What it looks like
A vulgar expression.
And, to be precise, one that is rather difficult to explain literally.
What it really means
To do something without method, without criteria, and without much concern for how it will turn out.
It does not simply mean doing it badly.
To do something a cazzo di cane, you need something more: you must know, at least vaguely, that a correct way exists.
And decide to proceed differently.
The scene
The project was clear.
There was a manager, a procedure, a drawing, three weeks and even a shared folder called FINAL VERSION.
Then something happened.
Delivery is tomorrow.
The manager is not answering.
Marco might have the updated drawing.
The folder contains eleven files, four of them called FINAL_LATEST.
Someone asks:
— What do we do?
Silence.
Then comes the answer that has saved more Italian deadlines than any management system:
— Facciamolo a cazzo di cane.
And suddenly the project starts moving again.
Boris didn’t invent it. It did something worse.
The expression already existed.
Then came Boris.
And René Ferretti turned it from an expression into a production method.
From then on, a cazzo di cane no longer described only something badly made.
It described an entire ecosystem where everyone knows how things should be done, everyone knows they will not be done that way and, above all, nobody seems particularly surprised.
Careful
If you assemble a bookcase and get one screw wrong, you assembled it badly.
If you throw away the instructions, start from the middle shelf, discover a screw is missing, steal one from a kitchen chair and end up with a leaning bookcase because “it holds anyway”...
you built it a cazzo di cane.
The difference is subtle.
But fundamental.
How to read it
There is one last detail.
Something done a cazzo di cane can be ugly, approximate and incomprehensible.
But it can work.
And that is exactly where the problem begins.
Because if it works, next time someone will say:
— Let’s do it like last time.
And that is how an emergency becomes company procedure.
