Friday, March 5, 2010

I made this! ...or wait? Does copy paste count?

Sometimes I am disturbed that I manage to survive all the corporate insanity that is going on in the Japan office. There are a few other nice and smart people in the company, but unfortunately they tend to be in the lower ranks of the organization or spread out over the branches outside Tokyo.

But after the last Cpt. Awkward incident, I thought I had gotten my share for the week and would at least have a not too stupid Friday at work. I was wrong, oh so wrong...

For reasons I have difficult understanding myself, I have been dragged into supporting the creation of a training program for the company. Generally I fully support the idea of having a training program in place but I have been bunched together in this project with Mr. Shachou and Mr. Brownnose rep who have the habit of agreeing with everything anyone says to him as long as they're equal or above him in the organization and then back talking them as soon as they're out of sight. I am aware of this so it doesn't really bother me that much, that's just the way he works.

One part of my annoyance is that most of the training material is really bad if it even exists and the discussion turned to some material regarding a certain aspect and the discussion went something like this:
Salaryman: (very skeptical) Do we even have any material regarding this?!
Mr. Shachou: (excited and a bit upset) Yeah we do, Mr. Brownnose made some amazing material, I'm so impressed with it!
Salaryman: (still skeptical, looks at Mr. Brownnose)
Mr. Brownnose: (aggressive) Yeah, I made a lot of material for this!
Salaryman: (still very skeptical) Ok, do you mind showing me this?
Mr. Brownnose: (confidently aggressive) Sure, look here!

(As I look at the material he's put together I have to admit that it's not too shabby, far from great, but real useable material in quite large amounts)

Salaryman: (still skeptical) Did you actually make this
Mr. Brownnose: (offended) Yes I did!
Salaryman: (frowning) You actually made all of this?!
Mr. Brownnose: (more offended) Yeah! I made all of this!
Salaryman: (more submissive) Well, it actually looks pretty good, sorry about that...
Mr. Brownnose: (smug) It's ok!

Then after the meeting I take another look at the material and after looking a bit more in detail I see that it's clearly out of Mr. Brownnose's competency to put together that type of material. I start googling parts of the text and for every section I get a hit on google. It's obvious that he's lifted everything off educational sites and not even really mixed things up much, just taking stuff straight off pages and putting them in slides. Just 5 minutes of checking clearly shows that the only work he's done is copy pasting.

I approach him where he's sitting

Salaryman: (angry) Hey, I looked a bit closer on the material and it's all copied of sites from the Internet and you haven't even sourced it to make it look like you made it all!
Mr. Brownnose: (caught with his pants down) Yeah... I did that, isn't that ok...?
Salaryman: (tired and angry) Do you know copyright? At the very least you need to source the stuff, this could get us in big problems you know! We can't use stuff like that's not ours just like that without proper permission!
Mr. Brownnose: (very submissive) But I did change some words here and there so it's not really completely straight copied...?
Salaryman: (just tired) Well maybe you don't realize it but that makes it even worse, I've checked and the changes are so minor that it makes it worse, we can't do shit like that!
Mr. Brownnose: (meekly) Oh, so maybe we shouldn't use this...?
Salaryman: (even more tired) You do whatever you want, but remember that I told you this!

At least Cpt. Awkward has that endearing awkwardness that makes me constantly forgive him, but this is probably the most offensive display of stupidity that I have encountered in a long time...

2 comments:

Martin said...

What does the Ultimate douche have to do with this post? I think it seems very innovative with two different hose sizes.

Mr. Salaryman said...

Come on, the connection is obvious here I thought. But yeah, it seems to be the ultimate one!

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