Quality Co-ordinators
The tossers with ISO9002 manuals who are ruining businesses in this country. I used to get their stupid updates which told me things like that the font for filling in change control forms had changed. Like anyone reading a change control form cares what font it's in, as long as you don't use Comic Sans or Wingdings.

I once produced a form and someone pointed out that the date on it wasn't in the right format. Conversation (I did lose it a bit):-

"It's supposed to say 23rd November 2008 and you've written it as 23/11/08"
"And?"
"well, for starters, the year is in ambiguous"
"what, someone might pick up this form and think that this program change had been made in 1908? That we'd written it on the previous, Edwardian version of the software"
"There's no need to be like that about it"
"Well, it's not ambiguous, is it?"
*pause* "And the date should be written so that people don't confuse month and day"
"But they can't because there aren't 23 months."
"Someone might think that 23 was the year"
*stares* "1923? Before the first transistor was even developed?"
*goes into a huff* "look, these are the rules about dates. You have to fill them in this way"

If you've got them in your company, find a way to fire them. They're parasites who don't make things go any better. They just exist to keep themselves in a job.
(swestener, Thu 27 May 2010, 16:44, 6 replies)

Ohh yes
I could go on for the rest of the evening about our Document Control Dept.

They will send back a document for having the wrong colour bullet points; yet when you ask for help formatting a complicated contract they haughtily refer you on to one of the technical authors. "Not our job", apparently.
(North Utsira South Utsira, Thu 27 May 2010, 18:55, closed)

I was a quality co-ordinator.
I changed formats etc so stuff was easy to use and made sense. Didn't last long.
(porkylips looks better as the sun goes down., Thu 27 May 2010, 21:59, closed)

I was also a Quality Coordinator
Weird, I thought this job-title would be too obscure for anyone to develop a deep dislike of it.

I spent 6 months doing this, it mainly seemed to involve telling people how crap they were at their jobs and setting pointless actions that you had no intention of ever following-up.
(Nitrous Nitrous, Thu 27 May 2010, 22:31, closed)

ISO9002 has struck in Australia too along with the "best practice" bullshit.
I'm past minimum retirement age and have made it clear that if I hear anything from these whackers about something not being in block capitals lor some such frippery I'm out the door. I'm not alone in this from what I hear.

I was not hired to be a typist or worry whether some dickhead thinks there are 26 months in the year. My customers are professionals who don't need to have everything set out for them in insulting detail.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Fri 28 May 2010, 13:12, closed)

whilst i agree with the general sentiment....
my mum is a quality contoller, and she hates it. this is because the firm that she works for decided to introduce the iso standard, and now whenever she asks to audit any of their work they all are as obstuctive as possible. she finds it deeply frustrating. she is nearly at retiring age, and she only took the job as it paid more and she's worried about her pension. she's not unduly anal and won't deduct points for petty shit but some of the files are a complete state and when she tries to talk to the people responsible they just don't care. they asked her to do the job, not the other way round! the firm just wanted to be able to put the iso standard on their headings without having to do anything else. well sorry, it's not jsut about how you write the date or which font you use, and if people don't at least try to enforce it then it loses whatever little meaning it has left.
( kappynitty doubled your entendre on, Fri 28 May 2010, 16:56, closed)

I sympathise with your mum to a certain extent,
the quality of some of the international patent reports produced by some of our patent examiners was not all that good. However I have seen reports from the US patent office that were utterly appalling and made the worst locally produced stuff look brilliant. We usually regard US international reports as nearly worthless (and so do their own patent examiners who routinely run the patent searches again and find new "art") and from what I see on-line so do European patent examiners, some or most of the time.

When this bullshit started a couple of years ago we were gathered together and given a lecture on how these reports should be written. I had never seen the bloke before. Turned out he had been there less than 30 months and he was telling 20 year staff how to do their job. Now if his recommendations had made sense it would not have been so bad. However the things he was telling us to do would have made the average four or five page report into a document of a dozen pages of barely readable guff and quadrupled the time needed to write it. It would only irritate the patent applicants and attorneys. This was pointed out in no uncertain terms at this gathering, I was going to do it but others beat me to it. They didn't call him a fuckwit to his face but that was the clear and wholly justified message.

Not a blind bit of notice was taken. So as far as I am concerned, I don't mind using frippery like block capitals here and there or spelling out "December" just in case some idiot thinks "Dec" means April, but I draw the line at stating the bleeding obvious about every possible permutation of the patent claims in words of one syllable to people who are usually far better qualified than I am. It's particularly true when it is obvious that the patent claims will be altered or dropped as a result of the report, however it is phrased.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Sat 29 May 2010, 14:55, closed)