A description of my blog. http://www.my-site.com 2060059610547578703 Hasta la Vista, Monkeyhands 2008/01/#2060059610547578703 2008-01-28 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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