From the crookde tmibres fo hunamtiy nohtnig staightr saw reve dame

I took my work laptop in to be fixed at my employer’s IT department this morning and while I was waiting I spotted this poster very prominently displayed on the office wall.

I asked the guy who was fixing my computer what he thought of it and he made a face to the rendering of which my written skills are unequal, as this sentence clearly demonstrates.

I asked what he thought, for example, of item 7 on the list (“Team members call out one another’s deficiencies and unproductive behaviours”), against which a score of 3.29 (of something) out of 5.00 (of something) had been awarded in March 2012, as against a score of 2.86 (of something) out of 5.00 (of something) in October 2011, a fall of 0.43 (of something). He said nothing - but did so in a way that I also find hard to describe.

I said that this scoring method meant that there must be 500 levels (of whatever that something is) at which “Team members call[ing] out one another’s deficiencies and unproductive behaviours” could be measured, each of which something would have to mean something if the system of measurement being used were to mean anything. He smiled an inscrutable smile and said that this was the boss’s idea and they had had a half day's training on it.

I’m not the best at reading people’s emotions but I had a strong feeling that his answer in fact meant something like “the whole thing is a load of bollocks and we all know it is, and the best way we can live with it is not to give a damn, otherwise we will all go mad.”

So I stuck my neck out and asked if he or anyone else at the training had asked their boss what the hell it was supposed to mean.

He smiled - more intelligibly than his last effort, I thought - and said, “She isn’t here any more.”

Now I ask you: what says more about the human condition – that no one said anything to her then or that she isn’t here now? Is my glass half empty, or half full?