Pet (Print) Peeves

Ever since moving back to America, I have been utterly appalled by common Americans' unabashed willingness to flaunt everything about themselves on their car stickers. Where we live, the most prevalent things seem to be:

1. People displaying mock-Hawaiian emblems - e.g. hibisci, turtles, sandals, etc. - in a futile attempt to demonstrate how "Hawaiian" they are when in fact they only go there on vacation for a week every two years, during which time they annoy the real Hawaiian natives by being thoroughly ignorant tourists.
2. Though not necessarily stickers, flourescent spray paint proclaiming support for snotty preteens and their inconsequential sports teams. They just aren't complete without the requisite heinous spelling and grammar in 6" high lettering: "We love you Ryan! YOUR GRATE!"
3. Stick-figure family "self portraits", including dogs. Confidence tricksters around the county rejoice, knowing the full names of all the members of low-IQ households around town.
4. RIP memorials to dead people. Were these the people who were so in debt they couldn't afford a proper tombstone for their loved one? Are the ashes in the spare tire compartment?

I find this all much like living in a nudist colony of sorts. Loads of people have wrinkled, ugly, or coma-inducingly ordinary bits that they insist on wiggling at the world. I feel a palpable sense of embarrassment on their behalf.

For the most part, that's as far as it goes: a slight unease at having to focus on the dimply fat rolls of other people's lives. However, there is one sticker that pushes me into a cranky red oblivion:


I don't really know why it bothers me so much. Perhaps it's because the people who put these stickers on their cars purportedly have a deep commitment to the outdoors and outdoor activity that Big Bear Lake and Resort are famous for. If, indeed, they are so in touch with Mother Nature, how do they not know the simple difference between BEAR prints:


And DOG prints?


They might as well have a sticker on their window that says "Welcome to Stupidville!"

I also blame the creator of the sticker, whose standards were so lax that they could not even bother to a) check out the official Big Bear logo (seeing as how presumably they'd been there about a squillion times) or b) Google "bear print" before mass-producing emblems for public consumption.

I thought I was only surrounded by intellectual zombies at work. Now I realize that they're with me all the way there and all the way back too.

I Hope It's Not Contagious

Just how much air could possibly fit inside Airy Fairy's head? Ponder this...

I had a really tough time deciding how to decorate my cube when I first got assigned one after months of sitting with UI Dev Lead and one other developer in a bullpen. Left to my own devices, I'd rather not fill my workspace with useless kitsch proclaiming how much better my personal life is than other people's personal lives. Proclamations, I feel, are best left to the insecure.

But nothing could take away the fact that part of the cube wall was glass, and when Clueless Himbo Backstabber came to visit my neighbor, I didn't care for the idea of him seeing code on my screen and making up stories about how I was trying to hack into the corporate systems.*

I found an old relic from my first days at university which fits the bill, dimensionally. It is a map of my university town, labeled at the top very clearly:

Blackwell's
OXFORD

Actually, the latter line is much bigger - about 125 point. Even bats could tell what it says. If they could read.

So AF, our native 55 year old Lolita, drops by to chat with my neighbor. She mock-casually peeks over my way, and asks:

"Oh! Is that London?"

Uhhhh. I really didn't know what to say, except, "No.... It's Oxford..." I point to the big bat letters in an effort to help her understand.

"Oh, OK! It's just, it looked like London, with those streets!" She vaguely motions at the High Street and Queen Street.

It should look like Oxford, with that lettering, I desperately think to myself, in an attempt to understand what possible logic exists in this utterly soul-killing small talk. And every city has streets.

"Um," I just about manage to spit out.

"It looks like a very small place!" She breezily proclaims.

If you thought it was London 5 seconds ago, how in holy criminy can you now suggest that it's small? I will my phone to ring. Ring, dammit. Even a telemarketer would do.

"Er, Oxford's actually quite a big city," I stammer. Usually I'm halfway decent at playing to people's conversational gambits; Airy's given me what Americans would call "bupkus".

Eventually, bored of mingling with peons who don't compliment her brassy hair enough, she wanders off. I quickly scribble on my Potential Entrepreneurial Ideas List: "Sell AF's head to bouncy castle vendors."

*Stuff like this actually happens to me. Don't bother asking me about the time a deeply ignorant man who claimed to know enough technology to be a development team manager shopped me to corporate security because he thought it was suspicious that a business analyst was in the command line environment typing something that looked indented, like code. If he'd bothered to ask me or my manager, either of us would have explained that it was Perl, which I was using to write a small utility script for a user. But he thought I was just reading about gemstones I might find when I programmatically cracked the safe at the glowing core of the building. Yeah, after I regexed everyone to death.

Goodbye To The Bionic Seagull

Last year, after a vacation, I return to my desk to find a consultant unexpectedly sitting in the space next to me, grinning rather amiably.

It turns out Dough Boy couldn't cope with managing a team of five simple developers without having a meltdown every other day, so UI Dev Lead was brought in to spoon feed him pureed project plans. Despite my internal shock and bristling at the implications of his arrival, I find it difficult to contain my "Oooooooh, a stranger, from the OUTSIDE...." awe.

Over the better part of the next year, UIDL proves to be a man of the utmost integrity, incredible efficiency, wicked wit, and a staunch supporter. His impeccable project plans and frank leadership style - honed by constant assignments at Wall Street caliber firms - made the impossible happen: DB started to look passably competent.

Whenever we speak about the team, he employs a distinct talent for communicating his understanding of my frustration without actually indulging my cynicism.

Ever the diplomat, he tells me, "You have such vision. You could run this whole show. If only you would try a bit more tact."

I laugh. "That's never been my strong point. I tell it like it is, you know that."

"It's not worth winning every battle. It might be easier to win the war if you don't."

"Well, sir, if I win every battle, I will without doubt win the war," I flippantly counter.

UIDL smiles kindly and shakes his head. It is an expression he uses with me on a regular basis.

Before long, he tells me that he is moving on to another project in another state. I knew he was never going to be around forever - as is the nature of consultants - but on a project as permanently dysfunctional as this one, anytime was bound to be too soon.

There has been some delay in writing this final tribute to UIDL because it's taken me some time to get used to the landscape without him at the helm of the UI development group. Truly, he was a Bionic Seagull. He flew in, and instead of crapping all over the place, he actually cleaned up a bunch of turd before flying right out again.

I Believe In Bolognese

Another item for the list of things I believe in: The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Never mind that His Holiness looks like tapeworms feasting on larger portions of intestinal matter. It just proves that The Creator manifests Himself organically in everyday life.
Perhaps if I pray hard enough, He might use His Noodly Appendage to smite the opponents of reason on my project.

Growing Up, Part 2

Even if I do eventually turn into some semblance of a grown-up one day, that won't stop me from collecting all of these Developer Action Figures.

Growing Up

I had a revelation today. Amidst tortuous hours arguing a point for a centralized design "service" for creating screens, and attempting to sort through and learn about other people's very different viewpoints, I finally got blog-angry. If other people won't listen to me, and I'm tasked with making sure this thing turns out right, how am I ever going to make it work? What's the point? I should just let them do whatever the bleep they want to do and get what they deserve.

And then, I stopped.

I realized that I was going about it totally the wrong way round. If I stopped thinking about these meetings as me against the world, the picture looked totally different. Instead of looking for differences and trying to purge them, I should look for the similarities and try to build more.

Win people over, not defeat them in debate.

If I make my mission to make friends, instead of killing enemies, then the world suddenly becomes a much more interesting place. Is this what growing up feels like?

DWMZ Soundtrack

Every struggling blog, I feel, needs a good soundtrack. Partly courtesy of the defanged and hobbled Napster, here are some of the tunes which, together, attempt to form a crude representation of the mood here on DWMZ. You may have to register*; if you are paranoid, like Marvin and me, browse the lyrics instead:

1. Stuck In A Moment (U2) lyrics
   
2. Under Pressure (Queen and David Bowie, or David Bowie and Queen) lyrics
3. Seven Nation Army (The White Stripes) lyrics
4. Wild West Show (Big & Rich) lyrics
5. People Are People (Depeche Mode) lyrics
6. Welcome To The Jungle (Guns 'n' Roses) lyrics
7. You've Got To Serve Somebody (Marianne Faithfull/Bob Dylan) lyrics
8. Plastic Man (The Kinks) lyrics
9. Change (Lightning Seeds) lyrics
10. Big Town (OMD) lyrics
11. Opportunities (Pet Shop Boys) lyrics
12. I'm Going Slightly Mad (Queen) lyrics
13. Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Tears For Fears) lyrics
14. I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor) lyrics
15. The Show Must Go On (Queen) lyrics
16. Boss Of Me (They Might Be Giants) lyrics
17. One Horse Town (The Thrills) lyrics

And one which has nothing to do with anything at all, but which I consider to be a classic of the highest degree:

Doctor Worm (They Might Be Giants) lyrics

Also, if anyone out there knows of a reputable New Wave/New Romantic rehabilitation clinic, I would be much obliged for the details, and so would anyone who is unfortunate enough to be driven in my car.

*Through an un-cunning combination of clearing cookies before clicking on the Napster links, I have managed to bypass the registration process once or twice. Now we really know that Napster isn't run by hackers anymore.

The Hand Inside The Puppet Head

Strange things have been happening.

It all started last week. Development Manager -- once perfectly willing to nail gun me to the whiteboard for being the subject of randomly fabricated gossip -- performs a classic micromanaging monologue, stops, pauses, and turns to me.

"What do you think? Are you comfortable with this approach?"

Even more shockingly, after I cautiously demur with an explanation, he says:

"Okay, that sounds fine. Scratch what I said."

I brace, waiting to be peppered with roundwire sash pins....Nothing. Days later, instead of the typical grumbling about not getting things wrapped up in less time than people normally need to brush their teeth properly, he says to the group of us working out last minute changes:

"Excellent progress!"

Honestly, someone needs to call the Men In Black. Some alien life form is using the apparently slimy, sleazy, scheming, rug-pulling, heartless maniac and pretending (with a little too much effort) to be human. There is no other explanation possible for why, after a year of masking project difficulties by shifting project plan dates to fit the circumstances, he would suddenly proclaim in the team lead meeting:

"I have received feedback that we're always painting a rosy picture of the project when it may not necessarily be the case. If something is behind, if issues are cropping up, then we need to reflect that in these plans and be honest about them to the users. I cannot emphasize this enough."

If it's not extraterrestrial body snatching, the cynic in me suggests that maybe someone's just been royally spanked.

Then again, I recently learned that more people I truly respect on the team would not be here if not for DM's direct intervention against prevailing opinions. If those aliens aren't careful, their repeat visits may just trigger a government investigation. I won't tell anyone, though, if you won't.

Dream A Little Dream

Over the last four days, I repeatedly experienced a dream I haven't had in a very long time.

The one where I'm wandering around a bustling financial city center again, shivering, in the middle of July. Driven and bright people surround me -- ones who value the intellectual satisfaction of their jobs instead of the tokens of affluence that a salary affords. We find friends who we can laugh with till we all hurt, over very lengthy dinners out.

We talk about code, silly brain teasers, and tell horrible jokes.

Work is full of purpose, walking in and out of offices shared with valued colleagues. Between energetic debates about one topic or another, we all settle into focused quiet, occasionally staring out large windows facing onto a city blending old and new, water and granite.

Every 20th car outside might be an SUV.

Today I woke up. As the dream faded into memory and the sadness settled slowly into my heart, I pondered: Are the too-bad-to-be-true accounts which I describe here endemic in corporate life everywhere, or is it disproportionately exacerbated by a famously superficial locale? Is it the system, or is it the people?

The Zone: A state of mind? A state of play? Or just a different place in the state?

vole.icio.us

The campaign against the voles has begun. My weapon of choice:
However, I am unworthy of wielding such a widow-maker. It's more likely to be a recipe for DIY amputation than anything else, and I haven't got free healthcare anymore.

Anyway, we're talking about the person who stood for nearly 20 minutes in front of the Yummy Rodent Death Pops, frozen by moral debate - thus proving that while I might fancy myself an assassin, my aspirations far exceed my jelly-wobbly nerve. So I've stuck to the tried and possibly-true castor oil repellent.

If what I read on the internet and the back of the packet is correct, as the pellets dissolve into the earth and coat the voles' food sources, causing them gastric upset. Death, no can do. Next best thing: dishing up the equivalent of a really heinous burrito left in the sun for at least a couple days.

The theory goes that once the stinkers figure out that they regain regularity outside the bounds of our garden, they'll stop frequenting our hot dog stand and tell their friends too.

So far, it seems to be working.

I couldn't help but think, though, that this is the exact same approach that companies deploy on decent folk who try to get stuff done in an efficient manner. Want to round a number to three decimal places instead of two? Write up an issue! Discuss it with a Change Management Board! If the change is allowed, get approval from the user. Forget about phoning them up and dealing with it in 30 seconds - you have to get carefully worded proof in written format approving the change.

Every piece of unnecessary process installed in a company equates to sprinkling a bag of them Gassy Gurgling Granules all over the turf. Employees who just want simple jobs to stay simple start getting grumbly bums, and edge towards the door.

Yeah, blame it on the audits. Blame it on the shareholders. Blame it on the blame game. Whatever it is, it's a crackdown on good, old-fashioned trust for employees, users, and management. Corporate systems fail to be oiled by the honest social currency of trust, and I'm desperately curious why. Is it because people in general have become inherently less trustworthy? Or is it because companies of a certain size must necessarily be so risk-averse that they are willing to sacrifice productivity and innovation?

Unfortunately, it seems that life mimics the garden yet again. Those voles who decide to move on from our yard will populate other yards, where they will very likely experience more dodgy cuisine. And so on and so on, until they die of exhaustion.

I hear Google has a very good cafeteria, though.*

*I wonder if they serve vole-au-vents?

How To Digg One's Own Hole

As part of my gardening theme this week, I thought it most appropriate to explore Digg*. It's a relatively simple concept:

1. Sign up.
2. Submit web links.
3. Check out other submissions and vote on them ("Digg It" or "Bury It").
4. Follow the popularity of the links you, er, Dugg or submitted.
   
5. Feel really important as your links get promoted.
6. Cry as your links fall off the end of the rolling ticker, not having managed to set a throng of Web 2.0 denizens abuzz.
   

It's basically a beauty contest of regurgitated web content fluffed up by a community of will-never-bes (of which I proudly count myself as one), who sublimate their frustration at the mismatch between their achievements and their self-perceived authority by playing God with weblinks. The generic term for this, I believe, is a "mashup."

I prefer to think of it as a gigantic Web Hot Dog. A thousand parts of the pig - edible or not - blended into an unrecognizable pink paste, subjected to intense processing, and extruded into a friendly rounded shape for convenient consumption. Absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever, but surprisingly tasty and disturbingly addictive.

My own attempt at Digging, as you can tell from my paltry Dugg List, demonstrates patterns similar to voles in new territory, e.g. shallow holes scattered throughout cyberspace. It began with shameless self-promotion in the name of testing the waters. Sadly for me, only one other person Dugg my original vole post.

I then punted a New Scientist article which I honestly found intriguing. It had faultless spelling and NO apostrophe misuse to boot (something I only wish would catch fire in cyberspace). Obviously, only two other people and I value solid content and good grammar. Or, to gain more interest, should I say grammer?

In a quest to discover what people really like to see on the web, I placed my bet on a content-free but wildly entertaining link offering to tell me my typing speed. Clearly I was getting warmer.

Either lazy programming or a boundless sense of socialist optimism powers this site.

I resisted the urge to punish an informational pop-up dialog sporting a warning icon and the blatant lack of meritocracy. I figured that if this man managed to keep me on his website for an embarrassingly long period of time, typing chunks of the Gettysburg Address, I might as well spare a Digg for him.

My adventure came to a pause after I discovered a submission of a Slate writer's cautionary tale describing how he tried to experiment with Digg by promoting an article he wrote about Digg on Digg. Not only did I learn that my transgression of self-Digging could earn me a title of Hit Hog, but my head started spinning from the self-referential-ness of it all. People on Digg Digg themselves, Digg other Diggs, make friends with other Diggers (Digg my back and I'll Digg yours), Digg stories about Diggers writing about Digg. I had to sit down for a spell.

Is it democracy, or is it a collective ego-fest built on the shallow currency of clicks? I haven't really made up my mind yet, and until I do I may just keep lurking, making the odd crater here and there and becoming a hopelessly hooked Digg fiend. Mmmmm. Pass the mustard.

*It's yet another idea created by Time Travelling Dot Com Body Snatchers From 1999, whose foreheads are characteristically tattooed with big glassy pastel blue buttons labeled "Fund Me" in 12-point sans serif. Their hypnotic powers are such that people stop to stare and utter, "How are they making money?"

Trippin'

My heart bleeds for the chappie next door, who like many not-so-young men of the region seems perpetually trapped in an identity crisis of enormous proportion. Is he gangsta or is he white trash?

1. His gleaming pickup truck, perched high on sparkling clean tractor tires, screams white trash.
2. His lowered black Escalade with spinny hubcaps, proclaims gangsta.
3. He and his weedy, pale homies sit on lawn chairs on his driveway, drinking Bud Light. With rap and reggae blasting out the garage.
4. He owns a golf cart. With spinny hubcaps.
5. He probably reads the CNN website via Gizoogle.

It's an open-and-shut case, it seems, of Drumstick (Cornetto) Syndrome: fake chocolate on the outside, Vanilla Ice on the inside.

After many years in the IT industry, I have sadly observed that it too is increasingly populated by those who suffer similar identity crises. Gone are the days of through-and-through geek-mania. Where are the ponytails? Where are the Birkenstocks with white sport socks? Where are the black t-shirts tucked into too-short trousers?

Now, there are so few left who truly embrace technology, whose first love was not another human but a small black console with magical powers, who aren't ashamed in the least.

Welcome the new breed, who became technologists for one of two reasons:

1. Easy money; or
2. Cool factor.

Slowly but surely, the cube farms fill with folks in matching clothes who have watched the Matrix ten too many times and honestly believe that the shallow gold-diggers sitting on their laps value them for their looks. Never mind that their code or analysis reads with the literary quality of "See Dick and Jane Run." Don't you know there's a skills shortage going on?

All puff and no stuff, as my Finnish chum puts it. I can't help but feel incredibly sad.

Occasionally, however, I read stories of nerd clusters roaming free and happy in other parts of the country. I am glad for them, and my myopic eyes mist over at the thought of once again being surrounded by so many people true to themselves, embodiments of the Granola Factor - crunchy on the outside, and crunchy on the inside.

Bad Teams and Pest Control

As if it's not enough dealing with the insanity of a dysfunctional team for 8+ hours in a day, I now return home to a once thriving garden with select plants that have been buzzed to near ground level. Not to mention the wiggly tracks of dead grass in the lawn, emanating from the borders.

A thorough internet investigation reveals that the cause is rodent infestation -- microtus californicus, or voles, to be exact.


As I read more about how to stop these vegetation marauders, it strikes me how many parallels there are between the situation at work and the one in my borders.

They may look harmless, but they can do a world of damage in a very short amount of time.

One might guess that anything with the capacity to raze a plant with 20 2' long leaves to the ground in the space of one evening would be at least the size of a small breadbox. The sheer volume of organic matter should not by all accounts fit into a handful of furry black golfballs, especially ones that hardly make themselves seen.

Turns out, voles are burrowing animals which consume some obscene amount of thriving vegetation many times their own body mass daily, leaving behind piles of excretion in their surrounding environment. They love to make homes in areas of dense shrubbery, where they can hide from anything that can kill them.

And so it is with bad teams. Managers who hide in their offices and window cubicles (much like Dough Boy), covered by dense heaps of project plans and meetings, never surface often enough to be identified as pests. However, behind the scenes, their lack of intellect and slash-and-burn finesse turns happy and productive teams into a grumbling mass of discontentment in record time.

It's not just managers either; with peons, like Darth Hut or Soulless Himbo Backstabber, negative attitudes reproduce quickly and spread under bad visibility (accountability) conditions. The damage is especially potent when they are given direct input into hiring and mentoring.

They are related to lemmings.

As we all know, based on the wisdom handed down by video games, lemmings form large brainless herds which can be easily led -- in the absence of benevolent intervention -- off steep cliffs, down deep holes, or into walls.

'Nuff said.

Killing them is probably not an option.

I haven't the heart to buy or make poisons yet. For either the voles or the humans.

If you put them somewhere else, they will probably just come back.

Gardening forum participants report that catch and release ("Gopher Chauffeur") never really works unless the release occurs at least 10 miles from the catch location, preferably across a wide body of water or a multi-lane highway. One ingenious man painted the backs of the pests before setting them free, and was hardly surprised to find that weeks later, the matte-finish wonders had returned to his yard.

The catch and release is a common gutless upper-management technique whereby underperforming middle managers or other employees get re-deployed to other posts ("Loafer Chauffeur") -- either to isolate bad behavior and/or to accelerate resignation. But they're never put far enough away, and these folks manage by sheer dumb luck to achieve greater visibility or influence than ever before. Unfortunately, very few happen to drown or get run over on the return journey.

The sad reality is that NIMBY can be quickly followed by BIMBY: Back In My Back Yard.

Persuasive tactics have a mixed track record.

From chili powder to used cat litter to castor oil, various methods attempt to either put the voles on the run or give them the runs. Evidence suggests a mixed track record, and the application of such methods requires regular diligence.

Similarly, corporate deterrence employs increasing levels of discomfort: offsites, morale-boosting events, warnings, management workshops, etc. Occasionally, I've seen these things neutralize a certain level of unprofessional behavior. But without regular application, managers and other free-sadicals continue to work their aggro on suffering teams.

This shock therapy/convince-them-it-was-their-idea approach assumes a basic level of reasoning ability on the part of either the voles or the deadwood. As far as I can tell, these were the ones who, when God was handing out single-serve pasta salad bowls, didn't get sporks.

Natural predators work best.

Nothing works better at ridding an area of plague-ridden growth killers than something sharp, fast, and dangerous on the prowl for most of the day.

Introduce a top manager to a flagging project and within weeks they'll be lining up half-dead bodies and vital organs at the doorstep. In a good way.

Prevention is always the best cure.

If we'd known that voles were a major threat to gardens in this area, we would have taken every measure to keep them at bay from the start. There'll be no next time for these mini-Tribbles.

It's somewhat more impractical, however, for corporates to prevent infestation. It's not as if bad managers, programmers, or analysts cannot fit through 1/4" wire mesh.

I can't help but feel that one of the answers has to do with size. Larger gardens bring larger numbers of creatures, and more luscious plants invite hordes of plant-eaters. In smaller gardens and smaller companies, it's exponentially easier to build secure walls and perform regular maintenance to keep the groobies* out.

*My in-laws have unexpectedly expanded my vocabulary to include words like groobie (any of several small scurrying things that causes one to jump and, occasionally, to scream) and chod (a generalized term for anything that has to be scraped off a welly or which is generally transported in piles via wheelbarrow).