I wrote this several years ago; the idea came to me during a particularly uncomfortable meeting with a contractor. I keep changing my mind with regards to the title; sometimes it’s “Six Degrees of Freedom”. We meet to discuss resources, not people. Outsourcing, insourcing, TUPEs And how many FTEs We need, and how many are superfluous; We must trim our budgets and our manpower, our undertakings. But it’s ok; they’re only contractors, and road diggers at that. We roll with it. We don’t discuss names but Full-time equivalents Each FTE is a person, each team is two, And a gang is not as it sounds, A menacing mass of uncomprehending brawn, but Four living emissaries, who toil to shift the earth and uncover the cables Whose surge we all live and die by And as we talk, and look at charts And calculate how many people to discard, My eyes swaying, I notice the room divider. Teak veneer, with a trim at each end to hide the workings Of the sliding thing which can increase room volume productivity, Cleave its capacity, double its output. […]