The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar

You know you're screwed when...

Betty White beats you in a cussing contest.

You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.

This Crapolla is sponsored by...

In This Issue...

Booting the Butt Kissers

Chief High Muckity-Muck Gets Booted

Scratch one more VP! My score at WTHAIS is now, 3 CEOs, 4 VPs, 4 Directors, and 8 Managers.

Chief High Muckity-Muck became my VP when my VP decided he wanted to be a Senior VP, so he needed a VP beneath him. The trouble was Chief High Muckity-Muck wanted to be a VP of Sales. So he moved my technical group under the Senior VP of Sales. That corrupted my group because now we couldn't tell the Sales people we weren't going to cover for their lies.

He did other weird crap like requiring we write dates on internal docs in the the form of day-abriviated month-year. We asked if this was because he was going to go through the docs with a program, and the format needed to meet what the code had been made to expect. No, he just liked it that way.

In his year at WTHAIS, he demoralized the group, got rid of the only adult supervision in the AsiaPac division, and told Octo-Manager to work a double shift to cover AsiaPac.

I have a list of people I would never work for again. It's not a very exclusive list. But there's another list I have where if I was sitting in a lobby waiting for an job interview and I saw one of these guys walk past, I'd just get up a leave. He's on that list.

Would VP number 5, sign in, please?

Insincere Butt-Kissing

In the 80's, before you were born, I worked at a TV station. This was a little UHF place that was really an insane asylum in disguise. When people escaped (I mean quit) the most-commn reason given for leaving was that no one in the joint knew how to say Thank You. People really meant the owner had never heard the phrase. He had grown up as an ambassador's son in Latin America, and decided that his employees were really peasants. Recently, I experienced an incident that was over-the-top in the opposite direction.

I didn't do anything special. I just did my job the way I always do it. But for some reason, a bunch of people decided they needed to gang thank me. At the end of the Thank You Bukake, I felt a little used, and soiled. At first, it was a happy surprise. Someone I did some work for, thanked me. That's great. More people should learn to do this. It's great for morale. But as soon as the Sales Execs got involved, it felt like the old AOL "Me Too" meme. People were thanking me who had no idea what I had done. It felt like by thanking me, they were associating themselves with the action I had taken. I've never had any room for hangers-on.

A real thank you should be sent one to one rather than a general broadcast. But sometimes, the person doing the thanking is really trying to make sure the rest of the organization knows you do God's work. WTHAIS is extremely political. The people who do well here are the people who get a lot of public shout outs. So the person I helped did a public thanking to not only thank me, but to also give me a little political capital. Then Octo-Manager chimed in. Ok, I get it, bolster your team in front of the company. But the Sales guys, that felt like pure disingenuous ass kissing. Damn, even the Senior VP of Sales couldn't resist and jumped into the orgy.

I had such a strong reaction to this cluster-thank that I've been questioning my reaction. If that's not a dirty, rotten trick, I don't know what is.

This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.

Arnold's Book is Out!

Go Back To Sleep

Let's play, "Who said this?"

Heard in the halls of various software companies.

"I'm not allowed to directly insult my customers."

"My kids, totally surprised me last night."
"They said, 'Thank you'?"

"This is the most worthless thing I've ever seen."
"You're exaggerating. You've seen the people in Marketing."

"Everyone just dropped their brains on the floor."

"I remember knowing that."
"Ooo! That's meta-memory!"

Excuse Me

It's almost time to adjourn.

Fek'Lar
They pay me to think. These are my thoughts. Do you think they are getting their money's worth?

Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn!

Although written with the software professional in mind, my mind tends to wander all over the place, and I sometimes write about politics, mass stoopidity, dumb things I saw, and whatever else comes to mind.

From time to time, I use salty language, thus The Crapolla is not intended for children, or certain people from the Christian Right.

feed available from http://www.lowcomdom.com/crapolla/index.xml

EOJ

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