Dear CEO,
What’s that sound, that irritating little sound, coming from every direction? It’s — wait, get back here. For God’s sake stop crawling around the room like that. It’s the sound of productivity, being nibbled away! So stuff up the bungholes and haul out the cyanide: it’s time for our annual survey of labor lost. “Death by a thousand cuts” is this year’s theme.

Footnotes. Cost to economy: $7.6 billion.
It is a real pain to drag your eyes all the way to the bottom of the page for some dumb footnote(1). And then you’ve got to find your spot again. Major hassle and round-trip waste of time.
Solution: Eliminate footnotes. Nobody reads them anyway.

Paper cuts. C2E(2): $11.9 billion.
Forget the paper-free office. We’ll settle for the paper-cut-free office! We sliced 14,000 fingers in our lab, did the digits, and found that the average subject loses four hours and two pints a year just looking for bandages.
Solution: It’s not just a metaphor: Teflon!
Downside: Workplace full-body depilation parties can get out of hand without proper supervision.

Staring into space. C2E: $239.7 billion.
Hello? Earth to accounting. Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Solution: Technology to the rescue! Eyeball tracking scanners have plunged in price. Sophisticated algorithms can detect the characteristic up-left drift-and-lock that signals wasteful zone-out. Hitch it all up to some electrodes, and… Zap! Your drifting workers will thank you.
Downside: The eyeball drift-and-lock sometimes accompanies deep thought too. “Hey, do we pay you to think?”

Thinking about sex. C2E: $94.7 billion
If we consolidate the SEX! Houston office with SEX Markham we can SEX! SEX! uh uh the Houston office with SEX! um. What was the question?
Solution: Oh, oh, oh. Sometimes we are so clever. We pinned up naked photos to the left and slightly above our test group’s monitors. Every time they sneak a peek — ZAP!

Workplace full-body depilation parties. C2E: $ 86.3 billion.
Jesus. Somebody wasn’t thinking.
Solution: Our crack team of Depilation Facilitators can be there in nothing flat.

Backing up work. C2E: $917.3 billion.
Not to name names but some of our efficiency rivals have been running this “back up your work” scam for years now. What a waste if you ask us (and you did!).
Solution: Live a little! The money you save by eliminating back-ups way more than covers any losses you’ll incur in the remote event that something ‘disappears.’ Where would it ‘go,’ anyway? You deleted that e-mail 47 different ways and then torched so many server rooms that when they plotted the fires on a map Picasso’s “Guernica” covered the country — and they still brought out the e-mail in court! Why wouldn’t they be able to find an account database that’s only like a billion times bigger? What a scam.

E-mail Related Lost Productivity Guilt Syndrome. C2E: $114.3 billion.
You people can’t leave your people alone, can you. They’re just trying to do their frigging jobs. But do you let them? No! It’s all “do you really need to read” this and “did you really have to reply to” that. No wonder they’re paralyzed at their computers and the eyeball tracking systems are firing off like car alarms in Caracas.
Solution: Ease off the chapped bastards. Then let our crack team of Guilt Syndrome Counselors into your office.

Eyeball movement tracking system maintenance. C2E: $239.8 billion.
File these lemons (carefully!) in the bulging not-ready-for-prime-time technology folder. They cost more to keep running than the problem they’re supposed to fix! Not while you’re hooked up though, unless you want to join the growing heap of very unproductive electrocution victims of this woeful IT foul-up.
Solution: Every damn year we do this survey the IT help desk makes an appearance (no wonder you can never find them). We say: join the burgeoning not-ready-for-downtime movement and deep six the productivity-sucking vampires, every last one of them.

Interviewing unsuitable candidates. C2E: $42.4 billion.
“Well, I haven’t actually installed the kind of eyeball tracking worker zapping system you’re talking about, but we had something similar in the regime I worked for before, cough cough, you liberated us, ahem.” What’s this guy doing here? This is an IT hiring! The Compliance Officer interview is next week.
Solution: What is the bloody point of interviewing someone if they’re unsuitable? Unless… Bingo! Unless you’re an Interviewer! HR’s been running this racket long enough. Sack the lot of them and bring in one of those monkeys that always win the stock-picking challenge. (By the way, we’re holding our annual scratch-and-dent monkey sale! Trust us, a blind monkey with bandaged fingers can still throw a dart just fine.)
Downside: Banana peels.

Useless animal testing procedures. C2E: $1.473 billion.
Okay, this might not apply to you. But we got royally screwed and we’re part of the economy too.
Solution: Next time we’ll just google something like “monkeys retinas lasers damage sliced fingers” and make the rest up.

Reading lost productivity reports. C2E: incalculable.
You — yes, you, the one reading this. You’re not actually reading this are you? At your rate of compensation you’re costing the economy half a million a bullet!
Solution: Look, let’s just forget it. Pack it in. Call the whole thing off. For the seventh consecutive year you CEO’s and your precious companies have lost more productivity than the entire country produced in the first place. We can’t afford to subsidize this charade anymore.

So let’s all go home and stare into space and think about sex for a couple of years, okay? You can keep the monkey.

(1) See?
(2) “Cost to economy.” But if you had to read this footnote you’re a bit of a burden yourself, aren’t you pal.

David Hull dreams of ghostwriting the juvenilia of late-blooming celebrity authors. His novella The Man Who Remembered the Moon is available from Dumagrad.