A description of my blog. http://www.my-site.com 3927848716816123263 Jobs I Have Sucked At 2008/05/#3927848716816123263 2008-05-21 As of this moment, my trench digging post has gotten over 70,000 hits. This is a new experience for me, and I'm not quite sure how to feel about it. It's like the carnival is in town or something. I've been linked to by EHOWA (warning: adult content) and Curmudgeonly Skeptical. I'm still getting a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, and there's a whole mini-controversy happening over at Reddit about how big of an a$$hole I am exactly. (Ironically, the one social networking site where the post hasn't made an impact is Digg.)

I still can't figure out what all the fuss is about. That post was just my attempt to make light of what was becoming a rather frustrating situation: I had hired a neighbor kid to dig a trench from Point A to Point B, and somehow I found myself not only having to micromanage the digging process, but also acting as the kid's career counselor. The exchange struck me as funny, so I decided to write it up as a sort of mock ditch-digger's handbook. I wasn't trying to say anything about capitalism or the minimum wage. I didn't write the post out of malice. I just thought it was funny.

"Sure," you say, "It's easy to laugh when the other guy is the one having to dig trenches in the hot sun."

That's a fair point. So maybe this would be a good time for me to let you have a laugh at my expense. I give you, therefore:


The complete list of every job I've ever sucked at and/or been fired from

My first job, when I was 14, was delivering newspapers. I was terrible at it. Somehow I always managed to miss at least one house. How do you ride your bike past a house that you've delivered a newspaper to dozens of times in the past, with a bag full of newspapers around your neck, and not think, "I should deliver a paper to this house"? I don't know, but I did it. Just about every day, for three months, when I finally quit in frustration.

My second job was bagging groceries. It's hard to screw up bagging groceries (put the bananas on top), but I was terrible at customer relations. I would bag the customer's items in silence, and then glumly follow them to their car, not saying a word. I think the customers used to draw straws to see who would get stuck with me. A lot of people went into that store looking for bread and milk and left wanting to hang themselves.

I was also excruciatingly bad at locating items in the store. A customer would make the mistake of asking me where the spaghetti sauce was, and I would run up and down the store in a panic, trying to remember where I had seen it. Oh, and sometimes I would work at the customer service desk, where you got to do fun things like make keys. Well, until you put the original key in the wrong slot one time, and grind it down so that the customer can't get home. They don't let you make any more keys after that.

We moved when I was 17, and I got another job at a grocery store. I was supposed to re-stock items that would run low during the day, like milk and soda. I was terrible at this. I couldn't ever remember how many I needed of what item, so I had to run back and forth a bunch of times. It took me like twice as long as a normal person to fill up the soda aisle. I think they thought I was retarded or something.

My first job in college was in a Christian book store. I sucked at that too. One time a guy came in looking to buy a Bible. I asked him what kind of cover he wanted. Which is, it turns out, exactly the question not to ask someone looking for a Bible.

After that I worked in a store in the mall that sold luggage and things like those metal balls that go click-clack on your desk. Another disaster. I couldn't make myself be interested in luggage or metal balls that go click-clack. I only had one tie, and I didn't like wearing it. I tended to hide in the back of the store until customers left. They didn't put me on the schedule after Christmas.

By some miracle of divine irony I managed to get a job at the on-campus job service desk, helping other college students find employment. I was marginally competent at that, although I came in late so often that I was nearly fired several times. After graduation, to the relief of my managers, I was no longer eligible to work there.

Did a bunch of odd jobs after that. One time I painted an apartment. I accidentally painted all of the ceilings with the paint that was intended for the bathroom. It was high-gloss paint. When you walked inside, it looked like the ceiling was wet, and it was going to drip some kind of horrible ooze on you. It felt like being in a cave. They let me go after that.

Got a job cataloging legal documents for class-action lawsuits. Was pretty terrible at it, but through some fluke was promoted to quality assurance, where there was nobody to see all the mistakes I was making. I found that if I arrived five minutes after the previous shift left, I could get a great parking spot. I was fired after being five minutes late every day for several weeks.

Got a job as a pizza delivery guy. Got lost a lot. Delivered a lot of cold pizzas. Didn't like being yelled at to sweep the floors when there weren't any customers, so I walked out.

Worked loading trucks at the Amway warehouse. It was like playing Tetris in 3D. I'm terrible with spatial relations. My line kept backing up and other workers had to keep coming to help me. Got yelled at a lot. Decided to quit before I had a nervous breakdown.

Worked at Blockbuster. I was actually okay at this job. I like movies.

Moved to California. Got a job with Mrs. Diesel's cousin, doing construction. I was bad at this as well, but not bad enough to be fired, considering I was only making $6 an hour. Mainly we worked at dairies. Sometimes I got to glue PVC water lines together. The neat thing about doing this at a dairy is that cow shit is everywhere, so you end up accidentally gluing big clumps of shit to your pants. Good times.

After several months of doing construction, I managed to B.S. my way into a job doing technical support for a company that sold software to auto body shops. I wasn't particularly good at this, but I found a niche writing up troubleshooting guides and other documentation for our department. The documentation grew into a website. I proved so good at building websites that eventually they created a full time position for me to maintain the site.

I quit that job after five years to do some "real software development." Spent 4 months doing "real software development" at a small consulting company before the dot com bubble burst. Seeing the writing on the wall, I left to start my own web development company.

I was, not surprisingly, bad at that too. I'm not a salesperson. I made a gradual transition over several months from self-employed to unemployed. Ran out of money. Had to sell our house to get the equity out.

Finagled a deal to buy 10 acres of farmland outside of Ripon, California, thinking that I could occupy myself while unemployed by building a house. Managed to get a job as a webmaster for a nearby city. Ended up working for the worst boss ever. Sent an angry email to him about what an ass he was. Got fired.

Spent a lot of time cutting down trees for firewood and trying to stave off depression. Got a call from one of the owners of the consulting firm I had worked at, asking if I was looking for work. Got a job at Galactic Invertebrates. Worked my ass off for three years on a bunch of projects that never saw the light of day, thanks to people like Lord Monkeyhands and Human Inertia. Quit in frustration.

Took a year off to build my house.

Got a call from another former co-worker, asking if I'd like to come do some work for Google.

That's where I work now. Google kicks ass. I build applications for them. I occasionally get lost on my way to work, and I'm late for a lot of meetings, but nobody really minds. It's fun, and I rock at it. I do a lot of my work at home. When I get bored, I go work on my landscaping for a while. Sometimes a neighbor kid helps out.



Your job is to help me break back into the top 5 at humor-blogs.com. Don't make me fire your ass.

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]]> 3017122124838399722 Why I Am What's Wrong with the World 2008/05/#3017122124838399722 2008-05-19 Since I started this blog about a year and a half ago, I've written a lot of absurd and offensive things. For example, I've suggested the Al Gore is the world's worst dictator. I've argued that the best way to avoid drowning when traveling with a Kennedy is to travel by boat. I've conjectured that the last item on the gay agenda is probably "drinks with Steve."

The funny thing is that nobody seems to get offended by these posts. The posts that people decide to get pissed off about are the ones where I say something that seems to me to be completely uncontroversial.

For example, one time I mentioned that I don't like being around ugly people. That post, as you may recall, earned me the name "f--ktard dingleberry."

Now am I wrong here, or is it a basic fact of nature that nobody likes being around ugly people? Saying that you don't like being around ugly people is about as controversial as saying that you don't like food that tastes bad, or that you don't enjoy Rob Schneider films. Before you scold me for disliking ugly people, try this little experiment: Go stand in the checkout lane at your local grocery store for five minutes. Imagine that you're throwing a pool party and you can invite one of two groups of people: the chubby troglodytes buying Alphabits and Doritos at the register in front of you, or the lovely folks staring warmly out at you from the covers of the 56 different womens' magazines that ensconce you in a cocoon of pouty lips and cleavage. Funny how your egalitarian principles suddenly take a back seat to aesthetics, isn't it?

I'm not saying this is an admirable trait, mind you. I'm not proud of the fact that I prefer beautiful people over ugly people. I think that it would be great if we lived in a society where magazines could put Nobel laureates and special ed teachers on the covers of magazines, no matter what they look like. Or, failing that, if we could somehow transplant the brains of the Nobel laureates and special ed teachers into the bodies of supermodels. Now that would be hot.

Another time I made the mistake of casting myself as a sympathetic figure in a disagreement that I had with Mrs. Diesel. The post was about the typical female trait of alternating between wanting their mates to talk to them for long periods of time about absolutely nothing and wanting their mates to know exactly what they are thinking without them having to say it. This is hardly a groundbreaking observation: Every married man has noticed that women love to talk pretty much all the time except for when they actually have something to say. I gave this as an example of male/female communications:
Woman: Hey, can you hand me that pencil?
Man: (Hands pencil to woman) Sure.
Woman: (Bursts into tears).
Man: Pretty disappointing pencil, huh?
That post got me called a misogynist and a sociopath, if you can believe it. Actually, I can kind of see the sociopath part, but misogynist? If it weren't for women, I wouldn't be able to tolerate people at all.

More recently, I wrote about the 19 year old neighbor kid who is digging trenches for my sprinkler system. Now if you can set aside my hyperbole about not wanting him to use the rototiller because he might eviscerate himself, forcing me to bury him in a shallow grave in the orchard, this post amounted to me explaining to this kid why I was paying him $8 an hour to dig trenches.

I don't want to get scolded by Suzy for explaining the joke, but to me the humor of that post arises from the fact that the answers to all of his questions would be crushingly obvious to anyone who has ever held any kind of job. Why do I have to dig trenches? You don't. Why don't you dig them yourself? Because I don't want to, and I have the money to pay somebody else to do it. Why are you only paying me $8 an hour? Because I can.

This post got a huge reaction. My good friend Glacial Spain Stumbled it, which led to several other people stumbling it. As of this morning, over 20,000 people have visited that post. That's TWENTY THOUSAND people. By way of comparison, I am one person, so if I visit a post, that's one person visiting a post. That post has gotten TWENTY THOUSAND times that many people visiting it. Crazy, right?

Most of the visitors got the joke, but a few were egregiously offended by the notion of me hiring someone to do something that I didn't feel like doing. One commenter said:
Yeah, digging trenches sucks. But so do you. You've got a kid sweating his ass off @ $8/hr for you, so that you can have a cheep sprinkler system and YOU mock him.... It's people like you, who demean honest working people, who give capitalism a bad name and who need a lesson or two in the art human dignity. But then, I'm sure that the painful experiences of others, is little more than a laughing matter, to the likes of you.
I take issue with this. It is not "little more than a laughing matter" to me. It is a laughing matter plus a cheap sprinkler system. That may not matter to you, but it's important to me. As for people like me giving capitalism a bad name... really? You don't think maybe the Enron debacle and the Bear Stearns bailout have me beat there?

By the way, I wasn't mocking him. He really did ask all of those questions, and most of them I answered to his face, more or less the way I wrote them in the post. He would grumble about how much digging sucks, and I would say, "You got that right. Why do you think I'm not doing it?"

I also took the time to explain to him that everybody has to work shit jobs when they are young. When I was younger, I pulled weeds, mowed lawns, moved furniture, worked on an assembly line, delivered pizzas, hauled lumber... pretty much every kind of crap job you can imagine. You know what I was doing four years ago today? I was unemployed after the dot com bust, so I spent my days cutting down almond trees for firewood in the hopes of making enough money to move my family out of the 900 square foot apartment we were living in. One time a relative needed a fence built in their backyard, so I spent a few days doing that. You know how much that job paid? If you said "$8 an hour," give yourself a gold star. I was 34 years old at the time. So please don't lecture me about exploiting the youth. I work shitty jobs when I need to, and avoid it when I can. Anybody with half a brain does the same.

There is one lesson to be learned from digging trenches, and it's that digging trenches sucks. I think I've done my part to help this kid learn that. Besides giving him lemonade and telling him not to blow his money on a new iPod, there's not much else I can do for him.

What I've learned from these comments is that the thing people are most offended by is reality. Well, not reality so much as someone pointing out the way things are. You breeze through the checkout lane with Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Jessica Simpson and every other busty Jessica staring longingly out at you from the covers of magazines (women's magazines, no less!), but you get offended when I tell you that I don't like ugly people. You don't have a problem buying clothes at Wal-Mart that were made by some 12 year old in China making 16 cents an hour, but you bitch and moan about me not adequately mentoring my 19 year old ditch digger. He's old enough to vote, for Pete's sake! He could be drafted and sent to Iraq! And you're mad because I'm paying him to dig trenches? Give me a break.

Ok, this is turning into a bit of a rant, so let me leave you with my all-time favorite comment, also provoked by my trench-digging post:
this is actually very asinine... people like u are the reason why college is necessary, you greedy bastard.
I laugh every time I read that. Can someone explain to me what that means, and how it's an insult? Because I keep trying to figure it out, but I'm not getting anywhere.

I expect you back here bright and early tomorrow morning for the caption contest poll. Bring your shovel.


Ugly people are always welcome at Humor-blogs.com.

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]]> 4712882138781674364 Can you dig it? 2008/05/#4712882138781674364 2008-05-14 Dear 19 year old neighbor kid whom I’m paying eight bucks an hour to dig trenches:

You probably won’t read this, but I’ve noticed that you have a lot of questions regarding your position in our organization, and I wanted to write down some answers so that I would have the information you require readily available.

Question 1. Why do I have to dig trenches?

The short answer to this is, “You don’t.” You choose to dig trenches because you have a maxed out credit card and a phone bill that you have no other way of paying off. Not to mention the fact that your phone is broken, so until you buy a new one, you’re paying for a phone you can’t use. These circumstances are the result of choices you made. I’m not sure where your confusion on this issue is coming from.

Question 2. Why don’t you just dig them yourself?

Because digging trenches pretty much blows. Surely you’ve learned that much during your tenure here. If you can pay someone to dig your trenches for you, I highly recommend it.

Question 3. Why do you only pay me $8 an hour?

Because you have demonstrated that you will dig trenches for that amount.

Question 4. What if I quit?

Then I will have to spend ten minutes to find another teenage kid willing to dig trenches for $8 an hour. And you will still have a credit card bill, a phone bill and a broken phone.

Question 5. Where are you going to find somebody else willing to dig trenches for $8 an hour?

Believe it or not, digging trenches is not considered a high-skilled occupation. Anyone with opposable thumbs can dig a trench. An orangutan could dig a trench. The only reason you never see an orangutan digging a trench is that orangutans have an irrational hatred of underground sprinkler systems. Although on second thought, they would probably just hire chimpanzees to dig their trenches anyway, because orangutans are smart that way.

There are actually people risking their lives to sneak across the border into this country to have the opportunity to dig trenches for $8 an hour. And as an added bonus, most of these people speak little or no English.

Question 6. Why don’t you just rent a trencher?

Because renting a trencher would cost me $70 a day. A trencher is loud and unweildy, and I would have to constantly attend to it to make sure that it is going the right direction.

Actually, you make a pretty good point. Let me think about this one.

Question 7. What do I have to do to get a raise?

Generally speaking, to get a raise, you have to do something to increase your value to your employer. One way for you to do this would be to save me money by working harder and/or faster. I am going to assume you are not interested in that option.

Another possibility is to save me time. You could do this by, for example, not making me repeat the instructions for digging a trench three or four times. Another possibility would be for you to dig pretty much right where I tell you to dig, rather than digging holes in random locations throughout the yard. Or, you know, drifting off on non-digging related activities.

Question 8. Am I going to have to dig trenches for the rest of my life?

Probably not. Honestly, I’m not sure digging trenches is your strong suit.

Question 9. Why can’t I do something more interesting, like run the rototiller?

Because if you rototill the way you dig, you will most likely eviscerate yourself in short order. Then I will have to bury your remains in a shallow grave in the orchard to avoid liability for your demise. And as we’ve established, I hate digging.

Question 10. If I work over eight hours in a day, can I get overtime?

Yes. You will be alerted in the event of any trench-digging emergencies that require round-the-clock digging. Keep your phone with you at all times.


If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend:

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]]> 7457044145799343209 Does Not Compute 2008/05/#7457044145799343209 2008-05-12 At my first “real” job, doing technical support for a software company, I worked with a guy who used to make all sorts of ill-thought-out claims. His claim to have invented a perpetual motion machine even made it into my book.

One time this guy stated – pretty much out of the blue, as I recall – that he thought metaphors were pointless. He didn’t understand why people used metaphors rather than just coming out and saying what they meant.

Now this is a stupid thing for anyone to say, but it’s particularly stupid for someone who works as a computer support technician. As confusing as technology can be, try explaining to someone how to save a document in a folder in Windows without using any metaphors (hint: you can’t use the words ‘document,’ ‘folder,’ or ‘windows.’)

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that my co-worker was on to something. A big part of our job was to explain to people what was wrong with their computers, and this task is made much simpler when one refuses to use any metaphors.

You want to know why your computer isn’t working? I’ll tell you why. First of all, it won’t boot up. ‘Booting’ is short for ‘boot-strapping,’ which refers to the act of ‘pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps.’ That’s a metaphor. Computers don’t have boots, much less boot straps, and they certainly can’t pull themselves up by them.

Your computer is not exactly on the cutting edge. It is incapable of understanding any commands you issue to it. It won’t even respond to a ping.

Your computer has no software installed on it. Installing is something you do to sinks and alternators.

Your computer can’t display windows. It has no available memory. It has no free space on its hard drives. None of its devices have drivers.

Your computer can’t talk to your printer, your monitor, your digital camera, or any other devices connected to it. It has no documents, spreadsheets, or any other types of files stored on it, and no folders or directories to put them in. Not even a recycle bin. Your computer might be able to print, but not in landscape or portrait settings. Good luck with that.

Your computer can’t connect to the web or any other networks. You can’t upload or download anything. You can’t visit any sites because you can’t send any data packets over any pipes, no matter what port you specify. Your computer doesn’t recognize any other computers in the domain. It can’t even use dialup. You can’t log in because won’t accept your password. It is incapable of acting as a client, server, or peer. It can’t share data. Your computer has no bandwidth. Not only can you not send any emails with attachments, you can’t send mail at all.

The upside is that your computer has no viruses. Not a single trojan or worm. No spyware has been installed on it. You have received no suspicious cookies. You have received no junk mail or spam.

Your computer’s drives do not need to be defragmented. Its firewall has not been breached, and you do not need a better virus shield. It does not have registry rot. It has no bugs. It is not acting up, it has not gone haywire, and it is not on its last legs.

To be honest, I really can’t tell you what’s wrong with you computer right now. Ping me later and maybe I’ll have the bandwidth to look into it.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend:

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]]> 5734833342588869623 Finally, a Post You Can Sink Your Teeth Into! 2008/04/#5734833342588869623 2008-04-28 One can learn a lot of interesting things working at Google.

I was surprised to learn, for example, how easy it is to be turned into a werewolf.

I am not at liberty to disclose the exact nature of the project I’m working on, but I don’t think that I’m spilling any state secrets by revealing to you that it’s related to lycanthropy. You might have guessed as much, yes?

During the course of this project I’ve done a fair amount of research on werewolves. Most of the information I’ve come across is fairly banal: the werewolf’s vulnerability to silver, his aversion to bright light, his susceptibility to wolfsbane due to that plant’s origin as a weed that sprouted from a puddle of drool of the the demon dog Cerberus, etc.

Now I know I've been a little out of touch lately, but I think I still know my readership well enough to place all of you into one of two classes: (1) Those of you who are interested in becoming a werewolf, and (2) Those of you who are interested in avoiding becoming a werewolf.

To those ends, I have put together a brief, categorized list of Ways of Becoming (or Avoiding Becoming) a Werewolf. Those of you who are completely indifferent to the prospect of becoming a werewolf may skip this section.

Category 1: Congratulations / Condolences! You’re Already a Werewolf!
Lycanthropy is often an accident of birth. As such, there is a chance that you are already a werewolf. You are most likely a werewolf if:

1. You are the seventh-born son. (France, Portugal and Brazil only. Sorry, Argentina!) Sadly, lycanthropy is still a male-dominated profession, although in Brazil the seventh daughter has the opportunity to become a mule with fire in place of its head, known as “Mula-sem-cabeça" (Headless Mule). I swear I am not making this up.

2. You are the child of two warewolf parents. It’s not clear what happens if only one of your parents is a warewolf, but I bet it would make a good sitcom.

3. You were born on December 24 (Russia only). The upside to being a Christmas Eve baby in Russia is that people actually remember your birthday. The downside is that they celebrate it by chasing you through the village with torches.

Category 2: Curses and Enchantments
Many people become werewolves through some sort of magic. Usually an enchanted salve, potion or special beer is involved. Most experts agree that it was some combination of these elements that turned Billy Bob Thornton into a werewolf.



Wikipedia quotes one medieval authority who argued in a book he wrote that werewolves were actually sorcerers who voluntarily transformed themselves into wolves. The book’s diabolical nature is evident when one copies and pastes a passage into Microsoft Word, causing it to light up like a Christmas Tree of spelling and grammar errors:
The werewolves are certayne sorcerers, who having annoynted their bodies with an ointment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, does not only unto the view of others seem as wolves, but to their own thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they wear the said girdle. And they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in worrying and killing, and most of humane creatures.
I can’t quite parse that last sentence, but I think it’s safe to say that those certayne sorcerers were mostly worrying about whether they look silly wearing an "inchaunted girdle."

Category 3: Lycanthropy for the Rest of Us
“But wait,” you say. “I wasn’t born a werewolf and I hardly know any sorcerers. Does that mean I’m safe?” Or alternately, “But wait, I wasn’t born a werewolf and I don’t know any sorcerers who are worth a damn. Does that mean I have no hope of ever becoming a werewolf?” The answer to both of those questions is an unqualified no. After all, if you wanted qualified advice, you wouldn’t be here, would you?

The fact is that there are still several ways in which you could accidentally or intentionally become a werewolf. For example, let’s suppose that you were walking through the woods one night, and you became extremely thirsty. You kneel down, as any normal person would, and drink some water from a shallow impression in the ground. Then you go home, thinking that you are still not a werewolf.

Wrong! You are a werewolf! That impression in the ground was actually the footprint of a wolf, and drinking water from it has transformed you into a werewolf. I know, right? That will make you think twice before drinking water from a puddle that strange animals have been tramping through.

Even if you want to become a werewolf, you should still be careful. I mean, imagine if that puddle wasn’t water. Now not only are you not a werewolf, but you’re still really thirsty, because wolf urine is not nearly as refreshing as you might think.

The point is that it behooves you to take proper precautions, whether your goal is to become a werewolf or to avoid becoming a werewolf. Above all, avoid taking the ‘easy route’ to becoming a werewolf.

According to Wikipedia, you can become a werewolf through “the removal of clothing and putting on a belt made of wolfskin.”

I know, it sounds great: Just put on your wolf-belt and you’re a werewolf. Take it off, and you’re human again. Win-win, right?

Wrong. How do you think the other werewolves, who became accursed creatures of the night by virtue of dark sorcery or some freak accident of birth are going to react when they find out that you’re a skin-wearer? Hardcore lycanthropes don’t take kindly to the “weekend werewolf” sort. You’ll be lucky if they don’t rip off your wolf-belt and leave you naked in the woods, with werewolf gang signs written on your chest in blood. They will probably give you a wolf-belt wedgie, too.


I hope this post was useful to you, whether you are interested in becoming a werewolf, or intent on remaining a non-werewolf. Lycanthropy is a personal matter, and we should be respectful of one another's lifestyle choices.

Watch for my next post, in which I will explain the best way to torture and kill werewolves for amusement.


If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend:

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]]> 4479157128595006459 38? But You Seem So Immature! 2008/04/#4479157128595006459 2008-04-16 In two weeks I’ll be thirty-eight years old.

I like this age. You know what’s great about being almost thirty-eight? People stop expecting you to grow up. And you can stop pretending that you’re going to some day.

When you’re thirty-eight and you interrupt a meeting at work with a five minute puppet show starring a Cat5 cable and a laptop power cable, people don’t shake their heads and mutter something to each other about how immature you are. They still think you’re immature, but they accept it. They look at your receding hairline and salt-and-pepper beard and realize that this isn’t the first impromptu puppet show you’ve put on starring office equipment – and it most likely won’t be the last. They assume you know how inappropriate you’re being, and that bringing it to your attention isn’t going to change anything. In fact, now that I think about it, being in your late thirties is a lot like being retarded.

In a sense, I’ve been waiting to be thirty-eight all my life. I’ve always felt about thirty-eight. Even when I was in elementary school, I felt about thirty-eight. When the other kids were worried about getting picked last in softball, I was worried about what I was going to do with my life. I was a lot like Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, in Annie Hall:
Alvy’s mother: He’s been depressed. All of a sudden, he can’t do anything.
Doctor: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy’s mother: Tell Dr. Flicker. (To the doctor) It’s something he read.
Doctor: Something he read, huh?
Alvy: The universe is expanding...Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.
Alvy’s mother: What is that your business?
Grade school is a terrible place for a thirty-eight year old.

There were times in school when I was literally bored to tears. I used to fake illnesses so I could get out of doing math drills. School just dragged on, and on, and on, and there seemed to be no point to it. It was all just one colossal waste of time, and nobody felt the need to explain why I needed to be there. It was, in fact, solid real-world training for the quarterly all hands meetings at Galactic Invertebrates.

My strategy for dealing with this sort of tedium hasn’t changed much over thirty-eight years. It’s a two pronged strategy, consisting of (1) doodling pictures of Spider-Man in the margins of my “notes,” and (2) cracking inappropriate jokes.

At one of the first of the pointless all-day meetings at Galactic Invertebrates, the human resources director spent an hour explaining the organizational structure of the company. Which was amusing in itself, because G.I. had no organizational structure. She explained, to a room of blank faces, that G.I. was what was known as a “matrix organization.” She asked if any of us knew what a “matrix organization was.”

Up to this point I had been content with my drawing of Spidey dodging the many arms of Doctor Octopus, but when somebody feeds me a line like that, I can’t resist.

“Well,” I said. “I know that nobody can be told what the matrix is.”

The human resources director looked at me with the look that my mom has on her face while she’s reading this, but everybody else had a good laugh.

It’s not just business meetings where my involuntary boredom defense mechanism kicks in. The other day I was in a finance committee meeting at my church, where we were going over the budget for next year. As I am only the church’s treasurer because of some kind of divine joke, I never have anything useful to contribute at these meetings. I mean, unless you consider drawings of your friendly neighborhood web-slinger to be useful.

Eventually we got to the pastor’s salary, and someone was going through a book that listed the average salaries for employees in various church-related jobs.

“Hey,” I said. “Does that book break it down by denomination?”
“Yes,” he said. “Why?”
“I was wondering how much a couple of Baptists would run us.”

This little remark had the effect of completely derailing the meeting for ten minutes while we tried to ascertain what flavor of minister would give us the most bang for the buck. Very productive.

Just out of college I worked at a company that cataloged legal documents for class action lawsuits. It was the sort of mind-numbing job that computers do these days. A coworker and I used to amuse ourselves by making little adjustments to the letters on the outside of the bottles of Liquid Paper, so that the labels read “Squid Paint” or “Liquid Baby.” I even made one that read “Quid Pro Quo.”

When we ran out of unmolested bottles of Liquid Paper, I turned to writing lengthy missives for the company’s suggestion box. I once wrote a 500 word essay explaining why the company should get a trained monkey to go around the office refilling our coffee cups. I included a detailed cost-benefit analysis, in which I explained how much money the company would be saving through increased productivity. Then, at the very bottom I wrote in small letters:
P.S.: Please disregard my earlier request for a soda badger.
Paperwork bores me as well. I’m terrible at anything that requires attention to detail, and I suspect that only about 3% of the thousands of forms that I’ve filled out in my life have ever been read by anyone. Lately I’ve taken to hiding bizarre comments on any forms I have to fill out, in an effort to determine whether anyone is reading them. For example, on the application for my current job, this question appeared: “What was your reason for leaving your last job?”

They gave me a full line to respond, but I didn’t need it. I wrote a single word: RABIES.

Clearly it wasn’t a dealbreaker, as I got the job, and was never even asked to get any shots.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a little more tolerance for tedium, but my patience for people who deliberately waste my time has eroded at about the same rate. The net effect is that I’m at least as big a smartass as I was in fifth grade, but I’m much more confident about it now.

Well, I’d better get going. I think I’ve got a meeting to get to.

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]]> 4395520445866953953 Worst Boss Ever 2008/03/#4395520445866953953 2008-03-20 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 3rd 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.

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]]> 8232562261700060110 Alternating Between Love and Hate 2008/03/#8232562261700060110 2008-03-19 Sorry about yesterday's little rant. I don’t think Grûndir realized that many of you are newer readers, and therefore are not familiar with his terrifying visage. For those who don’t know, Grûndir the Implacable is one of the nine Nazgûl, or ring-wraiths, who once served the dark lord Sauron. Grûndir fell on hard times after Sauron’s fall, taking on various odd jobs until eventually being hired by the Mattress Police to dispatch troublesome memes that I don’t feel like dealing with. He’s also good at rooting out the gophers and hobbits that continuously tear up my lawn.

(See, so now that I’ve explained it, it’s really quite funny, isn’t it? I mean, scrap-booking? Come on!)

And if dealing with the inconsolable Grûndir wasn’t enough, I woke up this morning feeling as if I were in a thick fog. I think it’s because of the translucent plastic sheets that the painters put over the windows yesterday. Still, it’s kind of creepy. I feel like I’m on the wrong side of a Camus novel.

On top of all that, I continue to have car troubles. I picked up my car from the shop yesterday, drove a mile and a half in the direction of Mountain View, and then stalled by the side of the road. Evidently my alternator is bad – which is precisely what, despite having the mechanical aptitude of a seven year old girl, I suspected the last time my car stalled, on the way to work last Thursday. The mechanic supposedly checked the alternator when I brought it in before, but it tested ok. So it works fine as long as the car is in the shop, but quits as soon as I get on the road. I guess that’s why they call it an alternator.

As a result, I haven’t actually been to work since last Thursday, which is pushing it (ha!) even for me. Thankfully my boss is very understanding, and is also quite aware that I’m a complete idiot as far as doing anything concrete and practical like fixing a car or getting somewhere on time. I’m trying to cultivate a sort of rock star image at work, so that people assume that I must be the most phenomenal programmer ever, since I sure as hell can’t do anything else right. Phase one of that plan is right on track.

Did I mention how cool my boss is? She's so cool that she even reads this blog sometimes. Isn't that awesome? I just sent her an email telling her that I won't be in until after 1pm today, because my alternator is in the process of being fixed, and I bet she won't even fire me. Isn't she the coolest?

Okay, so this ended up being kind of a pointless post, but I'll make it up to you tomorrow. In the past I've regaled you with stories of the second and third worst bosses ever, His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands and Human Inertia. And now that I've told you about the best boss ever, I think you're finally ready to hear the story of the worst boss I've ever had.

I'll see you tomorrow, if I'm not stuck on the side of I-580 in Livermore.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend:

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]]> 6221331917435774840 Hasta la Vista, Monkeyhands (part 2) 2008/01/#6221331917435774840 2008-01-30 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.

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]]> 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.'


Humor-blogs.com loves cookies.

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]]> 8579341665654348676 World's Foremost Authority on Sarcasm 2007/11/#8579341665654348676 2007-11-21 Lately I've hinted -- not very subtly -- that I'm now working for Google. I'm technically not a Google employee, but I'm working onsite at the Google headquarters on some internal projects for them. I didn't want to say too much at first because I wasn't sure how much I could tell you without getting in trouble. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm tempting fate with this post, as I was once fired from a job over an email that I sent the day before the Thanksgiving weekend. I won't go into detail on that now, but let's just say that I came into work the next Monday and couldn't log in to my computer. Some people just don't appreciate the fact that I'm the World's Foremost Authority on Sarcasm.

Presumably, though, Google knows this about me, as they are the ones who gave me the title. If you look up "sarcasm" on Google, you'll see my picture. Well, ok, not my picture, but a picture I made. Seriously. Go to Google Image Search and type in "sarcasm." The number one result is a fake motivational poster that I made. Pretty cool, huh?

sarcasm

Google did a background check on me before they hired me, and I have to assume that the background check included, well, Googling me. You can find out just about every interesting thing about me by looking at the first page of results on Google: I'm a software developer, the author of Antisocial Commentary, the mastermind behind MattressPolice.com and Humor-Blogs.com, the treasurer of my church, and a finalist in the 2006 Wildfowl Carving Competition, Division F (Decorative Lifesize Wildfowl).

Er, that last one might be someone else with the same name. I don't recall carving any wildfowl in 2006, although in 1991 I did sculpt an uncanny ceramic replica of my college roommate watching TV. See? His name is George.

georgeAnyway, I'll avoid saying anything bad about Google while using Google's blogging platform to talk about working at Google. I'm smart that way.

To be honest, I have nothing bad to say at this point. Working at Google is surreal. First of all, the campus is HUGE. I have a terrible sense of direction, which has resulted in me wasting about a day and a half over the past few weeks looking for my car. You wouldn't think that a company whose flagship product is an empty web page with a textbox in it would need fifteen buildings and ten thousand employees, but I guess someone has to run and fetch all those search results. ("Yes sir, I think we have 'donkey sex.' Let me just run over to the Donkey-Donut building a minute.")

It's like a small city, except that the city is populated by the people that you used to make fun of in high school. (I can say that because I'm one of those people, so suck it.) And now they're running the world and getting paid very well for it. When the movers and shakers are in Northern California, they don't go to Sacramento, they go to Mountain View. Last week Barack Obama was there. The week before that, Tony Bennett and the guy who run the human genome project swung by (not together, but wouldn't you love to be a roadie on that tour?). And then there was that little surprise show by a band you may have heard of called Matchbox 20. And that's just since I started working there, in October. The campus is just down the street from Shoreline Amphitheater, and there's some question as to which venue has better concerts.

Steve Martin - The JerkThere are 16 gourmet restaurants on campus, and they're all free. That's right, if you work there (or even if you're a contractor like me), you can eat lunch and dinner for free. There's a hardware depot in every building where you can pick up an ergonomic keyboard if the standard issue one you have isn't cutting it. Oh, and maybe a new mouse. And a mouse pad. And a webcam. And some noise-canceling headphones. And a remote control. And a paddle game. And this chair. And that's all I need.

It's like working at one of those dot com companies in 1999, before everything went to hell. Massage chairs, a dry-cleaning dropoff, lounges with arcade games and fridges stocked full of soda... It's like heaven with cubicles. I know, it doesn't sound right, but now you're getting an idea of how weird it is.

I could go on, but I've probably said too much already. I should probably try to avoid upsetting the bigwigs -- at least until they've gotten to know me a little better. I mean, for all I know they don't realize that I'm also the World's Foremost Authority on "Harry Potter Satanism" and "Crack Whore Barbie."

Harry Potter Satanism

Crack Whore Barbie

Humor-blogs.com is located in the Hummus-Humus Building.

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]]> 921161778511228604 Human Inertia 2007/08/#921161778511228604 2007-08-01 The third worst boss I ever had was a guy I called Human Inertia. This is when I worked for Galactic Invertebrates, which was an innovator in the field of bending over to a**holes with money. As I once wrote regarding GI,
The very name of the company heralds its commitment to going to unprecedented lengths to seek out new life forms and bend over for them. You remember when scientists found water on Mars and there was a buzz about how Mars might once have supported life? Well, GI immediately put together an expedition which traveled to Mars, went back in time ten million years, scoured the surface of the planet until they found a small patch of primitive lichens, and bent over for them. That's how good they are.
Human Inertia was paid six figures to prevent anything upsetting from happening at Galactic Invertebrates, such as "work" or "productivity." His motto was that if you haven't done anything, then you haven't done anything wrong. Human Inertia was a WMD (Well Meaning Dufus) who, like George W. Bush, had an MBA. (That should be good for a few Google searches).

Human Inertia was my direct supervisor, which meant that I spent a lot of time explaining my job to him and walking around him. Every week we would have a team meeting at which I would tell him what he had failed to prevent me from doing over the course of the previous week. He would throw some additional obstacles at me, which I would ridicule or ignore, depending on my mood. One time he told me that I wasn't really allowed to work from home two days a week, to which I responded, "Okay, but I'm going to keep doing it." I smiled to indicate that it had been a good talk.

At the end of the meeting we'd review the Action Items that had been assigned. Occasionally Human Inertia would take an Action Item, just for laughs, like that time I pretended to be lifting an 80' tall bronze statue of a horse.

If productivity was measured in PowerPoint presentations, Human Inertia would have single-handedly skewed the GDP. He had slides for every possible made-up statistic or unlikely hypothetical situation. There was virtually no correlation between anything on the slides and anything that actually existed. There were slides for profitability, customer satisfaction, gnomes, unicorns.... Eventually the presentation would devolve into a impenetrable Mobius strip of self-reference: "Here's a graph showing the ratio of time I spend doing PowerPoint Presentations to time time spent doing actual work; here's one showing the percentage of graphs in this presentation containing pure fabricated nonsense; here's a graph showing the alarming escalation of the the pointlessness of these graphs...."

At one point there was a plan under discussion that involved getting approval from Human Inertia before starting any projects. I was astounded that they would consider such a plan, because it would essentially prevent any work from ever being done. Every proposal would languish in limbo forever, collecting dust on Human Inertia's desk. I was all ready to raise a big fuss about this new process being completely unworkable when I remembered a crucial fact: Before it could be enacted, the approval process itself would have to be approved by Human Inertia. Needless to say, that was another horse that didn't get lifted. This would not be the last time that I would be spared by the H.I.P. (Human Inertia Paradox), in which the prevention of work is prevented by the prevention of work.

The only thing that really worried me about Human Inertia was that he was technically in charge of the company's finances. I tried not to think about it, but every once in a while he'd say something so dumb that I'd have to immediately run to the bank and cash my paycheck, just to make sure they had real money in their account.

He was the kind of guy who used to repeat idiotic urban legends like the one about how the average person swallows four spiders a year in their sleep. I can't fathom what, if anything, is going on in the head of someone who repeats something like that. Did he imagine that there was a university somewhere that had greenlit a study in which people were observed for 8 hours every night to find out how many spiders they swallowed? I tried to envision what the log book for that study would look like:

Day 1: No spiders
Day 2: No spiders
Day 3: No spiders
Day 4: No spiders
Day 5: No spiders
Day 6: No spiders
Day 7: No spiders
Day 8: No spiders
Day 9: No spiders
Day 10: No spiders
Day 11: No spiders
Day 12: No spiders
Day 13: No spiders
Day 14: No spiders
Day 15: No spiders
Day 16: No spiders
Day 17: SPIDER!!!!
Day 18: No spiders
Day 19: No spiders
Day 20: No spiders
...

What would the interpersonal dynamics of such a study be? Would the observer tell the subject if they swallowed a spider on a given night?

"So, how'd you sleep last night, Bob?"
"Umm, pretty good. Why?"
"Oh, no reason. No reason." (Stifles laughter)
"Did I... I swallowed a spider last night, didn't I?!"
"Nooooo.... I mean, I'm not really supposed to say either way, but no, you didn't."
"Really?"
"Really. No spiders. None. I haven't even seen any spiders, to be honest."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"Okay, good. But you would tell me if I did, right?"
"Well, I'm not supposed to, but yeah, I would."
"Good, thanks. Whew. I feel better."
"Hey, that's what I'm here for. So... any weird dreams last night? Like maybe about something crawling into your mouth?"

It was bad enough when Human Inertia would blather on about swallowed spiders or string theory, but what really worried me was when he would pontificate on something business-related. For example, he once predicted, a few days before its release, that The DaVinci Code was going to be the top grossing movie of all time. Now I don't pretend to be a business expert or a movie expert (ok, sometimes I pretend to be a movie expert), but I could give you about 28 reasons off the top of my head why The DaVinci Code wasn't going to even going to outgross Forrest Gump, let alone Titanic. First, it's not a "family-friendly movie." Second, it got lousy reviews. Third, a lot of people planned on boycotting it because of its subject matter. Fourth, people want to see Tom Hanks playing a retard, not playing a smart guy with retarded hair. I could go on.

Human Inertia ranks only third on my list of Worst Bosses Ever because once you got used to him, he was pretty manageable. He had almost no attention span. I used to send him long, boring emails with some crucial information that I didn't want him to know buried in the third paragraph. He'd find out about whatever it was too late to stop it, and I would just shrug and say, "I sent you an email...."

If you really wanted him to know something, you had to break it into three bullet points, each no longer than this sentence. He could, on a good day, digest up to five bullet points, or 1 2/3 emails. He would copy and paste these bullet points onto a slide, which he would then present at the next quarterly meeting, along with a graph indicating that he fully understood roughly 14% of the bullet points he had been sent that quarter. I once joked that I was going to draw a cartoon of him as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. He would be saying to God, "This is great, but can you boil it down to three bullet points?"

He left Galactic Invertebrates shortly after I retired. I hear he's working for a big Silicon Valley company now. I won't tell you the name, but according to my thesaurus, it's a synonym for ignoramus and buffoon.

I hope they like PowerPoint presentations.



Did you enjoy this post? There's plenty more like it in my book, Antisocial Commentary. Order your copy and help me to not have to get a real job, so I can keep writing this crap. Thanks!

Humor-blogs.com has prevented more work from being done than any other website. Also, it has swallowed at least six spiders this year alone.

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