the corner office

Charing Cross Station has an automated floor cleaner. It's a white plastic waist-high cylindrical dustbin type vacuum cleaning contraption on wheels, with a painted-on face and a cutesy name: "Scrubsy".

Health and safety (and legal indemnity, one imagines) being paramount, Scrubsy has state of the art safety features: a flashing blue police light slapped on top and a loud beeper, a bit like the sound that lorries and rubbish trucks make when they're reversing. And with flashing light and strident beeping, Scrubsy sets forth regularly from its docking station, weaving around the station concourse like a sheepish drunk, backing off any time it gets too close to anyone.

Perhaps most people don't mind it. Some might even like it - I saw an old gent patting it on its "head" the other day as he walked past it - but for me, it's loud and it annoys me no end.

Now, I would hate to give the impression that I'm in favour of the destruction of National Rail property. Goodness no, never. All I will say is that if, if anyone were ever to lose their rag, say, and round-house kick poor Scrubsy, and then if, if someone had just so happened to film this egregious act and then if, if they shared it online, well then I would watch that clip over and over and over and over again.

Scrubsy is, I think, an example of a sort of dysfunction which happens in large organisations. A kind of externality, a bit like the horror of your average enterprise software installation: you have one group of people doing something, possibly even genuinely believing that their efforts are valuable and necessary and important, while the costs are borne by a different group of people, entirely.

And it always gets me that the people doing the imposing will claim their accomplishment as a great success, even if everyone else hates it. I know it's cynical, and unfair, and I'm not really anti-automation per se, but indulge me. I can well imagine the annual appraisal of at least one person responsible for Scrubsy: stakeholder value, synergies leveraged, KPIs, annual spend, the lot. But what nobody involved will ever write in their appraisal: I put some poor soul out of a minimum wage job and I massively increased noise pollution in one of the busiest thoroughfares in London.