Closing Time

Goddamn I hate when the phone ring. It was Meathead, my new manager after his recent promotion and the latest management shuffle. Having himself spent so much time kill floor he's much more tolerable and understanding of our problems than any of my previous headaches.

"Hey, Dog. I need to see you in my office." Fuck. What did I do now?
"Gimme five to write up this ticket solution and I'll be there."

"'Sup, Meathead?"
"It's coming up on the end of the fiscal quarter. We have to close tickets."
"I'm still trying to answer all the ones I've got! By the way, what can you tell me about a corrupt RAID-5 superblock when an fsk returns 'bad inode number 0 to ginode'?"
"Oh, hey... fuck, man! Ask TT if he can help you with that. I have an emergency conf call in 15 minutes with the other $MyLevelManagers and our boss. Stop what you're doing and close all the tickets you have which are customer-close-initiate or have expired response dates."
"Sorry. Can't do it.
"You have to!"
"Nope. I'd like to help you out but I can't."
"Look, you have to close these tickets!"
"I don't have time. There's no way I can do it and follow the brand-new ISO9K process. To complete the mindless masturbatory exercise in uselessness and fill in all that shit takes more than an hour per for any open ticket."

They sprung this one on us a couple weeks ago in a useless meeting (redundant, I know), in which a PowerPoint presentation was sadistically read at us and repeated. Lies were told about how this has been mandated for ISO9K compliance -- ISO9K makes no such requirements, only that a process exists and is fully carried out. Among the required entries in each ticket are a rephrasing of the question, a research item even if the question is "Does your software run on an Atari 800?", an initial suggestion, an internal entry justifying that suggestion, and so on.

I've been having some fun with justifying my fucking suggestions, among them:

• Space færies from the planet Scripplick came to me in a daydream, interrupting my Tower Defense game.
  
• Thanks to a very large meal the previous evening, the suggestion was one of many items which exited my gastro-intestinal system minutes prior to responding to the ticket.
  
• Because I said so
  
• I first tried to extract an answer by pulling every nth word from MacBeth using the Fibonacci series. This failed so I tried again with the original Pulp Fiction script. While this latter result was infinitely more amusing it still left much to be desired so I went over to ITToolbox and yanked the answer written by one of our former colleagues.

"Fuck the process, Dog!"

Huh?

"We have to close the fucking tickets! Fuck the process. Close your tickets!"
"Can I have that in writing please?"
"I just told you to do it."
"Yeah, and in a few months when I'm reviewed I don't want this showing up. As soon as you send me the fucking mail I'll close 'em. You'll be amazed."
"I don't have time," he answered.
"You take one minute to mail me that ISO9K requirements are suspended for end-of-quarter closing tickets and I'll move from the top of your list of expired open issues to the bottom."

Two minutes later he was on the phone again. He'd fired off the mail but wasn't about to wait for our shitty server to take its sweet time in delivering. He promised I could look in his Sent Mail folder. I set to work.

Twelve minutes later I'd closed out 32 mooks and there are another dozen or so I can knock out this week.

I think I'm finally getting a little better at this game.

Cars & Trucks

Part 1 in an irregular series about bad management

Imagine what things would be like if a major truck manufacturer -- let’s call it Peterworth – were to function like $MegaCorp. If Peterworth wanted to get into the automobile manufacturing business, it might make sense for them to purchase Maserati. It's a high profile manufacturer, a market leader in its division, and Peterworth would stand to gain valuable technology as well as aerodynamics and design engineers. However, it would be absurd for Peterworth to then insist that Maserati use the Cummins ISX engine for production vehicles.

But perhaps Peterworth’s managers might respond that the 11-liter Cummins truck engine offers 530 horsepower while Maserati’s top engine only puts out 405hp. If management’s only goal was brake horsepower and they ignored everything from design to weight to fuel usage we would at least understand the reasoning behind such a bad decision.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Peterworth likes consistency throughout their design and production. One constant design element is cab-over: to access the engine the entire cab rotates up and forward hydraulically. Maserati engineers would protest that the engine is in the middle and it’s impossible to lift the entire body to expose the engine since the car incorporates unibody design for safety and stability.

Peterworth management ignores the explanations and demands a new, cab-over design, telling the Maserati engineers to figure out how to do cab-over to expose the engine which wouldn’t fit under a normal hood anyway, and that if safety is an issue then they better get back to work on the design already. After all, they’re part of Peterworth now.

The engineers figure out how to mount the massive engine in the middle behind the driver, cut the body and strengthen it using steel beams, incorporate a cab-back design so that the back half of the body can lift and rotate, and they do their best to make the thing aerodynamic.

The drawings still look workable even if the result looks nothing like previous Maseratis. But then a Peterworth engineer notices that there’s no way to stack the front of one car onto the back of another. Maserati engineers ask why the hell you would need to do that to which the Peterworth engineer responds, "So we can deliver the things." Trucks are normally delivered by chaining a few cabs onto the fifth wheel of the truck in front of them, sending them out to dealers in this configuration three to five at a time.

Of course the Maserati engineers are floored and try to explain that cars are delivered using car carriers which can hold six to eight at once. Peterworth replies that the have no car carriers and their market research shows that customers like the current delivery method. Some smart-assed dog-monkey in Maserati asks Peterworth management if customers had been asked about car delivery being handled the same way as trucks and is quickly muzzled.

So the engineers go back and make further design changes to reinforce the rear of the Maserati with more steel so that if can bear the additional weight. They then realize they have to increase the tire size and change the rear suspension. Maserati engineers also have to modify the front design to add weight and a linkage so that this stacked delivery method could function.

The car is now uglier than a 1972 Volvo, heavier than a Hum-Vee, has the aerodynamics of a garden shed, the handling of a canoe, and costs more than a Ferrari Enzo. But Peterworth management is thrilled because the car meets all their metrics: it has the highest horsepower available in a stock car, uses many of the same parts already used in production in other divisions, and it’s capable of being delivered using the Standard Delivery Methodology.

Despite poor reviews, complaints, dropping sales, drastically reduced customer satisfaction and constant demands that Maserati cars at least perform and handle like they used to, management sees raving success thanks to the chosen metrics being fulfilled.

Management has another idea: worker equality. The workload is widely distributed at Peterworth and there's no reason that the Maserati people should be treated differently. Peterworth's way of thinking doesn't allow them to differentiate between the ¤100/hr engineers, ¤80/hr monkeys, ¤30/hr secretaries and ¤8.37/hr outsourced monkeys. They all know Maserati, they can and will all do each others' jobs.

It doesn't matter that most secretaries have never drawn a single mechanical sketch in their lives or that the engineers don't know how to hand-bore an engine. Work is to be distributed fairly, meaning each person will complete X number of "tasks" each day. Anyone working for the Maserati subdivision ought to know how to work on Maserati issues.

The workers themselves are smart enough to know their limits so while some engineer is trying to figure out how the hell some glub-awful spreadsheet was put together, the secretary who should be doing it is asking him about metal alloy shear strenght since she's been tasked with a piston redesign. They're not allowed to trade tasks; management knows best. But they end up wasting even more time trying to figure out how to do their assigned tasks and helping others to do the tasks they themselves could do best.

But management is also always on the look-out for ways to improve a product. They approach the engineers and tell them that there’s only one small problem with the car: it’s not pulling enough weight. Literally. Next year’s design needs to raise the rear end and incorporate a fifth wheel so that the car can haul at least a standard 20´ trailer. The following year’s model can be upgraded to allow for hauling a full 40-footer.

This is exactly how management at $MegaCorp think and act. If you thought you knew who $MegaCorp was before, you can now be certain whether you’re right or wrong.

I Got Your Back

I am the worldwide expert in $Subject. I have been the worldwide expert in it for years. Cow-orkers all come to me for assistance. Programmers, when they have to make a new fix for $Subject, come to me. PM asks me. Our customers' upper fucking management gets sent to talk to me.

Hey, REC,
Can you tell me about the impact of FOO and BAR when dealing with $Subject?
-Gary

Sure, it'll only take me an hour to do some research and write up the two pages. But why do you give a shit, Gary? You don't deal with $Subject. You're a fucking line manager.

REC,
I need that answer pronto!
-Gary

I sent it to you yesterday, Gary. Our mail system is perm-b0rked. Here ya go again.

Hey REC,
Thanks a lot. This sorts out the questions. I think I'm going to make you my back-up on $Subject.
-Gary

You'll what? A blind, lobotomised, quadriplegic Robin is going to make Batman his back-up? Yeah, right, whatever. Hell, Clinton offered Obama the VP slot after she lost a few more states.

But... Hold on a sec... what are all those lines and names in this mail?

Oh, I see.

Isn't that interesting?

Gary forwarded me the wrong mail. Last week it would've been the right mail; it's wrong now. It shows the reason he needed my explanation of $Subject: every $MegaCorp division had to provide this information concerning their apps and products. To $MegaCorp's Super-Senior VP. And instead of telling SSVP to talk to me, Gary's taking the credit.

$Subject may change as soon as April. Gary will pay dearly.

Cow-orkers I

She Who Can't Be Ignored

One of our band of monkeys is an Eastern European. She joined the company a few months before me. She's not entirely unattractive though I understand from others who went on a rafting outing that there's a lot of cottage cheese for those lucky souls who get the swimsuit view of a hard-to-miss posterior.

I have a question! You have to help me!

This is Ripa's catchphrase. It's preceded by the victim's name and is called out in shrill tones. She's been here six years now. One would think she could solve just one ticket all on her own. One would be wrong, even if dealing with exact same problem she'd worked on a week earlier.

I have a question!

I shudder and try to ignore her.

REC! You have to help me!

I quickly minimise Age of Empires as I see her making her way over.

The COOOstomer is doing... something he shouldn't be. Natch. And not only was he dumb enough to do that, the sad bastard ended up with Ripa handling his ticket. Which means that one of us will actually do the work or -- more likely -- will tell her the same damed thing we've told her a hundred times. There's a 50-50 chance that she'll protest and argue that whatever she's been told was wrong and she'll then terrorise a different colleague, send a request to the customer for unnecessary information and testing, then finally come to her own conclusion which, oddly enough, matches what we'd already told her. However, she'll insist that we told her something different and will steadfastly refuse to put us on ticket as having assisted, yet another metric by which we are judged.

No one says anything about this. She's protected. A high manager in our department is also from the same former Soviet-bloc country. I found this out in a Root Cause-17 manner:

I'm the only monkey in all of EMEA who works with Eastern Asian languages (Chinese/Japanese/Korean, or as they're known, "CJK"). This ability, along with specialised knowledge in OS, database raw data and font handling, gives me quite a few easy tickets in addition to a lot of stinkers because no one wants to even look at a Japanese version of Windows despite the damned icons all being the same, as are the Control Panel and Admin program names. Although she was once an MCSE (I have no idea...), she is incapable of pressing the pretty buttons or hitting WinKey+R and calling up the Services control panel.

So I was astonished when I went back to the queue to take a fairly simple problem from $BigChineseCorp that I could resolve in about 5 minutes with a quick test and found it had disappeared. Had one of our Singaporean colleagues taken it? Maybe someone in India? An insomniac in our California office perhaps?

I ran a quick search and found the ticket. In the owner field was "RIPA". I turned to my mate and said, "She took a ticket she can't even work on! It requires knowledge in so many areas in which she's never worked that it's pointless, and I'll be damned if she's going to pad her quarterly numbers by cutting and pasting my E-Mail responses."

As I said this, LookOut flagged me that there was a new message in my Inbox. Oh joy. My friend smiled and said, "You wanna bet?"

That was a foolish €10.

Vera, a high-level manager, is from the same country as Ripa. The two of them are clearly friends and though it had dawned on me that Vera was the reason for Ripa's continued employment, I equally expected that following the proper chain of command (and doing so both respectfully and discreetly) would have results.

Results I got, but not the ones I'd expected.

Rather than whinge to my direct, lower-level manager yet again about Ripa, I went to Vera's office and closed the door. Looking back, it wasn't one of my brightest ideas but at the time... well, y'all without sin can cast the first stone.

"Vera? Can I talk to you for a minute?"
"Sure. Come on in."
"It's about Ripa."

Only in the aftermath do I remember Ver's eyes narrowing. I calmly explained that Ripa had once again taken a ticket she couldn't possibly work on, much less answer. The ticket required being able to read and enter Chinese characters. It required working knowledge of two Unicode systems. It required technical knowledge of fonts. It required knowledge in almost every aspect of computing in which Ripa was lacking.

Apparently what the ticket really required was me teaching Ripa how to speak Chinese and Japanese along with everything I've learned about code handling over the past 20-some years.

Vera exploded.

I was accused of damned near everything other than sexual harassment: refusal to assist colleagues, inability to work in a professional manner, having a personal vendetta against Ripa, lack of motivation, inconsideration -- whatever she could possibly come up with as she ranted on.

During her tirade she said how she was sick of all these accusations against Ripa. As I defended myself against the accusation of having some vendetta I said that the fact that there were so many complaints from others backed up my own complaint.

What happened next made her initial explosion look like a firecracker. I finally realised I needed to STFU, put my tail between my legs and agree with whatever was being said. I was on official verbal reprimand. Any further "unprofessional behaviour" would result in a written reprimand. I was directed to assist my colleague in any and every way necessary and if teaching a bricklayer to do neurosurgery in 15 minutes was what it took, so be it.

I left Vera's office and went back to my cubicle, handing Jimmy the tenner. I hit control-R in LokOut and started writing the answer which Ripa cut and pasted into her response to the COOOstomer.

Vera played "telephone", sending me customer responses and sending my replies back. It took a week and a half to finish the ticket instead of an hour or two. Ripa again refused to put my name in the "Assisted By" field.

The my-head-shaped dent in front of my keyboard continues to grow.