Your tax dollars at work

You know, you trust people to actually do their jobs right, and even when you give them every benefit of the doubt, they still fuck it up.

We're in the middle of changing from one search engine to another at work. One of the things we're adding to the mix is what's called a "clustering engine," something that can collect up search results from several different sources and present them in a single list that looks consistent, saving users from having to search over here, then over there, then in this other place.

Well, somehow the people who bought the clustering software managed to buy us a crippled-ass license that permits us to cluster... one source.

One.

This is roughly akin to buying a television that can only get one channel.

It also, for those of you who haven't figured this one out, completely invalidates the reason for buying the software at all, since I have seven or eight sources in my system and I needed to be able to present search results from all across the site in one page.

I can't do that now.

Some of the people involved in this decision make over $100,000 a year.

Think about that.

I bet you could fuck up my job for a lot less money. And you'd probably be more fun to work with while you're doing it, too.

You have career options you never even knew about.