WASHINGTON - In its annual December awards issue, Obsessive-Compulsive Magazine has given the American nuclear-power industry its highest honor: the “Best Place to Work” Award.
“Published exactly on December 1 every year, the Awards issue is the high point of the obsessive-compulsive community’s exacting schedule,” editor Ronald Finkelstein announced to the more than 3,000 nitpickers, nimrods, and certified public accountants gathered in the immaculately-cleaned ballroom of the East Tallahassee Marriott. “It is with the greatest pleasure that I may present our most prestigious award - Best Place to Work - to these very well-organized companies,” he concluded, wiping first the left side of his brow, then the right side, and repeating three times.
Receiving the award on behalf of the nuclear industry was Marvin Fertel, head of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade association. Fertel was next to step to the podium, delayed slightly as Finkelstein retraced his steps after missing the sixth left gray floor tile.
“The nuclear industry has always held safety to be its top priority,” Fertel read from a notecard. “Our commitment to safety is proven by the thousands of pieces of paper filed to that effect by every facility, every year.”
“Unlike commercial aviation,” he intoned, “there is no margin for any errors whatsoever in the nuclear field.” After receiving a standing ovation, he continued.
“You can be assured: in the nuclear industry, there is a written procedure for everything,” Fertel said. “We have taken the Homer Simpson stereotype personally, and believe me, we don’t like it one bit. The quest to prove that we aren’t Homer Simpson types, by stamping out every faint ember of individual initiative, has no finish line. We will never stop in our quest to prove that we are the most bureaucratic industry, the least flexible industry, and the industry least able to improvise and respond to rapid-changing conditions, in the world!”
“In fact,” Fertel continued after another standing ovation, “I am proud to announce that this year we have finally reached a long-standing goal: in the year 2009, we issued more written procedures than the space program. It is, after all, only fitting. If the floor at a nuclear power plant is swept with the wrong brush, or God forbid, if that brush is not properly checked out of the plant tool stand with Form 108-6 and an attached signed determination of need from the government’s resident safety inspector, everyone in a ten-mile radius of the plant will be immediately vaporized. Not so in the space program. Commercial aviation is even worse, with a total lack of an integrated approval chain for every decision made by every employee. They even use computer modeling of their machines in place of years of tests.”
Clearly proud of his industry’s accomplishment, Fertel concluded his remarks.
“You can be assured: there is no task we can’t make slower or more rigid. From having a regulatory agency that takes so long to process permits that companies go bankrupt while waiting for them, to issuing emergency evacuation plans, complete with air-raid sirens, in response to events which are physically impossible, to using the wrong analytical tool because a 50-year-old government order says so, we have dysfunctional organizations unmatched anywhere in the world. Mark my words: we will stop any effort to employ systems analysis in its tracks. We will never use computers properly. We will never adopt any methods from commercial aviation. Remember: it’s nuclear - and we’re all going to die.”
Fertel turned away from the podium, and upon accidentally dropping his notecards to the floor, curled up into a ball and sobbed inconsolably.
This page was written by Stewart Peterson on December 5, 2009
