I have a variant on the telephone answering situation.
A group of airline information clerks became increasingly distressed at
the nature of their interactions with customers contingent on the
management pressures to deal with minimum numbers of calls per hour. They
jointly organise (I know nothing of the technical methodology used) to
have their friends and relatives make a batch of very short calls at the
beginning of each shift, thus meeting their targets but enabling them to
give real customers more time. This has been going on for over six months
now, using a roster. Apparently the management still do not know what is
happening.
The person who showed me this system at work observed:
"We'll make this company the best for passenger service despite the best
efforts of managers. Our job satisfaction comes from making those stupid
bastards look even more stupid on a daily basis. As long as they go on
forgetting that all those spread sheet numbers are actually human
interactions they'll never catch on."
-- Phillip Capper Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business PO Box 2855 Wellington New Zealand