It's the Little Things That Keep Them Coming Back

Anyone looking for a job knows all too well that there is no shortage of job sites out there wanting to help. Some are better than others.

Another Ugly Day of Cardboard Boxes and Tears

This time it's the IT department getting whittled down to next-to-nothing, with lots of long faces and huddles of survivors in the corridors of CubeWorld^TM, wondering how they escaped this round and whispering about when their turn before the Executioners of HR is coming.

On the bright side, when Obama is President, there will be lots and lots of people working in construction and the Peace Corps and National Service, building roads and bridges, monorails and moving sidewalks, teaching children to love their country while we all work together, making a beautiful world where rainbows shine and unicorns sing under a cloudless sky. That sure will be nice.

The Game of Getting Things Done

Doodles drawn in the Monday morning production meeting, taken into Photoshop for clarification.
Previously in "Notes on a Meeting."

Make Sure You Give 'em The Secret Handshake

Sent to my home email account from work, when we finally got servers up.

It’s after 10AM and over the walls of CubeWorld™ I hear the frantic and excited retellings of weekend adventures, the synopses and analysis of various reality TV shows and your basic office gossip, rumor and innuendo offered up in whispers. The servers are down so no one can access any jobs, check their email or look at their Google readers.

Getting IT to do anything around here requires a 2/3 majority vote in the Secret Geek Council, (which convenes every New Moon) followed by the VP of IT’s signature. Then, in a scary ritual involving Red Bull mixed with Starbucks and the playing of gay 80s arena rock music, the IT people work their magic, which almost always concludes in what they will call a “Logic Lock Refresh,” meaning they turned it off and then turned it back on and somehow that fixed it. Then, because we are not schooled in The Craft of The Flipping of The Switch, they’ll act like they just rescued all of us dim mortals from the jaws of death and maybe we should build them an altar so they may be properly worshiped. I doubt brain surgeons and rocket scientists have the egos or unapproachable attitudes of IT people.

We might be able to do some work in about a month, knowing IT. I think they spend their days devising new rules to apply to the web filters. “Hey, look. That guy in cube #2,459 seems to enjoy visiting The Onion a little too much. Let’s block The Onion. But only in his cube.” [Cue evil laugh]