EPISODE 15: The Boss has popped into Mission Control to remind us to send him the numbers he needs for his monthly management report.   

Once's he's gone the PFY sighs, makes up a set of numbers, appends believable exponents, adds some fancy sounding units to the end and then sends them to through a script file to convert them into something the Boss can use.

None of it matters, as no one cares about the numbers anyway. At Management level there's likely to be more interest in the undigested-meat portion of the Boss' stool sample than our uptime stats, firewall throughput, or the Company's online storage totals... 

Still, the PFY will fabricate the data, extrude it through a Perl script to create a graphic panel complete with a pie chart or two, and maybe a Venn diagram, then send it to the Boss. The Boss then pastes it into the top right corner of his report document, which gets sent on to the higher-ups, month after month, year after year.

The real shame is that none of the higher ups has ever taken the time to flip through the Boss' reports chronologically - and thereby view the PACMAN-like animation the PFY's data has been so diligently creating all this time.

You've got to make your own fun in this job.

And no one cares if the numbers are wildly inaccurate. Back in the old days, someone might wonder how we'd achieved 117 percent uptime, or whether 17.6267 terafleptules was a real thing or not, but at this point no one will ask any questions so long as the pie chart isn't a single color.

As stated, we stopped producing real data years ago, and, on the rare occasion we're questioned about the validity of the data, we have an excuse close at hand.  

For a good part of the '90s we leaned heavily on blaming "The internet" for faulty data, though from '97 till around 2001, "Y2K" was solid gold.

In recent times - i.e. the data-faking era - "Blockchain implementation" was surprisingly short-lived as an excuse - but we got a good four years out of "It's a COVID thing," before flipping between quantum computing and privacy restrictions for a bit.

If pressed, we'll occasionally just shake our heads and quietly murmur "Viruses", "Hackers" or "Zero day attacks", as that covers a multitude of sins, and both the PFY and myself can ramble aimlessly for hours about viruses we have known, and what they might have done to our systems. The only thing we'd be missing in a scenarios like that would the onions in our belts, but no one would notice that while they were thinking up a good excuse to leave the room...

"AI" has at least another two years in it - unless of course AI becomes sentient during that time and kills us all... Still, AI might need someone to produce fake stats about how well they're doing...

...

The Boss is back surprisingly fast with a query.

"I was just looking at the graph and I think there might be a data error." He says, pointing to the graphic. "See there, where is says Terafloptules."

"Uh-huh." the PFY says.

"Is that a spelling mistake? Only I can't find the work Terafloptules on Google. And last month it was in Terafloctules, not Terafloptules, but I can't find Terafloctules either."

"Well, you wouldn't would you. I mean Google looks up data after the fact."

"I'm not sure I follow."

"Well, say you created a word. Idiomanagement, say. Will Google know about it?"

"Yes?"

"No, it won't. It won't notice it until it becomes a commonplace word or phrase. In the interim period, before it gets accepted and has a wider use, Google will simply skip over it, assuming it's a spelling mistake of some similar word."

"So... we're... using a word that doesn't exist?" the Boss asks.

"No, we're using a word that doesn't exist in common usage. It's like DVD Player in 1996. If someone saw that written down then, they might have thought it was DUD player and thought you were referring to Aly Dia. Now though, the word's in common usage."

"So is there a word we could use that people would be more familiar with?"

"I guess we could use Gigafloptules, but then I'd have to mention on the legend that the units are in thousands."

"What is a gigafloptule?"
"I'm glad you asked!" the PFY blurts happily. "To get to the bottom of that you really need to know a little bit about the parsec measurement of the speeds of data - but don't worry, it's not nearly as complicated as it sounds! You see, when Rutherford split the neutron with a nitrogen atom back in the 1850s, he noticed that a small amount of energy, a floptule, was ejected from the uranium positron...

I leave the PFY rambling while I pop up to the cafeteria to see if they have any onions. Yellow ones, because of the war...