Prophet Muhammad used to say that instead of going after his enemies, he would sit by the shore of a river, and wait for the bodies of his enemies to float by.
Sometimes, all you can do is wait.
Sometimes, you can give faith a little nudge.
Allow me to explain. A year and a half ago I started working for this company. It's thanks to this place that, besides being one of the strangest and most deranged places I've ever worked at, allowed me to take advantage of such luxuries as food in my fridge, a comfortable bed and my very own toilet. A toilet that I did not have to share with retarded roommates.
For that I am grateful, especially considering the large amount of friends that lately are enjoying their sudden state of unemployment thanks to this whole dot com crash.
The site I work for was in dire need of both a redesign and remodernization. Management assigned us one of their programmers as our web master. We will call this person Monkey Boy [CoN would like to apologize to all the chimps reading this issue - Ed]
Monkey Boy promised a completely new site in two weeks.
Ten months later our website was far from finished. Half still relied on hand modified HTML code, and the half that did work [CoN would like to apologize to all websites that do work -Ed] was a shamble of the most convoluted ASP code, with plenty of bizarre features that would appear and disappear on a regular basis. And slow.
The best part was Monkey Boy's attitude. The man had no shame and would not only constantly insult us and our knowledge, but accuse us of "breaking his code" when things stopped working (more often than they did work). He proceeded even to insult management whenever they requested a report on his status.
Oh, did we scream and kick our feet to rid of this chimp through the year, but lo, our cries would fall on the deaf ears of management. In fact, management would make excuses for Monkey Boy's lack of development and make us look like the bad guys that had it out for him.
The thing is, our department may be populated by strange people, but we're a closely-knit group. Had he been more supportive and shown that he had actually tried to build a site but wasn't good at it, we would probably have been on his side and not bitched. We would've found ways to help him. Alas, he just did not care.
When the one-year mark hit and our site was nowhere in sight, management had to agree that indeed Monkey Boy was the arrogant, useless fuck we had proclaimed him to be.
So our site remained without a webmaster, while we patiently wait for another incarnation of our site to be built.
Monkey Boy was, unfortunately, not fired, because he enjoyed the protection of the powers that be at our old office.
A protection that recently came to an end, as the company decided to sell the office and its entire staff that he is currently at. Since the market is terrible for anything with a .com next to it, chances are that the office will simply be closed and everyone there laid off.
Monkey Boy, probably sensing this, started applying around, because shortly after I received an e-mail from a friend. This friend is the executive director of a small but very successful media company. Monkey Boy had applied there and he was wondering about his ASP skills, reading the claim he had built the entire site I worked for.
I think I can recall very few instances when I was this surprised. Not a "I just got kicked in the nuts" type of surprise. More like "Did I just read that?" followed immediately after "How do I reply to this ensuring this company will never want to talk to Monkey Boy again?"
My response was short, but diplomatic, explaining that Monkey Boy's skills were top notch if he was looking for a way of going out of business really quick.
Needlessly to say, Monkey Boy did not get the job. And they say that revenge isn't sweet? I savoured it for days after that.
Then, I decided, just to add the final touch, I forwarded the query from my friend to management and asked with the most innocent tone I could muster "That's strange, isn't it? I thought Monkey Boy still worked at our other office". We'll see how long it takes for the dust to settle, and then I'll go sit by the shore of the river and wait.
Rev.Sean C. Rothstein-Jacobson asks:JESUS MAN- you STILL have problems with people being unable to unsubscribe? This baffles me! This baffles me and I am not one to underestimate Human stupidity!
Ellen Kokoris confirms the Reverend's bafflement: leave/unsubscribe/drop dead
Ron Chmara writes:Working with web sucks. Now, it's not the technology. Sure, Icould write pages and pages about Microsoft and their concept ofreliability (I'm sure it's thanks to Windows that computers have a"reboot" button), or the many new Internet applications to spiceup your website so that it takes an extra five days to download.
People can run better OSs. If they want a drool-proof unix, Apple now makes OS X for their hardware. If they want fascistic uptimes and use X86 hardware, there's linux and freeBSD.
Reliability doesn't *have* to suck. It just requires learning a new OS.
Of course, that doesn't leave that much to be nasty about... other than complaining about how bad you had it before, and how hard it is to learn a reliable OS, and get stable software..... :-)
It's the managers. Managers are lost. They have no clueabout how anything works.
PHB's can be amusing to toy with, once you've lost all respect for them, and can manipulate them with no moral qualms whatsoever. :-)
They have an idea in their mind, and even if meansa website that's a 5 MB flash animation with non-vectorbased images just to get the right touch and what not, theywill demand it.Useless are the cries for sanity by the peons that work for them.
I like to demo such evil monstrosities for them over a modem, to show what a user will actually see. A technique that works well for those managers who aren't cable/dsl folks is to send their _home_ email address a link, early in the evening, so they try to view it on their dinky 56K winmodem. They usually assume the site is broken. :-)
If that doesn't work, try doing a "laptop demo" (just to show how cool it looks on a laptop) using a dial out modem.
If that doesn't work, start collecting client names, so when the dotcom goes bust due to clueless management, you can start your own thing. It's what I did.
My sympathies,-Ron Chmara
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