I dub a certain meeting on Wednesday mornings at work here "Close Encounters of the Stoopid Kind". I could go on and on and on about how retardified the engineering practice is here, but basically it boils down to circle:

Engineering is asked to do something by sales
Engineering says we need X time to do it
Sales says we dont want it anymore cause thats too long to wait
Engineering say hey thats okay we'll go back to work on what was important anyway. Oh and BTW what do our customers want?
Sales says we don't know, go away you're bothering us.
Sales comes back saying hey we decided we want what we wanted but what we said we didn't want and we want it a week earlier now.

Okay so we had what I will refer as the "What the Fuck is a Ghant Chart" meeting. So bascially it comes down to this, there is a deadline. We have a Microsoft project associated with this huge project and a whole bunch of stuff has been entered in it. We've had sales and whatnot come down and tell us to change order of thigns in that project several times, which we have done.

However, whenever you move from one subproject to another you loose time in completing them. Thus, microsoft project is telling us that we won't make our deadline. But we can't do that, we have to meet the deadline. The conclusion of the people in this meeting?Microsoft project and project management principles are stupid.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

What this means is we are supposed to go through and reevaluate whats important, restructure the mess and figure out whats screwing things up and adjust times and deadlines of individual subprojects to meet the big deadline. Which is very doable. But if you were to just leave it a slush with no comunication between groups, like things are going right now, then guess what? We won't meet the deadline.

And thats today's Close Encounter of the Stupid Kind, brought to you by mildlyretarded.com