Leonidas, I missed you!! Thanks for comming back.
Thanks Brat - I still owe you for your help with the FLSA stuff. Which worked out great by the way. I never figured out what my ROR was, but I know that when they adjusted my time balances by reinstating and then unfreezing the values of my old accumulated time that I got a huge increase.
wildcat - Thanks for reminding me what my avatar was. Emilio will require a little surgery to get him to fit under the size limits on the new board - but he shall return. Here's a good Emilio quote:
"What's the level of compromise for making that kind of money? How far do I have to sell my soul? What's the price of that? And I don't know if I want to make those kind of compromises any more. I think I'm a different person. I think I've matured to a great extent. I think that I want different things now."
Maddy - Bulleted lists - I had to dig back in some dim memories for where/when I picked that gadget up.
You're close to being right about the TSP report thing. When I was a lot younger and only slightly more disrespectful of authority, some of my peers and I used to play games with reports and correspondence just to have fun with the powers that be. Like when they first made us follow an outline for report writing and I wrote four paragraphs describing the scene of a convenience store where someone had driven away without paying for their gas. It included information on the composition of the parking lot, the temperature and relative humidity, and the approximate lumens cast by the overhead lighting.
Anyway, when I was a young detective one day, my partner and I were skimming through some internal publication written by one of our PhDs. We noticed the use of a bulleted list and were commenting on it.
Why do you suppose they put this in here?
I don't know. Maybe to make it stand out?
One of the older guys, who had a degree in English, looked at it and said
No, because he was too lazy or stupid to write a good paragraph. Or, even a well formed sentence apparently.
We fell in love with bulleted lists. My partner even wrote a complete arrest report that was nothing but a three page bulleted list. He got away with that for a long time until he decided to start using multiple exclamation marks after certain items on his lists. We're talking twenty or thirty exclamation marks after some items.
- Detectives Brown and Leonidas approached the Defendant while he was standing near the scene of this incident and noticed that he had blood spattered on his trousers and shirt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Me: That looks stupid, why the hell did you do that?
Partner: I think it looks cool, and it makes the really important stuff stand out.
Me: Isn't that the idea of using a list in the first place?
He gradually worked himself up to the point where it was ridiculous just to see how far he could go before he got caught. Eventually he got called on the carpet by
The Man because somebody in the DA's office complained that his reports contained more bullets and exclamation marks than actual words:
- The Defendant was arrested at that time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- The Defendant was subsequently transported to the City Jail !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A few months later we discovered that we could use text characters to make scene diagrams. They must have been keeping an eye on us by then, because it only lasted a short time before we were told that reports with four pages of diagrams and only three paragraphs of text were just not going to be accepted.
We had to switch our MO then because they were watching the reports like a hawk. We discovered that anytime someone called the internal Rumor Control Hotline, with a rumor they had never heard of before, that the Planning and Research Division would be tasked to conduct an investigation and write a report. Some of these took months to complete. So we would call every few weeks with some new and bizarre rumor that we claimed to have heard and then wait for the report to come out.
We would pick the most ridiculous thing we could think of, and aim it toward a particular group within the agency. Just to rile them up
Is there any truth to the rumor that the Helicopter Division is going to replace the entire fleet with hang gliders to save on fuel?
Every week the P&R people put out a report that summarized the latest issues to the rumor hot line - and all the divisions poured through them to see if something affected them. Then, at the monthly open employee forum the Chief would have to address a small group of extremely unhappy employees.
What's all this stuff about Helicopters switching to hang gliders? I got to tell you Chief I think that's a load of crap. I'm pilot, not a damn kite rider!
We got away with that for two years. Our downfall was when we asked about the "rumor" that all the marked police cars were going to be painted pink in an effort to keep suspects from being combative. Our punishment was being assigned as reps to the employee relations meetings, where we had front row seats so the Chief could keep an eye on us.
