1 thought on “Unnecessary Inventions”

1. I disagree that a personal rear view is unnecessary. Could be very useful to keep an eye on people getting too close from behind to trying to steal from your back pack.

   Also useful in the office, in the mid-90s we had a manager who liked to sneak up behind people. If you had someone opposite you this wasn’t a problem as you could just keep an eye out for if the looked behind you a little too intently, but not everyone had that luxury. Fortunately, this was the time when AOL were putting CDROMs on the cover of everything so we all had a stack of them. We’d ‘decorate’ our monitors with them, shiny side facing us. Now when he snuck up we could see him and turn to talk to him. He tried to make a rule that we weren’t allowed to stick things to our monitors. Fortunately, our chief exec asked why he wanted them removed and when he couldn’t give a coherent answer asked me (I was fixing his PC at the time, I was the desktop/network support team) why we did it. I explained that he had a habit of sneaking up on people which caused stress and created a hostile workplace environment as people felt he was trying to catch them out. He was countermanded promptly.

   He was the production manager for our main software product. He went on extended leave for an operation and was off work for about 3 months. Those were the most productive 3 months the company ever had, we normally needed overtime to deliver to the planned release date but we delivered a release scheduled for the month after he returned 10 weeks early with no over time, with the lowest staff turnover (out of 40 staff in his area we’d have 1-3 leaving each month, 2 people left shortly after he went on leave and that was it). Within a week of his return 9 staff, including me, had handed in their notice and productivity fell sharply. He landed up having a very difficult conversation with his manager.

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