Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Yesterday afternoon I saw the coolest thing! My boss SPECTACULARLY quit his job! We should all show such clarity of purpose. Truly, I now consider him my mentor.
He was in the conference room on the left of the People-Aquarium where I spend 40+ hours a week in a meeting with a number of people on the non-technical end of the company.
There was a loud "pop" sound from that direction, followed by urgent knocking on our badge-access-only control center. When the door was opened, he flew in and started quickly and efficiently throwing his belongings into his bag. The loud "pop" from earlier was the sound of
him flinging his access badge forcefully across the meeting room and into the outside wall of the control center. Wow. That is style.
Less than 20 seconds after his entrance, our CEO followed him in,
having been IN the meeting where the badge was thrown.
What followed was cursing and then a request for a personal meeting
and, a few minutes later, my manager returned. He sat down and started working again, but I could tell things were not resolved to his satisfaction.
I watched over the next few hours as people (sales people, some of whom had actually witnessed this whole thing) walked over to his desk and started asking for stuff. I'm sure it was stuff like "Can we get the results of the back ups from last week?" or "What is the escalation process for customer XYZ?" but all I kept hearing was "Hey! Please stab me in the eye!"
What were they thinking?
When I see someone snap at work (and I've seen it several times) I try to stay out of the way for at least 72 hours, which puts me outside the window for 90% of workplace shootings that are triggered by meetings with idiotic sales people. To date, I have never been shot.
I watched over my laptop screen eagerly for the carnage to happen, but my boss is apparently a class act. He physically harmed no one, just spent the rest of the afternoon quietly drinking out of his flask.
I've decided that "Hey! Please stab me in the eye!" should be the
noise the doors make when people badge through them. It kind of
establishes the tone, you know?
In advance of a formal policy, I've made that my own personal badge noise.
Yesterday was a day all about fulfilling the commitments set by
others. I rushed downtown to do a security assessment (for free) to
help close a deal, while the work orders continued to pile up in my
inbox.
When I got back to the office (company name omitted to comply with
non-disclosure agreement) had broken something. They had broken it
badly.
I spent the next four hours working on it before finally getting
someone to understand that I had absolutely no idea what the end
result was supposed to be. To communicate this I finally took this
route:
"This service was configured correctly, or at least functionally, when
it was turned over. It looks like changes were made while I was out of
town. It now looks like they are looking for someone to blame. If I'm
not allowed to work on their stuff, I will not be taking the fall for
this."
I was then pretty much able to leave for the day, which was good. I'm
all about leaving for the day.
This morning I have already been visited by sales persons. I'm
preparing my badge for a good solid throw, but I'm trying to decide
who to "accidentally" hit with it. Style is good, random workplace
violence that can be written off as an accident is awesome.

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