Man, this ‘rueger’ thing. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl, seriously. It wasn’t a person, not really, but more like this set of rules, this ‘new way’ they wanted us to work. Dropped on us from on high, you know the type. Supposedly gonna make everything super efficient.
Getting Started with ‘rueger’
So, the rollout began. We all got herded into these conference rooms. Bright-eyed consultant type, clicking through slides full of charts and big words. Efficiency! Synergy! Paradigm Shift! All that jazz. They handed out these thick binders. My first task, honestly, was just trying to make sense of what any of it actually meant for my day-to-day. It felt like learning a whole new language, and not a very useful one at that.
Then came the practical bit. We had to start logging everything, and I mean everything, into this new system they called the ‘rueger framework’. Every tiny task, every email, every five-minute chat had to be categorized, tagged, and cross-referenced. It was a nightmare.
The Daily Grind with ‘rueger’
My process, if you can call it that, became this:
- Spend the first hour of my day just trying to plan how to log my planned work according to ‘rueger’.
- Actually try to do some work, while constantly thinking, “How am I gonna report this?”
- Spend the last hour, sometimes more, fighting with the system, inputting all the data.
- Realize I forgot to log something trivial and debate whether it’s worth the pain of reopening a ‘rueger ticket’.
We had these weekly ‘rueger compliance’ meetings. Oh boy. Most of it was just people complaining, very politely of course, about how they couldn’t get anything done. Management would nod, say they’d ‘take it under advisement,’ and then nothing would change. It was like talking to a brick wall, a very expensive, consultant-approved brick wall.
I remember this one project, a really important one for us. Before ‘rueger’, we’d have just gotten on with it. Quick chats, sketches on a whiteboard, get it done. But now? We spent two weeks just on ‘rueger planning’. Two weeks! The client was getting antsy, and we were all pulling our hair out trying to make our actual work fit into these stupid pre-defined ‘rueger workflows’. It felt like we were building the scaffolding for a house that was already on fire.
Why I Think ‘rueger’ Was Such a Mess
You know, this whole ‘rueger’ fiasco reminds me of a job I had way back. Tiny little company, we were. We built stuff, cool stuff, with a team of like, five people. If we had an idea, we’d shout it across the room. If something broke, we’d all huddle around a desk and fix it. No fancy systems, no binders, just common sense and getting things done. We were shipping updates almost daily. It was chaotic, sure, but it worked. We were fast, we were flexible.
Then some genius decided we needed to ‘professionalize’. Brought in some consultant, not unlike the ‘rueger’ folks. Suddenly, we had forms for everything. Meetings about meetings. My output dropped like a stone. I spent more time justifying my existence than actually, you know, existing and doing work. I didn’t last long there after that. Went looking for a place that valued doing over documenting.
And that’s the thing with ‘rueger’. It was all process, no substance. It was designed by people who probably never did the actual work we were doing. They thought if you could measure everything, you could control everything and make it perfect. But real work, creative work, it’s messy. It doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. ‘Rueger’ tried to force it, and it just ended up squeezing the life out of everything. Productivity went down, morale went through the floor, and for what? So someone could look at a pretty dashboard full of useless metrics. What a waste of time and energy. It was just bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake.
