The Reasonable Budget Cut Back to Absurdity

It's budget time and we are back in bizarro Never Never Land, where Captain Hook's cruelty teams up with Peter Pan's skewed logic, to make Wendy and us Boys prisoners on our little Island of Hungry Crocodiles.

Whew!, what a tortured metaphor! Fairly accurate, though.

In a nutshell:

'Developed for the department a budget for next year consisting of Analysis of this year's workload-per-person, Resources demanded by the company's needs for next year as defined by the Strategic Plan, and the resulting Cost estimate.

Speaking of "strategy" and "planning": we not only have a Strategic Plan - we have a Super Plan!

Well, planning and strategy are good things in a general sense - road maps, fiscal guidelines, etc. - and so a proposal was developed. Due to a certain contradiction between the Super Plan's goals and planned budget constraints for the next fiscal year, our proposal offered logical options: If This is wanted, then That must happen - If resource X is reduced, then goal Y will have to be postponed - and so forth. And so on. Tedious but honest choices. We can't eat all the candy we want without either brushing our teeth a lot or getting a lot of cavities. 'Can't have it both ways, Peter Pan.

Oh, but we can, Wendy, we can!

So it is that, while the planning requires us to "plow with the horses we have" - with a 50% reduction in overtime - it also requires that we fulfill every need, wish and logistic demand called for by the plan: a Super Man Strategic Plan, if you will.

Thus, per calculations and experience, next year every person will be working 168% of their legal time - without 33% of the material resources required - to produce 28% more next year than this year.

And, hot damn, this budget balances!

Let's go back to the tortured metaphor and sing:

"A Wish Is A Dream Your Heart Makes - Per the Super Plan."