I Don't Make This Stuff Up

Airy Fairy, overheard talking to Perky Pet Analyst (an Ivy League grad):

"We'll be working on this stuff at the same time as Iteration 0... You know, the one before Iteration 1."

Work Sucks... Or Not

This afternoon, I spied a license plate holder in the office parking lot which stated "Work Sucks... But I Need The Bucks." At first I sniggered. For all of about half a second.

My brain then kicked in and protested deeply at the fact that there are people populating the workplace who simply don't care about what they do. The software they write means nothing to them, except as something they crank out just to pay their cable bills.

Am I alone in the world thinking this is incredibly shocking? The people who construct mechanisms through which everyday commerce transacts only do what's good enough not to get their behinds fired. They will not strive for the best. Because you and I are simply not worth it.

No pride, no care, no effort, just "Me, Myself, and I." How rude. How disrespectful. How utterly disgusting.

Have they ever considered the following two options?:

1. Work sucks because they suck.
2. Work sucks but that doesn't mean their work has to suck.

Nope. They've just given up and become white collar burger flippers, taking orders through glazed, expressionless faces and thinking no one will notice if they use a bun that dropped on the floor.

You may believe, on the basis of the ranting that you witness here on DWMZ, that I am one of those people. I admit that the content here could, at first glance, be classified along the same lines as the garden variety "I Hate My Job" blithering found in fine corporate workplaces everywhere, but here's the difference:

I care very deeply about what I do. I want to be surrounded by people who care too. There is nothing more important to my working life than striving to create the finest possible output representing the greatest value to the end consumer. Nothing beats getting a job done right, whilst being part of a team that gets to laugh and build cool (and beautiful) stuff together every day.

My frustration lies in the fact that I can't find the love in IT these days. Nonetheless, just because I'm heartbroken at the state of affairs doesn't mean I'll ever stop trying to care. You'll never catch me spitting in my use cases.

Work doesn't suck... It's the people preventing good work getting done who suck! And they're the ones who think work sucks - because doing it properly is just too stinking hard.

How To Be An A-Lister

Begging your pardon for my lack of content recently. Like a hamster in a ball, I am happily isolated yet careening to an unforseen yet quite amusingly steep set of stairs, e.g. the next iteration.* Still, carpe diem**.

To continue the thread of being a non-entity, a very enlightened person pointed out this link on how to become an A-lister. It resonates quite a bit with my suggestion that perhaps the incestuous world of Web 2.0 might perhaps be, amongst other things***, a collective ego-fest. It's nice to know I'm not completely alone in this thought.

Either that or I'm just bitter that no one links to me yet. But hey, what did you expect from a raw veggie?

*Nope, no project plan still. You really didn't have to ask, did you?

**I will not disabuse Airy Fairy's of her belief that this means "Fish of the Day" in Latin restaurants.

***Like soapy containers of nothing that sting your eyes if they pop too close to your face.

Drifting

These days, I've got no one but myself to keep me company. Substitute Bionic Seagull has gone on vacation, and I'm tied up with a special project. The special projects are just about as much fun as one can have without a match, an aerosol can, and a spider the size of a quarter. I trundle along, geeking out as much as I can in a pseudo-language, humming away in my personal Happy Bubble.

No meetings, no drama drag queens, no overhead... Pure bliss.

It's very much like how this blog floats in the ether, the ranking bobbing up and down. It lurks along the bottom, but the movement patterns trace out a story of life and death on the open seas; thousands of blogs disappear from day to day, but thousands more take their place. Waves of hope crest over the neglected and decaying.


I'm just pleased the number's actually higher this time around. But I know, just as at work, it's only a matter of time before I hit a brand new low - certainly, an achievement in and of itself. And as many of you know, I'm all about achievement.

The Man Is OK If You Are The Man

Working For The Man: £1 of flesh.

Working With The Man: £10 to turn tricks.

Working For The Man Long Enough To Get Valuable Knowledge To Leave And Be The Man: Priceless.

For Everything Else, There's Social Security.

The recent publicity garnered by my Paw-In-Law's young company reminded me of the advice PIL imparted to me one day some years ago on the way to the airport. No, not the one about how to groom eyebrows by encouraging a bonfire with a can of petrol.*

Yes, the corporate world truly smells.

Yes, there's so much that one could do to make it better, more efficient, higher quality.

No, it really doesn't get much better.

No, you can't just run away. Yet.

There is a bright side, he said. If you stay really, really quiet, and filter out all the nuggets of industry knowledge from the company muck, when the time is right you can strike out on your own with like-minded souls and be a model of how things should work. And indeed he did, along with a couple of others close to us who have recently gone into phone booths and come out as entrepreneurs.

Of course, the road is paved with uncertainty and some struggle. But seeing PIL succeed in such a relatively short amount of time is heartening. One day, I may yet follow that fine advice. Until then, I would like to do my part in chipping away at the conspiracy of silence surrounding big company insanity.

As for the other advice, I'm still weighing it up. Never having to wield tweezers again is a distinctly tempting possibility.

*PIL's adventures in DIY have resulted in several masterpieces: new windows, massive extension, beautiful patio. They have also resulted in the occasional DITY (Do It To Yourself).

Our Fudge Runneth Over

Substitute Bionic Seagull comments to me today that things are awfully quiet on the project as of late. He's finding it spooky, especially after having been pestered for two weeks solid to spend all his time and more doing janitorial work on BSA byproducts. I explain to him that the lull is due to release and iteration "planning."*

"Don't you worry," I assure him, "Enjoy your free time while you can. It's only quiet now because management are busy boiling up some scalding chocolate sauce and lining up Ziploc bags."

"Eh?"

I explain to him that it will take all of 5 minutes for management to pour too much super-heated fudge sauce into sandwich bags which are too tiny and not heatproof. After taking 10 minutes to figure out how yellow and blue make green, they will casually but forcefully fling the overladen bags to the team.

The bags will then promptly explode, leaving brown goo all over the equipment, staff, and innocent bystanding users. Mayhem and panic will break out.

As the minions struggle to clean their environment, just about near the point when everything looks respectable and the skin grafts start healing over, management will ask everyone why they failed to deliver beautiful chocolate sundaes, and why the whole place looks like...

SBS nods slowly with a thoughtful smile spreading across his face. Either he agrees with me or he's considering a Haagen-Dazs run.

*T minus 4. If a project plan gets talked about in a war room but no one hears about it, is there actually a project plan?

Lost

T minus 10 to the start of a new project, and still no sight of a project plan. I am writing this under cover of darkness, with only a faintly smoldering wreck of a cubicle to illuminate my scribbling. The stench of charred flesh from the intense spontaneous blaming is almost too much to bear.

Many have gone insane from the uncertainty of it all. Will the new project plan rescue them, or will they be left behind on this God-forsaken old project, stalked by wild production support beepers in the night?

As I peer out from behind my special project shelter, I hear groans emanating from analysts with severe back wounds. Their eyes, glazed over with fear, stare into space; their hands, still clutching rudimentary and rather dull accusations, strike out at all who pass, even those who try to help them. Unfortunately, they are beyond help. Their use cases show no vital signs whatsoever.

Along the edges of the destruction, maniacal laughter of scavenging developers peppers the night air. After several fractured ambush attempts on the analyst encampment, they have managed to run off with disjointed fragments of business process modelling. They have used these broken pieces to construct twisted, leaky structures for shelter. Many of them, as a result of exposure to the toxic document dust cloud hovering over the area, have contracted terminal refactoring illness. The main symptom appears to be keyboard-shaped indentations in the forehead region.

I try to huddle deeper into my corner, but my hands only find more hard places and rocks behind me. Instinctively, I pull my keyboard and mouse closer to me. I am getting better at shooting CYA emails at zombie-like forms approaching my dark but dry patch. Fortunately, most of them take each other out before I am forced to fire warning shots across the ether.

Once or twice in the past few days, plan-shaped objects appeared on the horizon. Some poor souls who crawled out from beneath their documentation, believing salvation was at hand, were instead trampled in the stampede. They should have known. Real plans have a characteristic stable flight pattern which none of these decoys had.

Hope slowly fades. How could no-one have noticed that a project carrying so many passengers failed to reach its destination? We are lost, utterly lost. When will a real project plan arrive?

I shall continue to search the skies, but my will grows weaker by the day.

Please send help.

That Sinking Feeling

Whenever I feel like perking myself up, I go to Technorati to see exactly how much credibility I don't have in the blogosphere:

Every time I do, my ranking is significantly lower than ever before. It's actually quite fun to track and happens to be a great way of documenting my headlong belly-flop into the depths of web obscurity.

As if it's not enough that my rank is in the multi-millions, Technorati's phrasing couldn't be any more insensitive:

"No blogs link here"

"Favorited by: 0 members"

Come on, where's the love? Surely it wouldn't be too difficult to put in logic which inserts the word "sorry" at the end of such raw proclamations.*

Don't get me wrong, though; I actually find this quite nice. Always preferred a small number of close comrades to a large number of acquaintances, me. In the Web 2.0 world of social networking, blogging, digging, and ranking, meaningful connections seem lost in a sea of hit hungry hippos.

No longer does one have to physically hang out with a person, much less be able to carry on a thoughtful conversation with them, to become their friend. All it takes is some reciprocal linking and Bob's your uncle! Or your Friendster.

The passable use of apostrophes and possessive nouns has also become a mere luxury and quality content often means whatever happens to be the weirdest, grossest, or most shocking utterance of the day. It's an acceleration of the dishonorable decline of journalism into the pursuit of "eyeballs" instead of truth.

In this maelstrom of transitory superficiality, I take comfort in the few regular visitors to my dusty museum of oddities. Whatever brings you here - familial obligation, a shared sense of disillusionment, a taste for morbidity, or just plain derangement - I thank you for reminding me of where to find humanity in the coldness of cyberspace. If there were millions more of you, I might just feel far lonelier.

*A peculiar habit I picked up in the UK is to pepper my conversations liberally with apology. "Sorry, I didn't get that..." or "Terribly sorry, but your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries." Whilst hardly a guaranteed indication of regret, it does serve as a mark of civility so lacking in society today, much like the bow before the duel (where someone's going to die and the other person's going to be sorry). I can now say with absolute confidence that I am a sorrier person today than I ever was.