Recognize This Office? Dept

Fellow adoptive parent CiaoMyLove provides us with some visual commentary on office life.

On the quenching of thirst

In the first place, why doesn't my office have one of these guys on staff?



And if I can't get the office managers to hire a one-man Starbucks shop, then the least they should do is provide an upgrade to the water cooler:



On the unreliability of modern technology

What Randy (Guidry) doesn't know is that these next two fetching ladies are actually in the middle of User Acceptance Testing (this is an inside joke for his and Edgar Castro's benefit):



On safety drills
For purposes of workplace safety, it's always important to know whether you're in a real situation, or just doing a practice drill:



On providing service to those dudes who are proverbially always right

Personally, I prefer the passive-aggressive approach, but if you want to set realistic expectations for your customers right up front, you could always take this tack:



On whether customers of IT support departments are in fact always right

I've always thought most software products need to include the following error message:



On what certain people who call meetings are really using their meetings for

Instead of writing a snide introductory remark to this last image, I'll use the image itself as an introductory to a story that is, alas, all too true.



Years ago, for my sins, I spent a considerable amount of time as a consultant getting paid to flatter the ego of a gentleman who was a spectacularly incompetent software architect (one of those people who uses all the current buzzwords, because he reads all the currently faddish books, but who uses said buzzwords wrongly because he doesn't actually understand the books he's reading...we all know the type, right?). But this guy -- we'll call him "Babe" -- was a very good politician and good at flattery and empire-building, and he had gained control of the in-house software product that the consulting firm for which I worked had been hired to help enhance. So I, who was leading a team of about six developers from our firm's side, had to deal with this guy.

Now, a real leader who's seriously interested in getting things accomplished and doing so efficiently, always makes sure that meetings include only the people who need to be there in order to make contributions, and that people who are only needed for five minutes don't sit there for an hour after making their contribution -- especially when his company is paying $150 per hour to the people who are sitting in the meeting. But for Babe, the more people there were in his meetings (which were interminable), the more like a big-shot he felt. So pretty much the whole world was required to attend his weekly meetings -- I mean, seriously, we're talking thirty-five people or so for an hour of people taking turns giving Babe their two-minute individual status reports, pretty much.

Now I had a tight deadline and a team that was having to try to do a bunch of stuff they didn't have any experience doing, and I didn't have any time to waste. So for a long time I refused to have my team attend the meetings: I would dial in (I was in Austin and the client was in a somewhat more northerly clime), sit resignedly through the tedium until my time to report came up, give my two-minute report, and then go back to waiting for deliverance. And after the meeting I would get a call from Babe.

"Kenny, you're the only one from your team attending the meeting, right?"

"Yes, Babe, that's right. The rest of my team has a lot of code to write and I don't want to break their concentration; and I know exactly what each one of them is doing anyway."

"But I think it's important to build a sense of team by having everybody hear what the other groups are doing."

"Oh, I listen for the things they need to know about what the other groups are doing and when I hear something they need to know, I pass it on." This was quite true, only since the work the other groups were doing was pretty much entirely unrelated to what my team was doing, I hadn't yet detected anything of the sort, and thus my team had so far been allowed to work on undisturbed.

"But don't you think it would be better for them to attend the meetings as well?"

"Nope."

The perceptive reader will have noted that tact was not, in my younger days, one of my strengths.

Finally Babe just couldn't stand it any more and he gave me a direct order: everybody on my team had to attend.

So I got my guys together and I told them what was happening, and there was much lamentation because everybody was already working overtime to meet an unrealistic death-march deadline...but I reassured them, "Listen, guys, it's a teleconference, right? And you all have laptops, right? So here's what we do: you bring your laptops in with you, and he'll start the meeting, and he'll ask who's attending, and you'll each say your name so that he can put you on the list of attendees. Then we'll mute the phone and we can all get some work done. And about ten minutes in he'll ask me for our progress report, and we'll stop typing and I'll unmute the phone and tell him, and then we'll mute the phone and go back to work until it's time to say good-bye."

And this worked perfectly for a couple of months: my team members' individual contribution to the one-hour meeting was to say their names.

But then there came a day when disaster struck: somebody up in the client conference room accidentally bumped the phone and cut us off.

Well, I knew how passionately Babe cared about his meetings, but the problem was that ordinarily he called us -- and I didn't know which conference room the main meeting was being held in, much less what its extension was. So I started calling every extension I knew up at the client site looking for somebody who would know where the meeting was being held -- but nobody answered because, of course, they were all in the meeting. (This was before cell phones and BlackBerries were ubiquitous, of course.) Finally, after more than thirty minutes, with only about five minutes left in the meeting, we got patched through and the phone started ringing. We heard the handset get picked up off its rest, and Babe's voice said uncertainly, "Hello?"

"Hey, Babe, this is Kenny in Austin -- sorry we got disconnected there."

"Oh, you guys got disconnected?"

Yes, that's right -- in this meeting where it was so absolutely critical that every last member of my team drop all the real work we were doing and attend, we had been gone for a half hour...and Babe hadn't even noticed we were gone.

Ah, good times, good times...