I’m so glad we’ve had this time together

If I could figure out how to pull electronically on my right ear, Carol Burnett style, I would. Remember her show from back in the 70s? She always tugged her ear at the end of each show. It was, I read, a signal to her family that all was well at home. Why she couldn’t pick up the damned phone is, I’m quite sure, another story.

And it’s another story that brings me here now.

I’ve been roaming around the blogosphere reading about people’s lives and am dismayed at how many blogs end right dag nab in the middle of the story without ever telling you what happens. I found one mom who was writing a very funny story about raising her children alone while her husband was deployed in Iraq. For over a year she revealed great snippets from her family life and then said, “Hey, I’m tired of single parenting; I’m tired of my husband not being in my kids’ lives. I’m going to follow him on his deployments. God help us all.” And that was it. It’s like I’ve lost a friend. I’m worried about her and I have no idea who the heck she even is.

I can’t do that to you—my loyal cadre of eighteen followers, who I’m sure are lying awake nights thinking, “What, when, where or where can my friend Mary be?”

So here’s the truth—unvarnished and without sugar coating: Mary the Tech Worker has retired. Having achieved neither fame nor fortune, Mary realized how shrill and angry she sounded and decided to make a change. She quit her high tech job and can be found selling Nathan’s hot dogs from a cart on Coney Island.

Not really. But you get the idea.

Even your friends can only stand so much ranting and raving before they stop returning your phone calls, right?

But kids, I want you to carry on without me. I want you to get pissed and yell and scream. Just promise me you won’t tape tea bags to your foreheads or anything really stupid like that. I want you to open the damn window and shout “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” I want you to remember your friend Mary as someone who thought about things so much that her head busted open and a beautiful, happy princess jumped out and joined the real world. Okay?

Top ten signs you work for a micromanager

My micromanager is beyond the Pale, and answers more to the tune of a nanomanager. Check out this list, which I put together from research and cold, hard experience.

10. Follows you into the bathroom and continues to talk to you about your project status--and you're of opposite sexes.

9. Makes Captain Queeg and Captain Bligh look like management geniuses.

8. Sits in on meetings you chair, saying, "Pretend I'm not here," then hijacks meeting.

7. Never takes vacation. Does get sick from time to time, but comes to work anyway, saying, "I'm needed." Takes sick days only for major surgery, and then only while still anesthetized.

6. Claims all assignments are clear and unambiguous.

5. Won't supply clear answers to questions about ambiguous assignments.

4. Corrects the way you ask clarifying questions about ambiguous assignments.

3. Has said, "I don't like surprises," but gets obvious thrills from surprising subordinates.

2. Can't always resist the urge to tell subordinates how to use the phone system. Doesn't actually know how to use the phone system.

1. Strenuously denies micromanaging anyone, ever.

Love to know if you have more signs...suggestions for dealing with such beasts are also welcome.

Nations have recently been led to borrow billions for war; no nation has ever borrowed largely for education. Probably, no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and civilization. We must make
our choice; we cannot have both. -Abraham Flexner, educator (1866-1959)

Ah, Abe, how times haven't changed. In California, I hear more about potential park closures due to budget shortfalls than I hear about the potentially enormous effects the budget crisis will have on our schools. Now, Vladdie goes to a private school, so I don't feel it's my place to criticize. But it bothers me just the same.

WOW: encomium

PRONUNCIATION: (en-KO-mee-uhm)

Interesting word came my way (thank you Anu Garg!); it’s a noun and means glowing praise.

Reminds me that it’s review time in Corporate Land. I’m not sure much encomium will be flowing my way, as it’s my first time through this cycle at the new job. At my previous company, I wrote my own review. Can you say “lazy management?” You can bet there was a lot of encomium in those reviews. And without fail my bosses would take what I’d written verbatim and submit them for my review. Sweet, huh?

I suspect I’ll see a lot more meconium in this review. Familiar with that one? It’s the first stool of an infant—a “dark green fecal material that accumulates in the fetal intestines and is discharged at or near the time of birth.” Um? Bleuch.

Here’s a fancy pants example of our WOW in action:

"The speech cheered the faithful no end, as did Sarah Brown's smooth and skillful introduction of her husband. Yet though her encomium went down well with the party, it nauseated many television viewers."
Ruth Dudley Edwards; Why Mrs Brown Should Have Skipped the Heroics; Irish Independent (Dublin); Oct 4, 2009.

Oh those Irish! Always a ten dollar word.

WOW: machiavellian

PRONUNCIATION: (mak-ee-uh-VEL-ee-uhn)

It’s an adjective and means: characterized by cunning, deception, and expediency.

Is it any wonder that I’ve always been curious about this word? It epitomizes the tech world as I know it. In my salad days, I took the working world at its word. I believed what my management told me. There was the time the CEO of my company told us all in a company meeting that there would be “no layoffs.” I put that in quotes because that’s what the dude said…no layoffs. How long before the layoffs, the jaded among you ask? Why, the very next day about 25% of the company met their employment maker.

But that’s not really cunning, deception, and expediency, is it? Cunning, deception, and expediency would be more like telling the 200K odd people who work for you that everyone was going to have to pull together as a team, take one for the gipper, cut their pay so others could work and then pocketing your $48 million dollar bonus and laying people off anyway. But we’ve talked about this before…or I should say, I’ve yammered on at you before about this one.

So back to our word: it originates from Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), Florentine statesman and author of The Prince, a political treatise describing use of craft and deceit to achieve political power. I’m pretty sure I’ve worked for his great-great-great-grandson.

Usage that my friend-whom-I’ve-never-met-but-admire-just-the-same Anu Garg quotes is thusly:

"Rumours of Machiavellian plots and conspiracy theories have permeated the period of mourning."
Darryl Broadfoot; Mitchell: End the Revisionism; The Herald (Glasgow, Scotland); Nov 23, 2007.

Use it in a sentence today!

Bitter, party of 1, your table is ready.

Kids, pull up a chair—I've got the mother of all rants singing in my soul and I've got to let 'er out.

I had the unavoidable pleasure of presenting my project to the company’s European marketing team this week. This group has a new VP, whom we'll call Jason, and who's based in the UK. Apparently Jason was looking for an opportunity to take it out and whip it all around to impress his new subordinates. And unbeknownst to me I was served up as the whipping girl du jour.

Firstly, I should point out that to accommodate my colleagues in Europe, I had to get up at the UNGODLY hour of 5am, chug some java, and get on the road in the DARK in order to get to the conference room on time. Man alive, I am so NOT a morning person. Archie and Vlad know not to talk to me or really even to look at me until I've been upright with coffee cup in hand for at least 60 minutes. Imagine then my state of mind going into this meeting.

These days we in the tech world conduct inter-continental meetings remotely, so my boss and I sat together in the large, empty conference room, hovered around an alien-shaped speaker phone. Really this thing looked like it could crawl off the table and install itself in my brain stem. In retrospect, I wish it had.

Slowly, the team in points East of Eden assembled and promptly muted their phones, so that I was literally and figuratively presenting to an empty room. Luckily my uber-micromanager boss kept leaning across me to adjust the contrast on my laptop screen and muting the phone as I was speaking to give me pointers on what I should say next. Can you say not-giving-me-that-confident-feeling?

And finally the crescendo of our morning-time meeting: Jason said that the campaign creative looked like "the back of a software box" and had nothing of interest in it at all. Kids, I appreciate a smartass simile as much as the next gal, but not when it's directed at me. Yes, I can dish it out and no, I can't take it. He went on but I won’t bore you or embarrass myself with the details of what he said.

I waited a few minutes and thought about telling him that his accent reminded me of back episodes of "Dr. Who" from the 70s and asking him what his personal relationship with deodorant was. I briefly considered telling him that his was the empire that crumbled and lost what turned out to be the largest world economy in history. I even thought about telling him that I hated the Beatles and rejected every contribution to pop culture that has ever come out of the British Isles.

Instead I thanked his team for their support and told him it had been a pleasure working with them. In the end, that felt better—Brits get sarcasm, don't they?

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts. -Khalil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)

Top ten signs it’s time to look for a new job

Kids, when’s enough enough? How do you know it’s time to move on to the next gig? Here’re some telltale signs of mine.

10. You find little bits of spittle on the sides of your mouth every time you talk to your boss.

9. You have images of yourself running through fields of flowers toward your company’s biggest competitor.

8. You say, “What’s it to YOU?” every time someone asks you for a status update.

7. Your hand hurts at the end of each business day from slamming your fist on the edge of your desk.

6. You giggle and delete without reading every work-related email you receive.

5. Just before you delete those work-related emails you insert an emoticon.

4. You actually say out loud “What the f**k?” when your boss gives you a new project.

3. You wish there were an emoticon of a head sticking through a noose.

2. You try to make an emoticon of a head sticking through a noose—wasting hours trying to get the angle just right.

1. You find yourself swabbing the mess at the state pen because of a wild spree with an ax in the office … wait, no, then it would be too late to look for a new job, wouldn’t it? [Oh come on! What’s a little hyperbole among friends?]

What've you guys got?

WOW: gimcrack

PRONUNCIATION: (JIM-krak)

I like this word. As a noun, it means: Something cheap and showy, of little use. As an adjective: Showy, but worthless.

I'm giddy thinking of all the ways this word applies to my workaday world. For instance, the gimcrack project I'm working on right now. I told my boss on Friday that I knew no one would use the particular aspect of the project I'm busting my butt to finish. I'd literally spoken with folks around the world who said they didn't need it. In other words, I had empirical evidence of gimcrack. You know what she said? "We promised to provide this today, so keep going."

I'm sorry? Did I inadvertently suggest that I think and apply reason to my work? Silly me.

So anyway, back to our word. Its etymology is uncertain, as my sources say: "perhaps an alteration of Middle English gibecrake (small ornament), possibly from Old French giber (to shake)." That'll clear things up, won't it?

Here's an example I really like: "Uncle Rabid Prophet TechEye has worshiped more gimcrack bits of junk and practiced more half-baked religions than all of Hollywood combined."
Bow Down And Open Your Wallet; Warsaw Business Journal (Poland); Aug 21, 2006.
Special thanks to Anu Garg for pointing out this word.

Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way. -Martin Luther King Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves. -John Danforth, priest, ambassador, senator (b. 1936)

When you don't know what to do...

...reorganize! When I was a little girl, I frequently moved the furniture around in my room. Growing up in Connecticut you see was not as thrilling as it sounds . . . so imagine. Getting up in the middle of the night to pee took on a new thrill as I wondered briefly where I was and then, more importantly, where did I put that daing bookcase.

Reminds me of a company I worked for that would scoot around their executives every summer, a game of musical chairs--only there were always enough chairs for them. They'd put a VP of marketing here, a Senior VP of engineering over there, and a Director of new business development in the corner. [Note: you never want to be in charge of "new business development" it's just one step away from "spending more time with your family."]

So, how do you like what I've done with the place?

Michael Moore: Capitalism, A love story--Get ready!

It appears that Michael Moore has been reading Mary the Tech Worker and made a movie about the very things that drive her crazy! Get ready to watch it later this week:

Oh, the pain, the pain!

Kids, sometimes it just hurts to think! Get this, which I found on BusinessWeek Online (Sept. 27th if you need to know):

But directors also need to be sensitive to perceptions. Problems can emerge when leaders appear to be reaping high rewards at a time when they're demanding sacrifices from their workers. Wharton School professor Peter Cappelli says such moves can seem "patently unfair" and argues they can undermine morale. [...] Even though some CEOs seem focused on staying ahead in the pay stakes, leadership guru Warren Bennis warns that "employees are extraordinarily wary and watchful" right now.

Ya think, Warren? How does one get to be a "leadership guru" anyway?

It stuns me that execs look to BusinessWeek Online or your average Wharton School professor for such an obvious assessment. Still further in the article:

Consider ConocoPhillips. In January, CEO James J. Mulva cut 4% of the Houston oil giant's workforce. Two months later the company announced that Mulva had earned $29 million in 2008, on top of nearly $100 million he had made in the two prior years.

And not surprisingly:

Conoco did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

I'm just gonna come on out with this: Where's the f*cking revolution? What more do people need to see that the working world, for one, is a grossly unfair one? Why can't the undermined come together rather than taping tea bags to their foreheads and pretending they're among the elite?

I wish I were a religious gal, isn't that the opiate of the masses? I need something, that much is true. And riddle me this: can you tell me where I got the title of this blog post from? The right answer gets you my undying adoration.

Location, Location, Location

My management has their knickers in a knot about us being physically present in the office. I know this is a small thing to complain about when so many people don’t have jobs, but this asinine request is sitting in my craw.

For five years, I worked for a large corporation from my office at home. No carbon fuels used to get there, no contribution to highway jams; I didn’t risk my life riding alongside people who were putting on makeup or texting whilst wielding around their 2-3 ton vehicles at break neck speeds. And if I needed to talk to my ob/gyn every few months, I didn’t have to whisper or give my colleagues way more information than they care to have about my menstrual cycles.

Now, that company did not put this work-from-home policy in place just to please the likes of me. And frankly, I’m sure decreasing the company’s carbon footprint was not their prime directive either, although they did find a way to work it into their PR quite often. No, kids, they did this because it was CHEAP: they realized that real estate in Cupertino and New York and Singapore is expensive.

While I’m sure the company bigwigs wouldn’t care, this policy made people stick around. Not exactly loyalty, more a matter of convenience--the philosophy enabled a great work/life balance for us working slugs. We could have dinner with our families at reasonable hours, we could take an hour off to pick up our kids from school and log back in when they’d gone to sleep, we could in other words, have a life and have a job.

Enter current company: my management says that working from home is not in their plan. They want butts in seats. They frequently walk the aisles to do what we affectionately [sic] refer to as “bed checks.” They have, in my most humble opinion, this juvenile view that unless we worker bees are visibly working away at our desks, we’re goofing off. You know, us kids, we just can’t be trusted. I say, you trust people, they respond in kind. You treat them like children, well, you get what you ask for.

So I trudge in, trying not to rub bumpers with any of the idiots who are texting their friends about the traffic or reading the newspaper, just to get on the phone and talk to the people I work with in Australia, London, and Massachusetts. Or worse, I plop down at my teeny tiny desk in my itsy bitsy cubicle in the huge warehouse that I work in, just to hear my coworkers talk into their phones to their colleagues in Milan, Chicago, and Texas. It’s maddening. I can’t think. Sometimes I got off to what’s privacy booth, which is an airless enclosed room with a phone and an Ethernet drop. Kind of like a jail cell only not as nice.

In my old job, I was known for the work I did. I was promoted twice in five years because I got things done, had good relationships with people, and was generally known as the fabulous person you’ve come to know and love. Not because of how long I sat at my desk.

What do you think?

Firedrills

Snakes alive, it happened again! I’m working away at last week’s action items when the call comes from on high: we’ve got an emergency! We need [fill in the damn blank]. It’s a different blank every time, but the urgency is always the same. Executive management is looking! Executive management needs this! Hurry!

Yours truly says, “I’m sorry, this seems stupid. Do I really need to drop everything to get this done?”

Kids, when will I learn? How will I ever be the geriatric marketing manager I need to be so that I can pay my son Vlad’s college expenses?

The furrowed brow, the tapping pen on the desk, that’s all I need from my boss to know that yes, I must! Now git!

So I git. I git so much that my head hurts. I scurry around like the little mouse that I am grabbing at straws for the big cheeses—Mush, mush!

I get statistics, I get bar charts, I get metrics galore. I put them into a report. I polish the report with snappy words and phrases. I find some graphics, I find some illustrations. I send it to her, I send it to him, I send it to all of them. And I wait. And I wait some more.

But no one ever says anything. No one ever reads the report. They’ve noticed a new shiny ball in front of their faces. They’ve got to look into this one now. What am I waiting for? Let’s get a move on! We need this, we need this now! What are you doing over there? We need you over here!

I think this is why god made vodka martinis and the people who drink them.

What do you think?

Word of the Whenever results

No one seemed to like my great idea for a word of the whenever: rhubarb, as in “a heated dispute; brawl.” As in:

“People should get their domestic rhubarbs, verbal fisticuffs, and emotional jugular-snatching completely out of the way before they show up for a house tour." Richard Ford, Independence Day

Don’t you love it? [Fisticuffs, btw, is another favorite of mine. You’d be surprised how often I work it into everyday conversations.]

Sandy taunted me with: “Rhubarb pie is a little too tart for my taste.” And said her sentence was laden with hidden meaning. I think that means she was mad at me.

So I retorted with:

I know you did that on purpose, Sandy. Just trying to stir up a little neighborhood rhubarb, aren't you? ;)

Get it? See and the smiley face at the end showed that I’m not mad at her. Brilliant, no?

No one followed suit, tho, until Ricardo came up with his WOW: Mendacious - lying; untruthful; false. And submitted:

In her only vice-presidential debate, she was shallow, mendacious and phoney."
- Michelle Goldberg at guardian.co.uk on Sarah Palin

Any dig at Sarah Palin wins in my book [that woman scares the bejeezus out of me], but the winning entry has to be from Janette, who came up with:

The woebegone reveler cursed the bartender for the mendacious suggestion of a $30 Margarita which left her with a hang-over despite the price tag.

You’d had to have been there, which I was.

So Janette—send me your word!

Leaving in Droves

As anyone who’s been within 20 feet of me in the last six months knows, my company instituted a paycut in February. Trickle down—execs got bigger cut on salary only leaving their huge bonuses untouched, blah blah blah. Guess what? Now that some say the economy is picking up, people are starting to leave for greener pastures. Surprised? Neither am I.

But man! the steps this company will go through to dance around the most important issue on the table. Get this: they do a quarterly employee survey to gauge workers’ attitudes. Hello, that disconnected from reality that you can’t figure out on your own that people get pissed when you take their salary away? Not surprisingly, in March the survey showed that workers were not all that happy. By putting two and two together, the smart folks at my company determined that people were going to leave in droves the second they could. What do you think they did about it? Reinstitute the legally agreed-upon rates of pay?

Nope: they did what all big companies do, they formed a committee and named it Community Cares. Kids, working in high tech is so ridiculous that I don’t even have to look for things to ridicule. [Reminds me of Jon Stewart begging people not to vote for W in 2004; said his job would be hard again if the other guy won.]

Every few weeks we get notices from the Community Cares committee, telling us all the great things they’re doing to make our jobs better. My individual group formed a – yep, you got it, they formed a sub-committee—to find ways to improve employee satisfaction. I’m screaming inside “Give me my money back!” like the teeny tiny woman in her teeny tiny house [did you guys ever read that kids’ book? One of my favorites growing up]. The sub-committee’s bright idea was to subject us to a dreadful 2-hour presentation by HR covering the online tools we must use. Boosted my morale and job satisfaction, you betcha!

What is it with the corporate gods? Do they get together behind closed boardroom doors chuckling cynically at what they’ve done? Or are they really clueless?

What do you think?

Top ten brown nosing comments

Brown nosing isn’t my forte, but I’ve worked with some of the best over the years. Here’s a sample of what I’ve heard.

10. You look great in that color.

9. Did you think of that yourself?

8. I’ll work on this at lunchtime.

7. You were an animal in that meeting.

6. I sure do have a lot to learn from you.

5. Can I offload some projects from you?

4. Brilliant!

3. Want me to run out to get you some lunch?

2. How are your kids/dogs/cats anyway?

1. No, no, it’s okay if you put your name on my report. It’s as if you wrote it anyway.

Love to hear any you guys might have.

The Free World vs Engineers

What is with software engineers anyway? Have they been sent directly to the planet, bypassing the usual stops along the road of life that bring the rest of us humility, compassion, and the ability to take direction? Buckle up, kids! I’m on a rampage.

Say you’re the marketing executive whose JOB it is to come up with a product strategy. Imagine that you spend weeks creating a killer product requirements document after doing things like meeting with customers, talking to analysts, analyzing research data, only to have that document CAST ASIDE by an engineer who FELT LIKE doing something else. Can you stand it?

If you’re in the tech world, you know this happens all the time. You know that when the rest of us are meeting to plot product execution and develop roadmaps, those stinking engineers are in the BREAK ROOM playing PING PONG. And you know that some months later, when a product is released that has NOTHING TO DO with the product strategy you recommended, a product who’s functionality that the doc people can only guess at, a product that the QA people can’t imagine how to test, you KNOW that if you call a meeting with the engineers responsible, you KNOW they won’t show. Hell no! Especially not if it’s before 11am because they won’t be in yet—having stayed up till 4am playing online Dungeons and Dragons with their virtual friends in China.

You also know that when customers receive this piece of crap they’ll never disrupt their data centers to install it. Analysts and press will be stumped. Product revenue will go down, which in turn will make the stock tank and piss off the shareholders. The CEO will look to her staff saying, “The f*ck?” Her staff will look to their staffs, and so on down the line until the buck stops at your office. After all, it was YOUR JOB to write the product strategy.

I know you engineers out there have loaded your slingshots, but go ahead, I can take it.

What do you think?