trumps everything!" investigations that will ensure I never get caught up. Oh, and the oldest of my investigations is the one I inherited from someone who left the company. I was told "It's essentially done; we're just waiting for the results of this one study..." Except that "essentially done" means "nothing was ever written down, but you might be able to reconstruct it from the documents in her folder." One of those documents, among the references cited, lists "the memo so-and-so will provide." Today's gloomy task was to email so-and-so and ask if they have any clue whether the cited memo ever existed.

But hey, we're starting a new round of "we're going to come up with projects to improve productivity and reduce closure time" and no one understands why we aren't excited about spending a lot of non-existent time on them, given that every previous round ended up with the "improvement projects" being cancelled or undermined. It's so great to have a naively optimistic manager who is absolutely positively certain that this time Lucy won't pull the football away.