Hah!
scratch magnet
Definitely stealing that one...
"Good news!" the Boss blurts, rocketing into Mission Control in a frenzy, “I’m going to be heading a new working party to improve website usability." "You poor bastard!" I gasp, "I didn't even see it coming!” "See what coming?" the PFY says, lugging a box of recently replaced hard drives out of the server room. "The boss …
“No, because 'technology's changed so much in the time you’ve been away' – regardless of how short a time it was. Your role's disestablished and there's a new role, like ‘Technical Functional Support Co-ordinator’ or some crap like that, which they've shoehorned your replacement into, avoiding any legal entanglements.”
Well now, that brought back a few bad memories from the millennium, when a six week secondment turned into "you aren't suitable for the role any more".
Creative Dismissal is far too easy to get around these days.
This reminds me of a place I used to work where various people would be assigned to 'special projects', usually about 6 to 12 months before a 'mutually beneficial' agreement to 'pursue other interests' was 'negotiated'. And yes, most of those 'air-quotes' were usually enunciated!
Reminiscent too of a well known petroleum company (can't say who, but does the phrase 'Flora margarine logo' ring a bell?).
in 1999, the establishment of a Y2K Task Force was seen as a good way to second your dead wood to the Force and then dedicate your time to making sure they didn't have a post millenial job to come back to.
Friend of mine was hired to run a tech-writing dept at a well-known company, at a very high salary. First task they gave her was to get rid of a woman in the department they didn't like. Once that was done, my friend's position suddenly became obsolete and she was out the door. Worked out for me, as later on I was approached to run a department at another company, where my first task would be to get rid of an old guy past his expiration date. At least I got an up-front warning. I told them to grow a pair and walked out of the interview.
This is almost too real world to be funny.
It put me in mind of a project at my former place of employment that started in 2009 or 2010 to which my successor recently was reassigned as part of an agency plan to produce well-rounded middle managers. The project has to do with consolidating and rationalizing about 500+ Access- or Excel-based "micro-apps", developed by accountants, that provide function omitted from the large accounting systems they support. The investigation and analysis continues still, hampered by a requirement to maintain their functionality in the face of changes to laws, regulations, and the systems they support, and as well the frequent discovery of additional ones. From what he told me a few weeks ago they are, by now, at the second or third level information-gathering-survey stage.