A Piper Cub Lands in Philistia

My friend and cow-orker, Keith, demonstrates one of the advantages of controlling the corporate directory:

Note that last address. All three items after the “at” sign are the corporate domain.

I just got thanked for attending a mandatory meeting.

Send an urgent email to someone on the east coast at 5:47 PM.  Be sure to mark it with a return receipt too.  When you don’t hear back in eight minutes, leave a breathless voicemail, as well.

To paraprhase Yakov Smirnoff, I love this company.

(or Oops, forgot to post this after I wrote it)

Dedicated to Chris P (either you get that reference, or you don’t)

Reviews:

Good Christian stuff (theological raves):

Not-so-good Christian stuff (theological rants):

Political stuff:

Nostalgia (or “#$@% !!, I’m old”):

Humor:

Just plain good:

Sports:

(or Why haven’t you done that work we won’t let you do?)

Last night, the online time-card system that I use to bill my time spit out a warning. Apparently, I had not yet billed my time for all of this week yet (remember, the warning was generated on Tuesday), or anything for next week.

If the system is missing one week’s worth of information, the employee just gets the note. If it’s missing two or more weeks, your boss gets the note with you cc’d on it. Since it’s missing two weeks for me, the latter applied.

Now my boss is cool — he takes any communication that points a finger at his employees with a grain of salt. He’s also firmly grounded in reality, and realizes that next week hasn’t occured yet. But it’s still annoying.

Since I’m fully dedicated to one project these days, and since I figured that they’re coming up on the year-end billing cycle, I figured I’d go ahead and fulfill their stupid request. So, I logged on to stroke their egos, and then remembered the kicker when I tried to do what they wanted:

The system won’t let you bill time any further in advance than this week.

Wonder how many more nasty-grams my boss is going to get.

(or Appropriately scary post for Halloween)

Been shuffled off to this single project at work. It’s going to be a full-time thing very soon, but the first few weeks are allowing me to do some clean-up work on some stuff that I was doing before. The first week on the project, I only needed to work on the new project for about 25 hours, and so that’s the amount of time that I billed to the project.

Silly me.

The next day, I get a panic IM from my manager, who had gotten one from her manager. Apparently the guy who runs the project, Arnold*, was extremely upset that I didn’t bill a full 40 hours to his project. Yes, you read that right — he was mad that I didn’t bill enough hours to his project. I think this is a first in corporate America.

So my manager told me that I was to bill 40 hrs/week to this project every week, regardless of how much I actually worked on it. Makes filling out a time-sheet very easy, even if it is phenomenally stupid, so I’m not gonna complain.

And yes, he didn’t contact me about it. He didn’t even contact my boss about it. He went straight to my boss’s boss. Actually, this was a step down for him — the last time he had a problem with my group, he contacted my director (my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss). I’m guessing that the director asked “Why the #%$#@ are you contacting me?” Otherwise, the poor guy would probably be on Arnold’s speed-dial now.

Sadly, none of that is the scary part.

I just got a note forwarded to me from a teammate who has nothing to do with this project. As I look at the chain of forwards, I see that over the last week and a half, a note has been bucked around to over a dozen people with a very basic technical question. Ya know, the kind of thing that the tech guy — that they’re paying 40 hrs/week for — could answer with 90% of his brain tied behind his back.

Still not the really scary part.

In essence, the question boils down to “How do we contact Brendt’s team for on-going support?”

Hold me — I’m scared.

* Name changed to protect the innocent, namely me

Dear Customer:

Yes, you’re right. I wasn’t available to you on IM this morning. Since you did not email, call, or page me (but rather, bugged my co-workers to contact me), I can only assume that both your email and every phone within a 50-mile radius is broken. I join you in hoping that these tools are working for you again very soon.

Love and kisses,
Brendt

I can’t even think of a clever title for this post. The situation just has me shell-shocked.

Just got off a weekly conference call. Although there are a lot of paper-pushers on this call, it is actually one that usually needs to be held. Thankfully, it’s only booked for 30 minutes, so there’s not a lot that the paper-pushers can do to hear themselves talk. Except this week.

The business of the call this week was 99% done in 12 minutes. But, the call didn’t end for another 13 minutes. The reason?

Well, someone deemed it necessary to tie up this call with a discussion of why it was important to discuss a totally unrelated issue on another  totally unrelated call, and why it was important that certain people be on that other call.

When I was a kid, I first heard the paraphrase, “For God so loved the world, that He didn’t send a committee.” He also didn’t hold a conference call.

(or Scientists link total depravity to total stupidity)

OK, so here was my week.

Sports: New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and the team were fined a total of $750,000 by the league for spying on the opposing team. New England will also forfeit a draft pick next year (which one, to be determined by their performance this season).

A video camera was confiscated from a Pats video assistant on the New York Jets sideline on Sunday. Belichick took responsibility (though he referred to his actions as a “mistake” — oops) and spoke with the league commissioner about “his interpretation of the rules”. The rule that he had such trouble understanding was (emphases mine):

One can see that that’s obviously not very clear, so the league office followed it up with a memo to head coaches three days before the incident (emphases mine, again):

Apparently, even this wasn’t clear enough for Belichick. So let me just clear this up, for him and anyone else who doesn’t understand.

Stealing is wrong.

That clear enough, Bill?

Business: I had to do the annual review of my company’s “Business Conduct Guidelines” this week. 95% of it deals with how I am to conduct myself with external customers and suppliers, of which I have encountered exactly zero in nearly 18 years with this company. Of course, this is largely explained by the fact that 90% of it (and practically every other official communication that comes out of my company — and probably yours, too) is hideously marketing-centric.

I often wonder what would happen if all of us engineers quit working. How long would it take the marketeers to realize that they didn’t have anything to sell? But I digress . . .

One part of the guidelines deals with “questionable intelligence gathering”. Among the activities that my company “does not tolerate” are:

Gee, really?

Religion: Read a chain of posts recently. I had read one, and couldn’t really figure out what the backstory was, but the author provided some links. Had to go to another link from there, and finally got the picture. It seems that a seminary professor (from one of several seminaries for a major denomination) didn’t like some stuff that was going on and some stuff that some of the seminaries’ presidents were doing. Little or nothing that had been done to him personally, but to people he knew (or at least knew of). So he wrote an anonymous letter to (what I think is) the board that oversees the seminaries (i.e. the presidents’ “bosses”) and named names — though not his own, obviously.

Now, frankly, I can’t blame him for the anonymity. If I ever felt that I had to blow the whistle on my superiors, I’d probably wear gloves and a mask while typing the letter and mail it to a missionary in Honduras to be sent from there, so there was nothing incriminating in the postmark. If this guy’s identity is revealed, there’s a decent chance that he’ll “never work in this town again”.

So, did he actually send the letter to that board? Not sure.

Did he only send the letter to that board? Heck, no. He also sent it to a pastor friend who (with his permission) put it on his blog, and then a more prominent blog about the denomination picked it up and ran it (with both men’s permission).

I’m not even gonna bother quoting Matthew 18:15, because I’ve seen too many people make arguments that the verse is not applicable to their situation, and you just can’t argue with that “logic”, even if it is usually dead wrong. Let’s go with some more basic questions:

I was told that it was wrong for Billy to tell authority figures (or other peers) about what he perceived were Susie’s wrong-doings that had did not affect Billy. I wasn’t told this last week; I was taught this when I was 5.

Comics: I keep flashing back to stand-up comics who talk about warning labels.

Op-Ed: Now I’ll admit that (IMHO) I was raised well by parents who love me. But there’s not an issue of right/wrong anywhere in this post that I didn’t know and understand well before my age hit double digits.

And these aren’t even particularly Christian values (especially since I discarded the Matthew verse). Granted, they come from a Judeo-Christian ethic. But last time I checked, Belichick isn’t from one of those remote tribes in Africa that thinks that deceit is a good thing. I really think that the Fall affected more than our spirits. Among other things, God has given us the spirit of a sound mind, which we apparently aren’t using very well.

Are we really that stupid?

Obituaries: Apparently so.

One of the projects I’m working on has (among its team members) a German gentleman named Helmut.

John, the guy running the project — and who hosts the conference calls for it — pronounces the ‘u’ in Helmut’s name like a schwa, so that it sounds just like “helmet”.

I have no idea what Helmut looks like, but everytime I hear John say his name, I get this mental image of Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet in Spaceballs.

May the schwartz be with you!