Gimli: Legolas! Two already!
Legolas: I'm on seventeen!
Gimli: Huh? I'll have no pointy-ear outscoring me! [kills another one]
Legolas: [shoots two more arrows] Nineteen!The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
My workplace is currently going through a process of reviewing and optimizing our procedures in hopes of improving efficiency and creating a more streamlined system. This isn't an easy process - among other issues, we're ridiculously paper-based, considering that it's 2022. And I do mean ridiculously, I personally print over a million* pages of training support material on an annual basis.
As part of the review process, everyone has been tasked with logging their productivity on a daily basis. It's not as onerous as it sounds, but there have been some challenges in establishing appropriate scaling for metrics. We were discussing this during one of our morning productivity meetings, and I raised the problem of measuring quantity rather than size in terms of productivity. Sadly, it turned out to be a bit of a weregeek moment.
"It's like the second Lord of the Rings movie, where Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf are competing to see who has the higher kill count in their various battles, right?"
Silence and blank faces. Undeterred (and obviously unwilling to read the room) I continued:
"And at one point, Legolas takes out a huge war elephant, this gigantic tusked monster. He slides down the trunk of the fallen creature and hops off to stand nonchalantly in front of Gimli, who frowns at him and shouts, 'That still only counts as one!' It's the same sort of problem - we have to look at scale rather than just counting events."
More silence followed - I think that the other attendees were either puzzled, confused, embarrassed for me, or all three, I've never had more people avoid eye contact. Well, too bad, I regret nothing, it was a perfect analogy for the problem, geek reference or not - muggles.
- Sid
*Yes, ONE MILLION, to quote Doctor Evil.
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