And The #1 Sign Morale In Your Office Is Shot...

Happy Saint Pat's Day.

Sometime in the mid-late nineties I was working at a company that, even though it is long-defunct, shall remain nameless.

A good friend of mine - let's call him O-Dog - and I met at this company. We were both technical writers. Our boss, the company's testing manager, was - I am not making this up - functionally illiterate. She was in charge of editing our copy.

She also had her priorities. And so while I was hired to write end-user material - things like online help and user guides and so on - I ended up essentially as a glorified stenographer in requirements meetings. Dull work, and a complete waste of time, although that didn't prevent the boss from investing the job with a patina of panic; O-Dog and I were issued with pagers, which had a habit of going off whenever someone told the Boss that someone needed a requirement refined.

Most galling was the fact that the company itself was a really good place to work - for everyone but those of us who worked for the Boss. The programmers loved the place - it was a dream job for many. And it was a good place for those who were great self-starters and could push themselves to learn things and develop into skills and areas they'd not tried. In fact, I made a couple of major steps into my current career in the job - steps that the Boss resisted bitterly, feeling that I'd outflanked her to take those steps, a feeling that was, alone among every decision and assumption and statement I ever heard her make, correct. The woman was an idiot. Contacts and friends of friends tell me that she is both still in the Twin Cities and still an idiot, so she shall remain nameless.

I'd been at the company probably seven months. A number of us - O-Dog and another young programmer I'll call E-Rod - were working on a project that was one of those endeavors that just reeked doom. Although a lot of smart, talented people were working on the project, you could just tell from talking with the clients (a company from the Bay Area) that there was a layer of irrational exuberance combined with dithering on specifics that would soon become familiar to watchers of Dotcoms throughout the economy, and that things would not turn out well. I'd also run a Usability Test on the prototype of the product - excellent preparation for my current career, actually - that had shown serious disastrous catastrophic usability issues. My report made it very clear that the design was flawed, in some ways fatally.

I'd just found out that the Boss had gotten together to stuff my report into a drawer so the clients would never see it. The reason? The company had sold itself to the Client as "user interface experts"; to show the client that they were not would hardly do. The whole thing left me angry, depressed, and deeply hating the company; for a solid day, as I walked around the office, I chanted a cadence softly, under my breath:

I hate this place
I hate this place
I really, really hate this place
This place is driving me insane
this f&#*(^g place will eat my brain
I hate this place
I hate this place
I really really hate this place.

How bad was it? Co-workers occasionally caught snippets of the cadence.

O-Dog and E-Rod had had similarly bad weeks; in fact, both had (if memory serves) either given notice or were about to. We decided to go out for lunch.

We went to a local sportsbar/restaurant and ordered. The waitress - decked out in green, naturally - prodded "any green beer?"

E-Rod, whose notice was burning a hole in his manager's desk, promptly chimed in "sure!". O-Dog took about a tenth of a second to concur. Both turned to me. "No, I gotta work...".

The two of them attacked theirs with gusto when it arrived, as they poured out their litany of miseries that they were going to escape. By the time the waitress returned, I was ready for some of that myself. I figured that just...one...green...beer...couldn't hurt. Could it?

On the one hand the job-related catharsis was beneficial; it steeled my resolve to find another job and get the hell out of the Boss' group or, if need be, the company. Which led to a second beer.

And a third.

And a fourth. And a fifth. In my own defense, O-Dog and E-Rod stayed way ahead of me.

About 90 minutes into lunch, we decided to call in and tell the Boss that O-Dog's car had broken down, and that we were all waiting on a tow truck, and no, nobody needed to come and pick us up, thanks for asking.

Need eventually was. I left the company six weeks later (to a much better job). It had been the best Saint Patrick's Day ever. Or maybe the worst.

Won't be repeating it anytime soon, anyway.

Posted by Mitch at March 17, 2006 05:59 AM | TrackBack