Dateline: 1994. So, my boss & former grad school advisor, now in private sector where he hired me, drops this on me as I walk into my cubicle one morning.
Him: 'hey I'm scheduled to do this full day employee survey debrief on Friday in Oshawa, Canada at General Motors HQ but I'm sending you instead.'
Me: 'um...what? Where?
Him: 'you'll be fine. I'll send you the data. Make sure you're prepared to talk for at least 6 hours to a large group of managers. Buy your plane tickets right now & rent a car to drive over from Toronto.'
I was rather dazed by this, as it was just a few days away. Mild panic. Thank fuck I had plenty of public speaking experience, even back then when I was still in my 20s. I had taught a college statistics class a year prior actually in South Dakota where I launched my meteoric career. Plus I gave plenty of talks in grad school. And college for that matter. So it wasn't the speaking part, it was my knowledge of the gigantic amount of prep it takes to lead a training session for several hours. Did I mention I was making $25k/year at the time?
Anyhoots. There's a specific reason I'm writing this blurb, and it's about what happened there, or rather what was happening for years, with this employee survey data. So this company called NCS, long since absorbed, folded, laundered, etc had been administrating GM's employee survey in Canada (maybe globally don't recall) but my trip was focused only on CA employees, of which there are (or were) thousands. Back where I commuted across the twin cities 2x/day to work, in this 1 story converted giant warehouse, was the small team running this project. 2 programmers, 1 project manager, and a whole team of mailroom over achievers running optical scanners (& dealing with the mountain of mail).
I sort of knew the 2 programmers, Jim & Charles. They were around the area anyhoots. Because they maintained this archaic proprietary data crunching software that I assume they created, they couldn't be touched. Job security. I saw that for decades on IT teams and so have you: 'hey this stuff is so complex you need us around forever to keep it running. Please give me another raise.' Jim once asked me to help him check a bunch of numbers, I recall that. He gave me a list of dozens of numbers & stared at his screen whilst I read them off a clipboard. So he did care enough about QA for that.
However, the PM told me a different story, when I was talking to her to prep for what the hell I was getting into up yonder. She was majorly frustrated with everyone & everything on this project. Especially the programmers. And here's why: apparently the numbers, somewhere, didn't add up. This was ongoing, for years. But nobody knew what to do, as the 2 local programmers ran the thing via their black box program. That program pumped out boatloads of reports: rollup reports, slice reports, big reports, little reports...etc. What do you do? In hindsight as I write this, I reckon my boss caught wind of this and said fuck that I'm not going up there, I'll send the new guy.
So let's focus already. What, you wonder, happened? I flew to Toronto, rented car, then realized the freaking highway signs are in French. I saw the word 'sortie' everywhere. What the sam hill is a sortie? Fuck me. Speak English if you want to get ahead in life. That's what I tell the locals when I travel. They really respond to that. I must have had map or printout to get me to Oshawa 40 miles away because I knew fuck all where I was. At least I flew in day prior so it was daylight & could see where I was.
Yadda yadda let's focus so next day it's showtime at the gigantic Canadian HQ of Gen Motors. It's me in my cheap ass suit and 20 managers, all well older than me. So I get through the first couple hours, explaining how the survey is admin, collated, crunched, reported. Then I distribute reports to everyone and we dive into those for 2 hours. I give them an hour to go over stuff.
Some folks have calculators & are banging away on them. Uh oh.
One guy calls me over to his table, he's been doing math on his notepad and found that the numbers don't add up. So I sit next to him. I also have a calculator. I start adding numbers also. Come to the same wrong total. The good news, as it were, is that the 'overall total' numbers were 'off' from the correct total by ~3%. Not horrible maybe, but it looks really bad. Especially when you're working for the company who created the reports, facing 20 managers, who had a portion of their bonuses contingent upon these reports.
What would you say?
I said this, after selecting a winner from the internal panic conversation in my brain:
'I think this might be some kind of rounding error.'
Yeah, I know. What the fuck am I supposed to say? How about:
'Hey everyone, all the report are wrong, because the underlying proprietary black box program at HQ in MN is run by a couple programmers who are the only ones who know the reality?'
Again: what would you say?