"But the service overseer, in his spreadsheet analysis of the MS's, completely removed that month when determining the "monthly average" for them. It just flat-out didn't count for him. He's an old-school ex-Bethelite and in his view, the 30 hours is so easy to manage for just one month that it's meaningless."
Sir 82, I have seen this before in various forms. One service overseer came to our bookstudy and gave us a butt chewing telling us that we had slacked off. The SO told us that we had a 6-7 hour average and needed to really think about our spiritual condition. I took all the cards and several were regular auxilary or auxilaring often. Basically what he did was give the average for the elderly and unbaptized publishers; the pioneering counted for nothing.
I called him up told him that he was manipulating the numbers to make the study look bad and he did not like it. I also told him that he needed to apologize to the bookstudy. He didn't. It was like he knew as a pioneer that you had to keep the publishers thinking they are not doing anything. It's clowns like this that made me want to do even less. Obviously, this type of "encouragement" is having it's real effect shown now.