Worst Boss Ever

Sorry for the delay in posting today; it's been another crazy day. I promised you the story of the worst boss I've ever had, so here it is. I'll warn you that it's a little long, and not so much funny as sad. There's no happy ending, except for the fact that I don't work for the ass-hat any more. Unfortunately, people don't always get what they deserve. Sometimes you just have to be content with the knowledge that stupidity is its own punishment.

In September of 2002, I took a job as the webmaster for the government of a nearby city.

My boss, the head of the city’s IT department, was a pony-tailed, marginally competent sad-sack, the kind of guy who spent his life trying to live up to his memories of Woodstock, even though he was only in 3^rd grade at the time. Stoner, as I’ll call him, was the worst boss I’ve ever had.

The day I started, I set out (with Stoner’s blessing) to radically revamp the city’s website. I met with various city managers and other key employees to gather requirements for the site, and then started building out the site.

Most of the project was what you would call a “back-end” redesign; that is, my job was primarily to fix the underlying structure of the site, not to make it pretty. But as you know, I’m also something of a graphics guy, and the site definitely needed a facelift as well. Like it or not, it’s a fundamental fact that people do judge books by their covers – you can tell people about all the wonderful improvements you’ve made to their web site, but they aren’t likely to be impressed unless it looks different. So as part of the project, I also redesigned the look of the site.

As I neared completion on the redesign, I did a demo for Stoner. He was thrilled with the back end changes, but seemed concerned about the look of the site. The problem, he said, was that any significant design changes would have to be approved by the city council.

Ok, I said. So do we have to present it to the council? I’ll be happy to go to the next meeting, if that’s what I need to do. He said he would try to get a demo on the agenda.

A few days later I asked if he had been able to get the web site demo on the agenda. Not this time, he said. Maybe next month. I was a little puzzled by his hesitancy to commit to taking any action, but I figured he just had a lot of other stuff going on.

Around this time I started to become aware of a lot of low grade grumbling about Stoner from the other employees in the IT department. I got the impression that he wasn’t well liked or respected by the people who reported to him. Still, I hadn’t experienced any serious problems myself, so I reserved judgment.

I moved on to another project, meanwhile continuing to occasionally ask Stoner about the status of the council meeting demo. Several weeks past, with city council approval of the design the only thing holding up the site redesign.

Then one day I was meeting with the city’s director of economic development when she asked what was going on with the web site redesign. When I told her about the holdup with the council, she laughed. “The city council has never had anything to do with approving changes to the web site,” she said.

I called another person who attended all the council meetings, and she confirmed what I had been told: it wasn’t the city council’s job to approve design changes, and Stoner knew it. What the hell? Why would he have made up something like that?

I went into Stoner’s office and told him what the economic development director had said. He hemmed and hawed for a bit, and then finally admitted the truth.

“I don’t like the design,” he said.

I was rendered nearly speechless. Stoner had stalled the entire web site project for six weeks with a ridiculous lie because he was afraid to tell me he didn’t like my design work. Now I know I look like a total badass on my blog template, but in real life I’m hardly intimidating. It’s pretty much inconceivable that someone (particularly my manager) would be afraid to give me some criticism on my design work. What did he think I would do? Burst into tears? Walk out? I can’t even imagine what was going through his head.

The thing is, design is inherently subjective. Anyone who has done design work has had the experience of creating what he or she thinks is a fantastic design only to have the client pooh-pooh it because they don’t like that shade of green. If Stoner had just said, “The back end is great, but the design blows,” I would have been disappointed for about 30 seconds and then scrapped the design and started over.

But not after six weeks of unnecessary delays. I don’t like being jerked around and lied to. You had your chance to give me your input on the design, I thought. Screw you. This is the design.

“Ok,” I said. “You don’t like the design. Obviously I do like it. But you and I aren’t the end users. We’re not the ones who really matter. Why don’t we send the design out to all the stakeholders in this project and ask for their feedback?”

He could hardly say no to that. So I wrote up a very diplomatic, even-handed email asking for feedback on the design. The response, as I expected, was overwhelmingly favorable. Everybody liked my design better than the old one. The new web site was launched, complete with my design.

Now a smart manager would have been happy with a win for his department, regardless of whose idea the design was. A particularly cagey manager might even have found a way to take credit for the design that he fought against. In retrospect, I don’t think either of those options even occurred to Stoner. He was too busy seething over the fact that I had made a fool out of him in front of his department. They already didn’t respect him, and now this.

Oblivious to Stoner’s fragile mental state, I continued to work on other projects. I had been meeting with the economic development director about the creation of an interactive web-based map that businesses could use to find office space within the city. This project had languished for over a year with little progress because no one involved had the technical expertise to make it work. Now, after three weeks on the project, I had built a rough prototype of the application. I sent an email to Stoner apprising him of the progress, and included a link to the development copy of the application so that he could see for himself.

Unknown to me, Stoner set up a demo of the application with his manager, a bigwig with a title like manager of city services or something. Now demo-ing a development copy of an application is iffy at best. Demo-ing a development copy of an application without telling the developer what you’re doing is like driving a random car off the blocks at your mechanic’s shop without telling the mechanic. You’d have to be borderline retarded.

Predictably, the application broke during this unplanned demo, and Stoner ended up looking like an idiot in front of his manager. After the meeting, Mr. I’m Afraid to Tell You I Don’t Like The Design stomped up to my desk in a rage, telling me that I had just made a fool of him. “Do you even bother to test your work?” He demanded.

This time I really was speechless. Was he serious? Was it possible for someone to be that stupid? I just sat there, dumbfounded. What did he expect me to do, test the code before I wrote it?

Soon after this outburst, he left for the day. Now as it happened, this was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, so the office would be closed until Monday. I stayed at my desk late that evening, fuming about Stoner’s absurd tirade. I should have let it go, but I knew that Stoner’s words would be echoing through my head for the next five days if I didn’t do something.

So I shot off an email to him, noting that I had specifically told him that what I had sent him was a link to a development copy of the application, and that it was unrealistic to expect an early prototype to work perfectly, especially considering that I was working on the code while he was doing the demo. I brought up the fact that under his leadership the project had gone exactly nowhere for over a year, whereas I had made significant progress in only three weeks. I closed the email with the observation that every failure related to this project had a single point of commonality: him.

In hindsight, it should have been clear to me that Stoner was a psychologically unstable individual. I should have known that my email would set him off. I mean, hell, even a well adjusted person doesn’t like being told he’s an idiot. But I foolishly believed that he was, at some level, a rational individual who would act in his own self-interest. With the amount of recognition that Stoner was getting for my efforts, it would have been insane for him to fire me, no matter how much he personally disliked me. I thought he would read the email and think, “Damn, I’ve pissed this guy off. I need to back off or he’s going to quit.”

But here’s the lesson: Stupidity trumps self-interest. If you have a choice between working for a stupid person or an evil person, pick evil. Evil people are predictable. They won’t screw you unless it does them some good to screw you. Stupid people will screw you because they couldn’t figure out what else to do. And stupid people who are paranoid from smoking way too much pot are even worse.

I came in the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend to find that I had been locked out of my computer. That’s how I discovered I had been fired. Stoner’s door was closed, and he wouldn’t answer when I knocked. Finally, after an hour of sitting at my desk wondering if I should just pack up and go home, he called me into his office.

“I have to let you go,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“The official reason is ‘no reason,’” he replied. I was still on a probation period, so he could fire me for ‘no reason.’ Presumably firing me for a reason would have caused all sorts of havoc.

“Would this have anything to do with a certain email I sent last Wednesday?”

“It might,” he admitted.

I eventually gathered from his comments that he thought there was a “conspiracy” against him in his department. He couldn’t easily fire any of the other conspirators, but he could get rid of me.

The sad thing is that he was right: There was a conspiracy against him. Unfortunately for him, the conspiracy consisted of everyone who worked for him. His employees had long since tired of his unstable behavior and capricious management style, and had been plotting to get him replaced. As a conscientious employee who did my best to stay out of office politics, I was actually the closest thing that he had to an ally. And he had just fired me.

I’d like to report that Stoner eventually became a victim of his own delusions and got fired. I would have wagered that he’d have been out on his ass within six months. Unfortunately, a Google search reveals that he’s still there, five years later.

So I suppose the real moral of this story is that paranoia and rampant stupidity are no barrier to a long and prosperous career in local government. Go figure.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Human Inertia | Hasta La Vista, Monkeyhands! Humor-blogs.com thinks that all bloggers are out to get it.

Harry Potter and the Comments of Retardedness

One of my most popular posts ever is Harry Potter and the Inevitable Slide into Satanism. It even made it into my book. The point of the post was to make fun of close-minded people who won't let their kids read Harry Potter books. I wrote:

Now that I'm a parent, I've realized the necessity of keeping certain books, movies and music away from my children. I don't like the idea of censorship, but no matter how much my kids beg they are not going to be allowed to listen to "Fergilicious" or read Eragon. I'm sorry, but I believe the children are our future.

Neither of my children (aged 5 and 7) have come home toting a Black Sabbath record yet, so I've dodged that bullet so far. But in anticipation of my seven-year-old bookworm eventually asking whether he may read Harry Potter and the Nominative Phrase, I decided to peruse one of these books to determine for myself whether there was any real danger.

I then expressed my shock and outrage at "finding" this signup form in the book (click to enlarge):

I was a young, naive blogger when I wrote that post. It honestly never occurred to me that anyone would take it seriously. I mean, go read the post and tell me how anyone with two brain cells to rub together would think that "signup form" was real. It's impossible, right?

Wrong. People continue to leave comments indicating that they've completely missed the point of the post. "Missed the point" is a generous phrase, in fact: these people were still shoeless at the security gate twenty minutes after the point touched down in Phoenix.

The surprising thing is that these commenters aren't the clueless Fundamentalists that you'd expect. No one has yet left a comment saying, "I KNEW those books were Satanic!!!" They're all people telling me how stupid I am for falling for the "Harry Potter is satanic" line. Two of them mentioned that they thought the signup form was a fake. No, really?!

I thought I'd post some of the favorite comments I've received. I've edited only for length. Trust me, I couldn't make up comments this stupid if I tried.

hmmm maybe it is important to keep certain things from kids at younger agesbuteventually theyre going to findtheyre own path. as a parent could you denyyour childs everlasting happiness just because you and your friends dont "approve". if your child or friend or even yourself find happiness in a less than reputable society but are happy trully being themselves AND DON HURT ANYONE, than how can this be bad? it is ones own pah that they must take into whaevr form ofascention they so choose. thats my opinion anyway.

-david age 16

Hi, David! It's great to hear from one of our younger readers! Did you know that Mozart wrote the opera Lucio Silla at age 16? It's true. Not only that, but by age 19 he knew the difference between their and they're, and by age 26 he had stopped appending his age to his signature to excuse his own stupidity.

you are out of your mind you crazy old bat

-Anonymous

That's redundant, you stupid retarded chicken.

you all are crazy people let the kids have fun and stop recking a good time

- Anonymous

Sorry, I don't recking we will.

I've been reading the potter series since Iwas I was 11 (currently 19),and I can assure you I'm not santanic in any way...and the whole add in the book, so never happened...I own several copies of the books and never seen this...Another point I would like to make is, the book is considered "Fantasy" for a reason...it's not REAL...Kids just don't go out into the yard, pick up a stick, and say Avava Kadvra...and you're worried about the song "Fergalicious"...Maybe you should be worried about other songs from more provocative artist such as Eminem or Trick Daddy...HARRY POTTER RULES

- Whitney

Wait... It's not real?

i think this post is a little ridiculous. i agree that harry potter in curriculum at school is controversial, but it having anything to do with satanism? i don't think it is akin or has anything to do with satan worship. if a kid does end up worshiping satan after reading this book, then it is the parents fault for raising a messed up kid not the books fault. an excellent read. its not about worshipping anything at all. i dont' really believe you people, i'd want my kids to get excited about reading something.

- Anonymous

A little ridiculous? Do you know how hard I worked on that?

Okay, listen here Diesel or Octane or whatever it is you call yourself, the Harry Potter stories are nothing more than stories about friendship and sticking together and learning how to overcome obstacles in one's life. The fact that there happens to be elements of an magical nature is entirely secondary. And furthermore, speaking as a pagan -- a proud to be one for the last 17 years since I began practicing -- I take great offense to having my faith -- yes, FAITH -- being referred to as devil worshipping. I'm all for free dom of speech but if you expect your beliefs to be respected, I suggest you return in kind.

- Jade Hawthorn

Jade or Topaz or whatever it is you call yourself, I'm sorry that I implied that the Harry Potter books had anything to do with your stupid made-up religion.

Fortunately, after Jade put an evil hex on me, I received some encouraging comments from a number of folks in the pharmaceutical industry:

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And then more from Anonymous...

I have read all the harry potter books and there is nothing wrong with them (like all u ppl think)

- Anonymous

Anonymous, did you read the one where there were some subtle points being made that went right over your head?

if you think harry potter is bad, your fucking stupid. and even if you did get that retarded harry potter 'sign up sheet' from one of their books, the book was a fake. and if you dont believe me.... then blow yourself.

- Anonymous

Anonymous, congratulations on being the dumbest person on the planet. What tipped you off that the sign-up sheet was a fake? Was it the fact that the other graphic in the post was a fake Satanism for Dummies book with the tagline "From the folks who brought you Harry Potter and Cancer?" Was it the part of the post where I said that I make my children wear helmets while doing difficult geometry problems? Was it the address on the bottom of the form that read, "Knights in Satan's Service, attn: Harry Potter Department, 666 Lucifer Way, Las Vegas, Nevada?"

So you think that form was a fake, eh? Anonymous, that wasn't even a real sheet of paper. I was too lazy to print the form out and scan it, so I just dummied something up in Paint Shop Pro. I made the "torn edge" by drawing a zig-zag line with my mouse. But I didn't fool you, did I, Anonymous? You figured out that it was a fake, probably torn from a counterfeit Harry Potter book. That's some solid deductive reasoning there, Sherlock. Do the human race a favor, would you? Go see Jurassic Park and have a fatal heart attack so that you can't reproduce.

Anyway, it's Monday, and you know what that means: A new issue of the Clay Pigeon humor magazine! If you want to read some writing by people who aren't polluting the gene pool, head over there now. Speaking of stupidity, the CP has a special report on which one is dumber, home improvement store employees or shopping carts. Plus, an article from the CP archives that takes us way back to 1990, when we were expressing our doubts about an upstart software company named Microsoft, and our first ever Letter to the Editor. Who knew there was no U.S. Department of Coffee?

And if that doesn't meet your ravenous hunger for humor, check out those wacky Satan-worshipers over at Humor-Blogs.com.

I'll be back tomorrow with the caption contest finalists.

Hasta la Vista, Monkeyhands (part 2)

For those of you too lazy to read part 1, a brief recap of what has happened up to this point: His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands, CEO of Galactic Invertebrates, failed to tell our most important client about a project that I had been working on for THREE YEARS, and which was going to be rolled out to all of our clients in SEVEN DAYS. As a result, an emergency meeting was convened with Asshole, the president of our most important client, BeeStings Unlimited. At this meeting, Asshole dictated a list of brand new requirements which would be virtually impossible to implement by the scheduled launch date.

At this point, I had a decision to make. I could say, "Screw it. Serves these idiots right if this application doesn't launch on time." I could make a big stink about why the application didn't launch on time, and all the executive directors would get to explain to their clients that the CEO of Galactic Invertebrates is a retard and that while each and every one of our clients is super-duper important to us, all of them stacked in a pile don't mean shit compared to BeeStings Unlimited. Hell, I could take the next three weeks off and just pull up a lawn chair to watch as a barrage of countless gigantic clods of shit hit the proverbial fan.

But nooooooooooooooooo, I'm too nice a guy to do that. I won't trouble you with the horrific details of what happened over the next week; suffice it to say that I worked nearly a hundred hours over the next seven days (the week of my anniversary and my daughter's birthday) to make last minute changes to the Interstellar Portal, catering to Asshole's idiotic whims. I tried to get ahold of Monkeyhands to communicate my displeasure at this turn of events, but -- surprise! -- he was unavailable, vacationing somewhere in Europe.

So I buckled down and got the thing done. It wasn't perfect, but it launched without major incident, on time. I walked out of the building that day to the sound of trumpets heralding my accomplishment, because I was hallucinating from lack of sleep.

The next day I fired off an email to Monkeyhands letting him know that I was extremely upset about the situation, and that this was going to be the LAST time I would ever be working 100 hours in one week because of someone else's screwup. He responded -- several days later -- with some noncommittal reassurances.

By the time Monkeyhands finally got back from vacation, my anger level had dropped from White Hot Seething Rage to Barely Controlled Fury. I stopped by Monkeyhands' office a couple of times, but he was always in a meeting or about to leave for a meeting or trying to squeeze his upper torso into his colon. Eventually I gave up.

Now as you'll know if you've read pretty much anything else I've written, I'm completely full of myself. But you're just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I'm a damn good programmer.* I built GI's entire application infrastructure from the ground up, in roughly a quarter of the time it would have taken a typical programmer. "How is that possible?" you ask. Well, it's all about leveraging your work.

Let's say, by way of illustration, that you need to mow a lawn, and all you have is an old hand-powered mower like that one they used on the Brady Bunch. A typical programmer will look at that problem and say, "I could build a gas-powered lawn mower for you and save you a lot of time and trouble." Which, of course, is a good idea. When I look at that problem, however, I think, "I could build a lawn mower for you and save you a lot of time and trouble. But frankly building lawn mowers sounds like a pain in the ass, and I don't want to have to be building a lawn mower for every poor sap who needs to mow his lawn. So how about if I spend an extra three weeks and build a machine that builds lawn mowers?" So it costs me an additional three weeks up front, but after that I can crank out lawn mowers in my sleep. And once I get bored with building lawn mower building machines, I might build a lawn mower building machine building machine. You see where this is going. One time I inherited a project that a subcontractor had been working on for 6 months with minimal results. I told the subcontractor he was done and rewrote the entire application myself in a week. If you want some software built, I'm a good guy to have on your team. Or instead of your team.

Thus it's fair to say that in this company of 35 people, I was one of the three or four key people that kept GI afloat. A smart CEO would do everything he could to keep those three or four people happy. So if one of those key people was oscillating between Barely Controlled Fury and Cynical Resignation, he might want to make a point of meeting with that employee to at least hear his concerns. His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands was not a smart CEO.

Eventually a coworker, who had only been with the company for a few weeks and therefore had not yet had his spirit crushed, set up a meeting with the CEO to express our concerns. At this point I had no real interest in expressing my concerns, because Monkeyhands clearly couldn't give a shit about my concerns, but I went along because I thought it was cute how my coworker thought he was going to accomplish something at this meeting. My coworker laid out a very compelling case that some drastic changes were in order, and I did my best to back him up.

The CEO was clearly displeased with this attempt by the serfs to tell him how to run the castle, and he sat in stony silence while we laid out our case. When we were finished, he suggested that we "write up a proposal" and submit it to him, and if it was one of the best proposals he got that year he would see what he could do about it.

Keep in mind that we weren't asking for raises. We weren't asking for more more autonomy for our department. We weren't, in fact, asking for anything. We were simply telling him what, in our opinion, absolutely had to change about his company in order for it to succeed and make him the millions of dollars he clearly felt he was entitled to. As low as my expectations had been going into this meeting, Monkeyhands had managed to limbo a good 26 inches under them. I was rendered almost speechless by his unprecedented obtuseness.

Having just spearheaded the launch of our flagship product under near impossible circumstances, I felt emboldened to speak up. I said, "You know, I don't really have time to be writing proposals. I think we've told you everything you need to know. My job is to write applications."

He glared at me with his beady little extraterrestrial eyes and said, essentially, "Your job is whatever the f---- I tell you it is."

That's when I went to my happy place, because the alternative was to punch Monkeyhands in his fugly little alien face until he stopped wasting oxygen. I coasted through the rest of the meeting in a sort of dreamlike state, nodding and smiling and thinking about how I wasn't going to work for this ass-hat one second longer than I needed to in order to make sure my family didn't starve to death. That night I went home and started researching my options for refinancing my house. We have ten acres of valuable land in California, so I had some equity at my disposal. It took me a few weeks, but I managed to negotiate a loan that would give me enough money to take a year off and finish building my house. As soon as the papers were signed, I put in my notice.

And wouldn't you know it, Monkeyhands immediately made time in his Euro-touring, rectum-examining schedule for the two of us to go out for a beer, like the two best buds that I had always suspected we were. He used this outing as an opportunity to dispense fatherly advice while I nodded and continually swallowed little bits of vomit that came up in my throat. After establishing that he was my mentor and quite possibly my NBFF, he asked me why I was leaving.

"I feel like it's time to move on," I said.

He pressed for more information, and I kept giving non-answers. Is it Human Inertia? "No, Human Inertia is a manageable idiot." Is it The Snake?** "No, The Snake is just a symptom of a bigger problem." Ok, so what is it?

"Just time to move on. That's all."

I was determined not to give him the benefit of my opinion of him and his company, because after ignoring me for three years he could go f--- himself. Besides, if I told him what I actually thought, it would be really hard to keep working for him for another three weeks. I would have been fine with speaking my mind and walking out, but that would have left a lot of my coworkers in the lurch. So I gave him nothing. I could tell he wanted to lash out at me like a spoiled child again, but he was at least smart enough to know that he desperately needed to hold on to me for as long as he could, even if it was only three weeks. He couldn't afford to piss me off at this point. In fact, he began to offer me everything he could think of to keep me. He even told me I could work from home pretty much all day every day if I wanted, even though I had been specifically told on prior occasions that I wasn't allowed to work from home even two days a week (which I did anyway, of course). Funny how a little perspective changes things.

But I was past the point of being mollified by anything they had to offer. I simply couldn't stomach working for that petty little sphincter nugget any longer.

I wrapped things up as best I could over the next few weeks, but when it was clear that a lot of important projects were not going to get done after I left, they asked if I'd be willing to do some work as a consultant. "Sure," I said. "At an hourly rate of [fill in exorbitant rate here]." I added that every time I picked up the phone, there would be a one hour minimum charge.

I was actually kind of hoping they'd say no, but I made the offer because I still felt a little bad about my coworkers who were already overworked without having to pick the pieces of my unfinished projects. Monkeyhands spat and sputtered, but eventually agreed to it, because what else could he do? Thanks to the official GI policy of "F--- Documentation"***, I had three years worth of exclusive knowledge of GI's systems tucked away in my little brain. No one else at the company had a clue how anything I had built worked. If something broke, God help them.

The Monday before my last day, Monkeyhands called me into his office and tried, once again, to get me to tell him why I was leaving and what it would take to get me to stay. I once again politely refused to tell him shit. I could see that he was fuming behind his beady little alien eyes, but he still couldn't afford to aggravate me.

When I continued to refuse to cooperate, he resorted to trying to make me feel guilty, launching into a big speech about loyalty and some such bullshit. He seemed to be trying to tell me how valuable I was to the company, but somehow his monologue degenerated into a self-aggrandizing account of how he had continued to fund application development (read: Diesel's salary) even when everybody told him he was crazy. Rather than, "You're extremely valuable to this company," it was "I'm such an amazing visionary to have recognized how valuable you are to this company, and if a lesser man were in charge you'd have been out on your ass a long time ago." I began to literally feel sick to my stomach. Whatever germ of a notion that I might have had about sticking around was completely obliterated by that pathologically egomaniacal speech.

I continued to give him only the vaguest of answers about why I was leaving.

Finally he came out and said, "Diesel, you've been working here for three years. I think you owe me a little more than that."

What happened next is one of my happiest memories. I replay it in my head, over and over, the way you might revisit a day of riding around on your dad's shoulders at the fair, getting your cotton candy stuck in his hair. It's a memory that always makes me smile. Sometimes when it's cold at night, I think about it and a sort of ineffable warmth radiates out from my heart to my toes and fingertips, making me feel all snuggly and cozy. If I ever have to get a root canal without anesthetic, I will just think about that day when I was sitting across from Monkeyhands in his office.

"So, you think I owe you more than that," I said, gazing thoughtfully out the window. "Well."

I thought of all the empty assurances that Monkeyhands had given me in the past. I thought of the times I had seen him demonstrate "leadership" by belittling employees who had failed to meet impossible goals. I thought of his transparent gestures of magnanimity and his condescending paternal advice.

Then I looked him straight in the eye and said, in my most patronizing tone:

"You know, sometimes we don't get what we feel we're owed."

And I smiled.

*Yes, I know I told you that I don't like being called a "programmer," but that was mostly for effect.

**The biggest jerk at GI, who is tolerated because "the clients like him." He shares my first name, which explains, incidentally, why I started going by "Diesel."

***Seriously. Monkeyhands actually said this to me once. Possibly the dumbest thing ever said about software development.

Humor-blogs.com is always in its happy place.

Hasta la Vista, Monkeyhands

Note: This story, concerning my final days at Galactic Invertebrates, is long overdue. I only waited this long because until recently I was still doing consulting work for them, and I didn't want to needlessly antagonize the little asswipes. Also, it's generally not a good idea to badmouth a former employer on the internet when you've just started a new job. Suffice it to say that my current employer is about as far from Galactic Invertebrates as could be. In fact, my current boss -- as well as her boss -- are both former GI employees who got fed up with the idiots running that place around the same time I did.

I had to break it into two posts because it's a little long, but I think you'll enjoy it.

The second worst boss I ever had was the CEO of Galactic Invertebrates.

Galactic Invertebrates, as you recall, is a small interstellar firm that specializes in bending over. The owner and CEO is a diminutive extraterrestrial being who is known as His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands. Monkeyhands wasn't technically my boss; I reported to Human Inertia, who reported to Monkeyhands. But as Human Inertia spent most of his time trying to remember which pipe was for breathing and which one was for swallowing, Monkeyhands was effectively my boss.

Monkeyhands came from a planet that is known for raising snooty little wankers who think they're better than everyone else. He was the kind of guy who would take you out to lunch in his Mercedes and bitch almost under his breath how much he despised his imported luxury car. This is a proven technique for a person of Monkeyhands' imagined stature to indicate that he is not only "one of the common people," but also a little too good for German luxury cars. Do you remember the episode of The Office where they do a Christmas gift exchange with a price limit of like $20 and Steve Carell throws in a $200 iPod just to show how magnanimous he is? This guy did that exact thing at one of our Christmas parties. No joke. It was enough to make you want to crush his little baby monkeyhands with a ball peen hammer.

Monkeyhands had the habit of starting some exciting new initiative to revamp the company and then leaving for Europe for three months, with Human Inertia in charge of overseeing the details. Every time he returned from one of these trips, it was like a retelling of the Parable of the Talents:

Monkeyhands: Now, my servant, what have you done with the talents I have entrusted to you?
Human Inertia: Lord, have mercy on me! I know that you are a cruel master, and I have therefore developed these sixteen PowerPoint slides to demonstrate what I plan to do with the talents.
Monkeyhands: You lazy and worthless servant! I entrusted you with... ok, let's see the slides.

After the presentation, Monkeyhands would cruelly berate Human Inertia for half an hour. But Human Inertia could take a berating like no man I've ever seen, and when it was over he would go back to his desk and make more slides. Monkeyhands would launch another ill-thought-out company-revamping initiative and then jet off to the home of shoddy luxury vehicles.

GI was a typical tech startup: Lots of excitement, long hours, almost no documented processes.... The only problem was that this company had been in startup mode for fourteen years. That's like having your wedding night last for three weeks. I know, it sounds great, but eventually getting no sleep and banging your head against the wall just to demonstrate your commitment gets a little old.

By the fall of 2006, I had worked at this company for three years. Much of that time I was working on a product that I'll call the Interstellar Portal. The Interstellar Portal was going to be our flagship product, and I was determined -- despite obstacles like Human Inertia and the general dysfunction of Galactic Invertebrates -- to get it done. I worked my ass off on the Interstellar Portal, all the while playing the requisite political games so that I wouldn't be blindsided by some new requirement that I hadn't planned on.

I kept all the key people at GI informed of the Interstellar Portal's progress by sending emails and holding regular meetings. I wanted to make sure that there were no surprises when this thing rolled out. I even held a number of special pre-rollout meetings to make sure I had addressed everyone's concerns.

As a final step before launching this mammoth application for all of our clients, I sent out an email to our entire client base regarding training that would be available for using the Interstellar Portal. It wasn't even my job to set up training for the clients, but I thought it was important to do, and nobody else was going to do it.

The email went out to 7,000 people. I received exactly one negative client response.

Unfortunately, the response was from the president of our most important client, BeeStings Unlimited. The president of BeeStings Unlimited was such an asshole that I don't even have a nickname for him. I'll just have to call him Asshole. One little anecdote to illustrate what an asshole Asshole really was:

One time Asshole demanded that we remove all "cookies" from one of our applications. It's not important for you to know what cookies are; just know that it is VERY common for web applications to use cookies. Amazon uses them. eBay uses them. Hell, Asshole's own company used cookies on their website. But for some reason it was vital that I immediately drop everything and spend 3 weeks rewriting our applications to eliminate cookies. Whatever. I do what I'm told. But if I'm going to be fixing a problem, I need to know what the problem is. So I sent Asshole a very nice email saying, essentially, "What is it about cookies that you have a problem with exactly? Because I have to replace the cookies with something, and I don't want to replace them with something that you like even less than cookies."

His response was, and I quote, "READ MY LIPS. GET RID OF THEM."

Hence the name Asshole. Anyway, the point of this little digression is that you do NOT want to get on this guy's bad side if you can avoid it. BeeStings Unlimited was a very important client for GI, and Asshole knew it. Asshole would make your life hell just for giggles if he didn't think you were taking him seriously enough.

So ordinarily one client complaint about a product rollout wouldn't be a big deal, but you do not want to get a complaint from the president of BeeStings Unlimited one week before the rollout. And you definitely don't want to get one from him that says:

"That is very brave of you, rolling this out when I have never heard of it."

At this point I should tell you that Galactic Invertebrates has a number of Executive Directors, each of whom is responsible for one or more clients. Now BeeStings Unlimited was SO gosh-darn important that the ED* for his account was none other than His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands himself. That meant that it was his responsibility to communicate any important developments to BeeStings Unlimited.

So, to sum up, the CEO of our company had failed to tell our most important client about a project that I had been working on for THREE YEARS, and which was going to be rolled out to all of our clients in SEVEN DAYS.

I had a special meeting with Asshole, in which he rattled off a whole new list of requirements for the application. Monkeyhands wasn't around, and all Human Inertia would do is say things like, "Don't worry, we'll figure this out." Which meant, "I'm not going to stand up to Asshole, so you'd better do what he tells you."

To give you an idea what that means, imagine telling Steven Spielberg that he needs to reshoot the ending of his latest movie to make it more "uplifting" a week before the premiere. It's borderline insane. You just can't do it.

So at this point I had a decision to make: Try to do the impossible, or tell 7,000 people that I couldn't do what I had promised I would do. What would you do?



I'll post Part 2 on Wednesday. Make sure you come back tomorrow to vote in the caption contest.

*A co-worker of mine was known to joke that 'ED' also meant 'dysfunctional prick.'


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Talkin' About My Generation (or: I Hope I Die Before My Mass Increases)

A quick note before the actual post: Thanks to everybody for the truly phenomenal response to my caption contest. I you haven't submitted a caption yet, you have until Monday at midnight, Pacific time. (I know I originally said Tuesday, but I changed my mind. Sue me.) I'll consolidate my favorites into a poll Tuesday morning so you can vote for the best one. The results will be posted on Friday. And now for your regularly scheduled post....


I don't understand kids these days. I mean, take the levitation for example.

Don't pretend like you don't know what I'm talking about. We've all seen it. You'll be trudging through the video game aisle at Best Buy, making sure to keep one or both feet on the ground at all times because you're a responsible adult with obligations to this planet. Suddenly a twelve year old will glide past, his feet a fraction of an inch above the ground. Then, before what you've seen has fully registered, he's walking again, as if nothing had happened.

At first I thought these kids were merely disregarding the principle of friction, but having witnessed several of these events I am confident that the little punks are flouting gravity itself. This irritates me. When I was a kid I used to occasionally chew gum in class or dip pterodactyls in the inkwell, but I knew better than to break the basic laws of physics. Oh, sure, there was that time I tried to use non-Euclidean geometry to see down Ms. Kremer's blouse, but that's nothing compared to wearing your jeans six inches below your waist. It's like these kids are daring gravity to pants them.

My real concern is what happens after these kids realize they can get away with it. Kids need discipline. For every action, there has to be an equal and opposite reaction. If there isn't, then what? I'll tell you what: Say goodbye to the conservation of energy, first of all. Probably conservation of matter too. Objects in motion get lazy; objects at rest get restless. Some troublemaker will find a way around Einstein's constant, and the news will travel faster than the speed of light. And if one kids pulls off time travel, you know the other kids are going to hear about it yesterday.

I have to admit that the problem didn't start with today's youth. I did know one guy from my generation who tried to build a perpetual motion machine. This was shortly after I started work at my first "real" job. I was 25 and I think Mr. Newton (as I shall call him) was three or four years older -- which is to say about 18 years beyond the age when most people stop trying to build transmogrifiers, magical doorways to Narnia and perpetual motion machines. Not only that, but he was a computer technician -- not college educated, but he had enough technical expertise that he could fix most computer hardware problems. One would think such a background would immunize one from the delusion that one could build a perpetual motion machine. One would be wrong.

He didn't call it a perpetual motion machine, of course. I think he called it a "self-powered car." As I recall, the car worked like this:

1. A laser heats a container of water to boiling.
2. The pressure from the steam makes the car's wheels turn.
3. A generator hooked up to the car's wheels makes electricity.
4. The electricity powers the laser.

I think there were 3 or 4 more steps in there somewhere which would have dispersed any energy that actually made it from step one to step four, but you get the idea. Not only was the car impossible; it was impossible in an almost unbelievably stupid way. Did Newton think that the engineers at GM were just waiting for the moment when someone would whisper into their ears the magical words laser-powered steam turbine? "Eureka!" they would shout. "If only we had thought to combine 19th century technology with untempered ignorance!"

"That's called a perpetual motion machine," I told him. "It's impossible. You lose energy at every step of the system. Hell, you'd probably lose 95% of the energy you started out with on the steam conversion alone." Not to mention 100% of your credibility, I thought.

"It's not a perpetual motion machine," He said. "If you brake, the car will stop, and then you'd need more energy to get it started again. That's why there's a battery." Ah, another step. More energy loss. Good thinking.

"Ok," I said. "So you have a tank of water, right? And you heat the water. Now let's say you put your hand near the tank. Will it feel warm?"

"Of course."

"Right. That's heat. Heat is energy. You're losing energy from the system in the form of radiated heat."

"No, the heat boils the water. You're not losing it."

I think I argued with Newton for about two hours before I gave up. I also once had a debate with him about faith versus science. He fancied himself an atheist, and scoffed at me for believing things that couldn't be proved.

"What do you believe in?" I asked.

"Science."

"And what is science based on?"

"Experiments."

"And how do people observe experiments?"

"Uhhh..."

"With our senses, right. And how do you know that what your senses tell you is true?"

"Uhhh..."

"Experience, right. Because your senses have been reliable in the past. But how do you know that what you experience with your senses isn't all just one big illusion. How do you know that you're not just a brain in a vat?"

"Uhhh..."

"You don't, right. At some point you just have to make a leap of faith. I make a leap of faith by believing in God, and you make one by believing in science. It just takes a few more step to get to yours."

"So science is still better."

"Whaaa...?"

"It has more steps."

More steps. That was his answer. Make the system complicated enough that you can't see that it's all bullshit. Hey, it worked for the self-powered car, right?

Still, his car was pretty simple. Anyone with a 4th grade education could have understood (and probably designed) it. I suggested he needed more steps to further complicate it, thus shielding the car further from reality. Something like:

1. A garden grows on top of the car.
2. A dinosaur eats from the garden.
3. The dinosaur dies, turning into fertilizer for the garden and fossil fuels.
4. The members of the Coalworkers Local 327, who live in the glove compartment, come out and mine the coal when it's ready, loading it into a furnace.
5. The furnace burns the coal, heating a container of water, which turns into steam.
6. The steam turns a turbine which drives a generator, which powers a laser.
7. The laser heats another container of water almost to boiling.
8. The water is shot through finely ground coffee, in order to make espresso.
9. The driver sips the espresso while waiting patiently for a tow truck.

Hey, GM has done dumber stuff. If this idea takes off, maybe Daimler will buy them. Then there will be no stopping them! I mean, unless they hit the brakes.

Seriously, imagine what we could accomplish if we could eliminate the need for fossil fuels altogether, and rely entirely on our nation's vast untapped resources of stupidity! I just hope today's youth recognizes the gravity of the situation.



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Mattress Tags: humor

Listed on humor-blogs.com

Even a Traffic Whore Has Some Standards

As you all know, I'm a traffic whore. I labor under the delusion that if some day my readers outnumber the teachers who wrote on my report cards "Not meeting his potential," my desperate hunger for approval will at last be sated.

To this end, I occasionally submit my site to blog directories. I don't think this generates much traffic for me, but I figure it can't hurt, unless the blog directory is called "Blogs That You Should Never Visit Because They Are Hella Lame." And even then, I'd probably submit mine, because how much damage could it really do?

Judging by the number of blog directories out there, somebody must be starting a new blog directory every time a Starbucks opens. Or maybe every time somebody orders a Venti Carmel Macchiatto. I think at this point there are more blog directories than blogs, and since every man, woman and child alive has 12 blogs, that's a lot of blog directories.

Anyway, the other day I ran across a blog directory that didn't list my blog, let's call it Not Another Blog Directory. So I dutifully filled out the submission form and waited for the hit to come rolling in.

Not long after, I received the following email:

Hello diesel,

Your blog has not been added to the Not Another Blog Directory. Due to the amount of submissions, we cannot explain the reasons for each. Most likely it is due to one of the following:

- blog is listed more than once in the directory
- site is not a blog
- blog is offline
- blog is new (must contain 5 posts and be at least 7 days old due to excessive spammers submitting).
- site contains nudity
- site is a shill site intended to simply promote products/affiliates
- site construes something illegal

If you believe your blog should be added, please contact us (be sure to mention what
your blog URL is).

-Not Another Blog Directory Team

This, of course, hurt me deeply. In an effort to mask my pain, I fired off the following email:

Hello Not Another Blog Directory Team,

I don't care. Due to the amount of blog directories, I cannot explain the reasons for not caring about each. Most likely it is due to one of the following:

- Your blog directory differs in no meaningful way from the 17,000 other blog directories.
- Your blog directory contains too many other blogs.
- Some of the other blogs suck.
- Your blog directory still has the price tag on it, and is wrapped in cellophane.
- Your blog directory uses a color scheme which reminds me of the wallpaper in my bedroom during 5th-7th grades. This was a difficult time for me. Thanks for bringing the memories flooding back.
- Your blog directory does not list my blog; ergo it sucks.
- You used the phrase "amount of submissions," when what you really mean is "number of submissions."
- Not a single blog about Jewish race car drivers.
- Tasteful nudity is what separates us from the animals.

If you believe I should care, please contact me (be sure to mention why I should care).

- Mattress Police "Team" (we haven't really been a team since we lost our power forward)

I'd give their real name and a link, but due to the amount of not caring on my part, I don't have the energy.

Mattress Tags:
humor blog directories blog promotion

10 Things That Suck Less Than Working at Galactic Invertebrates

If I weren't retired, I'd be on my way to work at Galactic Invertebrates* right now rather than sitting at home watching my kids watch Dora the Explorer. I love the part where you have to say "Swiper no swiping!" to keep Swiper from swiping. Then when Dora says, "Gracias!", I say"De Nada, baby. I got your back!" Man, if I was 30 years younger....

Anyway, it occurred to me that today would be a good day to post an IM conversation I had a few weeks back with a fellow ex-Galactic Invertebrates employee. You know her as "Not Karen," a pseudonym that cleverly hints that her real name could be virtually anything. We were chatting on a day that I took off from work to sign papers for refinancing my property, and we came up with the idea of listing all the horrible things we'd rather do than work at Galactic Invertebrates. The list was pretty funny, but I think the conversation about the list was even better.

not karen: any new news?
diesel: nope
diesel: signing papers at 4:30
diesel: took a PTO today
not karen: sa-weeeeet.
diesel: you want to know how sick of that place I am?
diesel: I've spent most of the day shoveling dirt in the rain, and all I can think of is how happy I am that I don't have to see Human Inertia** today
not karen: dang
diesel: I'm actually happy to be out in the cold, working in the mud
not karen: wonder if that comes before or after "I'd rather chew broken glass."
not karen: "would rather shovel dirt in the rain."
not karen: Top 10 list of things that suck, but suck less than working at Galactic Invertebrates...
diesel: exactly
not karen: Shoveling mud/dirt in the rain
diesel: Having your face swell up to twice its size because of a scorpion sting
not karen: lol
not karen: Do your taxes
not karen: in Spanish
diesel: lol
diesel: I like that one
not karen: thanks!
diesel: it should be German though
not karen: even better.
diesel: taking a transatlantic flight seated between Mickey Rourke and Courtney Love
not karen: oh [expletive]
not karen: that's HORRIBLE
diesel: :)
diesel: thanks
not karen: moonlighting as a bunny in an animal test lab
diesel: nice
not karen: doing the Macarena
diesel: lol
diesel: French kissing Janet Reno
not karen: (puke)
diesel: :D
not karen: Dry heaving
diesel: sorry, that one may actually be worse
not karen: that shit's painful
not karen: i think we have a good list going. how many is that?
diesel: 100?
diesel: Gotta be close to 100
not karen: i'm retyping into Word. This is a good exercise.
diesel: how about playing rock-paper-scissors for real, and being paper
diesel: paper covers rock...rock breaks knuckles
not karen: i know you're not used to hearing constructive criticism from all your worshipping readers,
not karen: but that's not funny
diesel: ;(
diesel: it will hit you in about 3 hours
diesel: you'll just bust up for no reason
diesel: and you'll be like, "Dammit, Kroese!"
not karen: LOL shut up
not karen: and i KNOW you didn't bust out the Crocodile Tear smiley
diesel: how about having to write a master's thesis on the use of double entendres in Who's The Boss?
diesel: too subtle?
not karen: good in theory, but not very punchy
diesel: lol
diesel: ok
not karen: Watching back-to-back episodes of Who's the Boss would be pretty horrible in and of itself
not karen: and would qualify in my book
diesel: yeah, but not quite bad enough
not karen: Hmmmm.
not karen: gimme another show
diesel: how about having to watch every episode of Who's the Boss with a retarded kid who pauses the show every time he doesn't get a joke and makes you explain it to him.
diesel: I'm getting a little abstract now
diesel: still, you have to admit that would be pretty bad
not karen: oooh!
not karen: i know
not karen: Waiting for Godot
diesel: lol
not karen: again, to simplify
diesel: not watching Waiting for Godot, you mean actually waiting for Godot
not karen: i think hanging out with a retarded kid would be a bad time by itself
not karen: right.
not karen: it works on a number of levels
diesel: it's the combination of retarded kid and Who's the Boss that makes it work
diesel: or not
not karen: please hold
diesel: W
not karen: DUDE, i was simply typing them up
diesel: ok
not karen: you're pretty fussy now that you're a man of leisure.
diesel: I've always been fussy
diesel: leisure just hasn't helped
not karen: Diving for dead bodies after a plane crash.
diesel: uhhh
diesel: how about wool underwear?
not karen: i still need a show for "watching back-to-back episodes of ..."
not karen: yes. good
diesel: or better yet, steel wool underwear
diesel: 7th Heaven?
not karen: PERFECT!
diesel: how many do we have now?
diesel: and when can we stop?
not karen: We have 10
diesel: are they all good?
not karen: i'll send them to your supersecret e-mail address
not karen: i think so
diesel: ok
diesel: cool, I'll post them to my blog when I get braver
not karen: i took some editorial license in weeding out your rock, paper, sissors and retard Who's the Boss ideas
diesel: man, that Who's the Boss one was genius
diesel: you have to picture yourself sitting on the couch next to the retarded kid who won't press Play until he understands why Tony and Angela aren't married
not karen: you're letting the blog feedback go to your head
not karen: takes too much "thinking".
diesel: lol
not karen: Dave would never approve.
diesel: you're never going to convince me that's not funny
not karen: Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go learn myself how to layout a newsletter in Publisher.
diesel: it's high-brow humor
diesel: not your sort of thing
not karen: LOL.
not karen: asshole.

*I have changed the name of the company to cover my ass.
**Surprisingly, also not his/her real name.

You Know Who You Are

Hey, do you speak using a speech synthesizer and have to be fed through a feeding tube? No? Ok, then stop yammering about string theory like you have the first clue what you're talking about.

Let's Keep in Touch

A few weeks ago I signed up for a LinkedIn account. As near as I can figure, LinkedIn is like MySpace for people who have jobs. It's sort of an online networking site, so that if I need to hire a new Java programmer and your cousin's brother-in-law's babysitter is a Java programmer, then I can spend 10 minutes explaining to her why I still really need to post an ad on Craig's List.

When you sign up, LinkedIn allows you to send invitations to all the people in your Outlook address book, so that you can "stay connected" with them. Now keep in mind that all of the people in my address list are either (1) friends with whom I'm already in contact (which is why I have their email address), (2) relatives that I couldn't lose if I tried, or (3) co-workers that I see every day. So what's the point of a website to help me "stay connected" with this people, you ask. Well, let's say that I get so fed up with the retard circus that is my place of employment that I finally decide to just walk out one day and never come back. Now ordinarily I would never hear from any of those jerks again, but since I'm on LinkedIn, I'm guaranteed to get a bunch of emails saying, "Hey, dude, it's not the same here since you left. We all miss you a ton. Speaking of which, do you have a minute to answer a few questions about that doomed project that caused your nervous breakdown?" LinkedIn is the career equivalent of a herpes infection. As much as you want to leave that bad experience in the distant past, LinkedIn will guarantee periodic reminders at the worst possible times, like a bad outbreak on your honeymoon.

But like an idiot, I clicked the "Invite people from my address book" button, because at the time I happened to be experiencing a unique combination of curiousity, boredom, and inebration. The LinkedIn site gave me a bunch of names of people to invite, including a few people who are just below Patient Zero on the list of people with whom I want to remain in contact. "Geez," I thought, "That's all I need, to be tethered to those human boat anchors for the rest of my life." I unchecked their names and then clicked the button to send the invitations to the people I can actually tolerate.

At this point I noticed that it had sent a lot more invitations than I had expected. I clicked the back button to look at the list again. Turns out that the list was in a text box, so that you had to scroll down to see all the names. I had sent invitations to nearly everyone in my company, including one individual who in my opinion epitomizes not only the Peter Principle but also the Dilbert Principle, and probably the Vice Principle and pretty much every other incompetence-related principle you can think of, not to mention the Jerkwad Principle, the Asswipe Principle, and the Your-Honor-I-Beat-Him-To-Death-With-A-Stapler-In-Self-Defense Principle.

Oh, and in case you're one of the co-workers who got my invitation: Of course I meant to invite you. Just not all those other idiots.

One of the nicer people who accepted my invitation offered to write a recommendation for me on LinkedIn. She even emailed me asking what I wanted the recommendation to say. I thought for a second, then sent back this email:

Hi Karen,

I would like it to say that I'm 12 feet tall and that I can shoot laser beams from my eyes.

Thanks,
Diesel

I'm hoping to get a few other people to back up this recommendation, so that while potential employers may at first be skeptical, they will be won over after reading several recommendation from other individuals all attesting, in their own words, to my giantism and laser-eyes. I'm not sure what kind of job this skillset qualifies me for, but it's got to be better than my current position as Administrator of Kafkaesque Services. I suppose my future employer will be disappointed when I'm nearly 6 feet shorter than advertised and the only thing I'm capable of shooting from my eyes is blank stares, but then I'll just play the discrimination card. "Oh, so you want to fire me because I'm a dwarf with eye problems!" I'll shout. Then they'll give me a quiet cubicle in the back somewhere, where I can play Tetris and practice my blank stares.

I'll let you know how it goes. Join my LinkedIn network and we'll stay in touch.