In the 60s and at the height of the ‘Cold War’ I was stationed in Germany for three years. I had a really nice time there, to the point of considering going back to work and live there when I left the forces in 1969. Well, I didn’t, but I did have a life changing experience there. I read ‘Catch 22’ by Joseph Heller. Reading this book wasn’t my prime reason for not signing on to a retirement age in the forces, but it was a contributing factor.
I read Catch 22 in one day, most of which was spent either laughing out loud or giggling. One of the many vignettes in Catch 22 that amused me, was that of Colonel Cathcart and ‘neat bomb patterns’. Todays Dilbert Cartoon reminded me of it and of the number of times I have realised that variations of the ‘neat bomb pattern’ concept are applied at work. Where ‘hitting the target’ becomes an irrelevance.
When I returned to the UK from Germany for my last tour of duty, I was stationed in a command and control centre providing logistical support to RAF bases throughout the world. I did a duty watch at the ‘control desk’. There was a sheet of glass on the desk with many pieces of paper underneath on which someone, at some time, had recorded some information. Information which at some time may have been useful and for all I knew still could be, but most of which were completely unfathomable to me. So at each watch I started removing those pieces of paper that I thought had no relevance to the work in hand. I eventually removed most of these ‘notes’ without any comment from anyone else.
Some time after being demobbed I became a civil servant in The Department of Transport. Under the Thatcher administration there was a drive to ‘improve efficiency’ in the civil service. We were each required to submit a monthly timesheet to a central point, presumably for analysis. These were records of time spent against a specific job per month. As it happens, and probably uniquely, I was already keeping an accurate account of this before these records were introduced. Of course we never received any feedback on these records, so I started entering ridiculous figures for time spent – no response. I then started adding fictional job numbers to these ridiculous figures of time spent – no response. Eventually the department I belonged to was reorganised and it all stopped. Here we are some forty years later reading Dilbert with Colonel Cathcart’s ‘neat bomb pattern’ concept alive and well.
Boadicea's Chariot 
That figures! A very entertaining post Peter. The conclusions are dead neat. My short experience in Education tell me that similar absurdities are reached by an obsession with calibrating children in a subjective tick-box culture. (Apologies for woolly thinking here – have had no breakfast yet.)
Hello PG – Reading the cartoon again (and still being amused by it)the reference to a ‘model and an understanding of reality’ provides me with a link in to a political blog I pasted on my own site and the dark-side. The theme of the post is modelling with references to GIGO (garbage in – garbage out) and a ‘perceived reality’, which it occurs to me is often analogous to ‘neat bomb patterns’!
Thanks PB – interesting stuff!