The Rules Blog and Podcast

Karen from Bankstown writes:

My colleagues run from their office to the photocopier & back for NO REASON. I think it is ridiculous and they should all be fired for trying to look so busy and important. It is something that has annoyed me for years as there is nothing more distracting that hearing “Judy from accounts” breaking into a run and thumping around the floor on her way to get a paperclip from the stationery cupboard.
Steven says:

Ah yes, the strings race to crescendo while the camera switches to slow motion as Judy makes that hero-dash to get the scissors. She’s got only seconds to cut the red wire before the dirty bomb sent by the Algerian office takes out Accounts and all hope of reconciliation by the end of the tax year.

Judy Bauer is up there with the sort of office hero who soldiers into work bleeding from the eyes with Ebola. The world, people, the w-h-o-l-e world, will fall to ruin if Judy is away from her desk for the day. More than once some Judy has run through her medical chart with me to prove her devotion to duty only to have to add “devastating emotional shock” to the list. That’s because Judy nearly has a stroke when I tell her to bloody well go home and leave the rest of us in health.

Karen, most people are so stupid the only honorable course for them would be to donate their dense craniums as armour-plating for Humvees. Not after they’re dead. Now. Donate now.

Judy’s probably not going to volunteer for that and forcing her is still illegal (which it wouldn’t be if stupid people were stripped of the vote as I advocate). I suggest running some fishing wire across the corridor between Judy and the stationery cupboard. Her running will be seriously hampered by two broken ankles.

Miss Rhylla says:

Ah, poor Judy from accounts. We do give her a hard time on The Rules, but she probably deserves it. My new year’s resolution is to come up with a new fictional person to tag with these often shameful stories. Vishna from IT, Rupert in HR, or Tullulah from Knowledge Management…? I digress.

The busy-ness epidemic is indeed madness and something that I am all in favour of stamping out, wherever it lives. I’ve been lured in by its siren song on occasion and have been known to break into a photocopier-bound trot before. Busy & Important can manifest itself in all sorts of guises; scampering to the printer, breathlessly snatching up the phone, sighing and puffing as you head up and down the corridor brokering peace in the Middle East and squeezing in a spot of open heart surgery before lunch, all while getting your timesheets done.

Some bosses may encourage it thinking if everyone is “busy” that’s a good thing, but of course the problem with this sort of caper is that it is has a bird-flu like infectiousness and a similarly detrimental impact on productivity. My advice is to enlist supporters for your anti-scampering cause, and all sing out with questions for the runners each time they jog past, “is someone on fire?”, “has Ebola broken out in the lunchroom”, “is there a bomb in the ladies loo?”, “how many laps to go now?” or set up a drinks station – marathon style – with cups of water and power bars and cheer them on as they hurtle past. My guess is it will eventually slow them down – or at least send them on a different route.