Bitching About Work and the Irony Thereof

Okay this should close out the last of the "anecdotes" that I am required to post.

I work in a hostile environment. And I don't say that to engender sympathy or anything like that. I kind of enjoy it and sometimes perpetuate it. It pushes me harder than I would normally push myself. It also allows me to push others harder than they would push themselves. It does, however, create a sometimes caustic workplace – which is hard to take in large doses. It is not uncommon for someone to get bawled out. We've had several people quit over it in the past.

Anyway, my anecdote:

I have been working on my current project for almost 9 months. It started out great, I was always ahead and my stuff was well designed, easy to debug and simple to maintain. About two months ago I integrated my beautiful project into a new driver environment written by another division in my company. That last sentence really doesn't really have to be understood the way I wrote it. It just means that I had to start using someone else's stuff in my stuff.

Of course I have had no ends of crap break on me because of it.

I would like to say it was because the other group's stuff was junk and buggy and all sort of other bad things. But that's not true. The other division's stuff was just a much, much bigger and grand project than mine. My project has 4 full time engineers on it, theirs 12. I am in charge of my stuff, I am not in charge of their stuff. All things considered their stuff is pretty good -- its just not my stuff. In the words of George Carlin: my stuff, your shit.

Still, my project came to a screeching halt because of the new stuff.

Anyway my boss lets my project fester for a bit (about a month). I had tons of horrible bugs that kept me from getting anything done. Eventually I got called in to a meeting with my boss and the guy in charge of the stuff that wasn't working (I'll call him "the guy" from now on). He then proceeded to chew out the guy for a good hour and a half. I had to sit through all of it and get chewed on a bit myself in the process.

It was the opposite of fun.

Anyway, we get out of the meeting and I have a voice message left on my phone. It was recorded about 15 minutes after my ass-chewing meeting started. It was from one of the guys working under me and he said that he found the last bug and all the tests were now running.

Sure enough, I checked out his changes to the project and the new stuff and everything ran fine. (That's a lie, but it makes a better story – lets just say the sky was no longer falling.)

So now I had the dilemma, do I go immediately to my boss and tell him everything is fixed? If I do, it looks like I'm either a liar or an idiot. What are the odds that everything gets fixed during the reamfest?

Anyway that's the anecdote.

As an interesting aside, did you ever watch that show Roots based on the novel by Alex Haley? There is a harsh scene in it where the KKK is beating this black guy with a whip. The black guy's white neighbor takes the whip from the KKK people and starts beating the black guy himself. The KKK is happy the black guy's getting beaten and leave. The moment they leave the white neighbor drops the whip. The black guy is pissed that his white neighbor had the nerve to beat him. The white neighbor claimed that he did it to save the black guy otherwise the KKK would have beaten him to death.

It’s an interesting study about people there. I find in these ass-chewing sessions where someone is getting hammered by my boss, that if I start bitching at the person getting chewed on, my boss eases up and thinks he's done his job. The person getting chewed out by both me and my boss never sees it as me doing them a favor. Still I do it because that way I don't have to suffer through longer meetings. It makes it end quicker, which is better for everyone. Its analogous to the Roots story.