A depressing day at work.....

....started with a meeting where our company's ISO registrar had a representative telling us that the ne plus ultra of quality control was effective flow charts for a company's processes, and spent at least 15 minutes illustrating the concept of a flow chart.  Apparently many companies these days are hiring lots of people who have no idea that such a thing exists, and they're putting them on their ISO self-audit teams.  What could possibly go wrong?

More depressing was a meeting this afternoon regarding bribes from vendors, and in the name of cultural diversity, our HR manager never really got around to saying that if you accept more than a modest meal and a mug with the vendor's name on it, you're crossing a moral and ethical line that leaves it open to question whether you've chosen a supplier for business reasons, or for other reasons.  So apparently business ethics rules are being written in Jell-O these days.

(and yes, I know that in many companies, the sales team gets to live like kings--and often perverse ones--on the company dime, but there at least used to be a pretense that the engineers and managers in the factory had a higher code to honor)