Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Interesting Times

I've been in a living hell of meetings lately. After my manager announced he was quitting, I had the replacement manager and president of the division come to the end of iteration demo meeting. They're both very nice guys, I actually get along with them quite well. However, they are both very easily distracted.

During the demo, I kept getting interrupted with random questions and comments. "Wouldn't it be cool if you also did this?" Yep, already planned. "Isn't one of those a logical distinction and the other physical?" They're both concepts under the overall entity, so, who the fuck cares. STOP INTERRUPTING ME!!!

The product I'm demoing is an extension to another company's product, so they then wanted me to demo the other company's product. That's fine, but can't we schedule something later to do that? Plus, this will mark the third time that I know of that they've had the other product demoed for them. They just keep forgetting about it. My 5 to 10 minute demo went an hour. Super guys, though.

Then today, the CEO flies in for a set of meetings, one of which is the "all hands" meeting. I am required to attend. I walk up to the meeting room 1 minute early to see someone coming out of the room to come find me. Oh, I'm sorry, am I wasting everyone's time? I mean, am I wasting it without using PowerPoint? Ass.

Right off the bat, the president of the division announces he's resigning. I was shocked in the same way I'm shocked during crappy horror movies. Sure I know there's a transgender Eskimo Kenny Rogers impersonator hiding in the closet with a weed eater full of piano wire, but once he/she pops out it's still pretty shocking. This marks the second such shock in under a week. The previous similar shock was when my manager resigned.

But on the plus side, they re-announced that the butter troll is hired back on. Everyone had to clap for this even though it was announced two days ago in another meeting. Yay!!! They then handed out awards to the hard working team--not my team of course, because we're all lazy fuckers. The awards are some little Kinko's made up award in a crappy little frame. The new project leader for that team read the whole description for each unique award, each of which took about a minute. They bestowed fake titles on each person like "database goddess", "system savant", "team hero", etc. What better reward could there be for giving up your nights and weekends to further the product along? Oh yeah, cash, bitch. But I guess they would just lose the money playing some dice game in a back alley. This way, they get to proudly list "awarded the title of Original Binary Ninja" on their resume.

The meeting wrapped up with the numerous bullet points on the last slide boiling down to lots of exciting excitement happening in addition to other exciting things. The CEO then said he hoped that all of the personnel shuffling (aka leaving) had finally leveled off. He was looking forward to having the teams stabilized and didn't want to lose anyone else. If you would like, please feel free to get some one on one time with him in the next couple of days to see what he can do to keep you happy. Odd since he's the one that said "if you don't like our way of doing things, there are plenty of other opportunities out there for you" in a similar meeting a couple of months ago. I guess if people actually take you up on that "offer" you feel pretty stupid afterwards, huh?

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