Scenario 2: The illiterate rubbish.

In a similar vein to the imaginary scenario above, imagine that another thing you mentioned during the system testing has also ‘gone live’, despite you pointing out several problems with it two months ago. In the olden days (ie. for the last four years), everyone in your team created their own fax template for the faxes which they send to external companies every day. You always thought this was a ridiculous situation, but it just evolved because your manager refuses to care about the quality of documents that go out of the building. Some people’s faxes were good, some were okay and some were shockingly bad, but at least they all had the company logo on, and you were confident that the version you created was probably the best of the bunch as you had taken care to almost imitate the company font and you knew how to use the spellchecker, which other colleagues seem unable to locate. When you were told that the new system would ‘auto-complete’ these fax forms, with minimal input from individuals, you were overjoyed! It would force people to produce decent looking documents. However, the ‘test version’ which looks like some kind of crap thrown together by a five year old has inexplicably found its way onto the new system. Your senior manager told you two months ago that this version wouldn’t be used, when you told him it was ‘crap’. He seemed grateful when you handed him the version where you had circled over thirty mistakes in red pen, including a missing digit in the office phone number, an illegal claim and a version of the company logo that someone in the office has decided to redesign, badly, all by themselves. You are told that there are higher priorities to fix on the new system, but you suspect that some people think this travesty is actually okay to use. You now wonder what the people in corporate branding would say about this dog’s dinner of a document, and you wonder why some of your colleagues are dragging the company name into the dirt by actually sending out this embarrassing shite. But what would you do?

(a) Grit your teeth and use the new fax template, knowing it’s rubbish, but thinking ‘well, it’s the company that’s looking bad, not me – I wash my hands of the whole thing.’
(b) Mention it once more to the senior manager, telling them that you’re embarrassed to put your name to this drivel, but will do so if they insist.
(c) Say nothing, but keep on secretly using your own, much better, version, in which you do at least have some pride, until one day you’re spotted with it by the fax machine and you have a great big, albeit satisfying, row about the whole thing.
(d) Go on strike and refuse to liaise with outside companies by fax until this is resolved. Ensure that the people who are paid thousands of pounds in the ‘corporate branding’ and marketing departments mysteriously receive copies of the shoddy new fax in the internal mail. Sit back and await fallout.
(e) Something else.
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