out of sight

Back to work today; I'd forgotten that we had a continuation of the other week's Coping With Millions Too Much Work session which effortlessly used up a quarter of the day and which was at least mildly fruitful though I do perhaps think it's time to subject some of the people in management rôles to a simple test: five Post-Its should be placed on a whiteboard in front of them - two blank, two with popular business-words such as "opportunity" and "challenge" written upon them and one saying "overtime" or "recognition of the length of the contractual working week" - of which the management-person is then asked to count the number of blank Post-Its to see if it was programming or mere chance which caused about five explicit mentions of overly-long working days or insufficient resource and the like to be completely ignored.

I often wonder what a shop gains by employing someone who is not able to answer simple questions about the stock of the shop in which they find themselves working. Maybe they're usually only released from the stockroom in the half-hour prior to the shop's closing time in order to dissuade late-arriving customers from wanting to buy anything and possibly initiating a relatively lengthy sale process which might keep the staff from locking up and running away the moment they flip the sign on the door to "closed".
It's a pity a similar technique couldn't really be employed at my work to ensure a swift exit within minutes rather than hours of the target finishing-time without arousing immediate suspicion.