During my 11 years as a software developer, there were many adventures, but none can compare to the brutal and at times hilarious experience of working for a home developer on their software system around the turn of the millennium. My software company was hired to help salvage a disastrous and over-budget program created by another company (whose name, my friend discovered, is anagram for “Crummy Gnome Typists”). I don’t even know where to start, so let me just describe some of the characters who worked there and how they responded to an insane working environment. These people actually exist.
The Manager
The manager was a dedicated worker. Dedicated, like “take a business call outside the church while your kid is being baptized” dedicated. I heard that happened. He also expected others to be similarly willing to sell their souls. One time he was actually somewhat reasonable: I had requested Friday off to take a Microsoft exam and I approached him at midnight on Thursday night and said “you know, technically, I requested TODAY off to take that exam at 9 am. May I go home?” and he didn’t fight me too much.
Other times, not so reasonable. There was the time we all worked on Sunday without air conditioning and a programmer’s wife (her name was spelled crazy because her parents “couldn’t spell”) brought her triplets and sat them on a blanket on the floor all day while we were programming. I think she thought her husband was having an affair because she couldn’t believe the number of hours he was working. Well, she got to see with her own eyes what his life was like, because when 9 pm rolled around, she approached The Manager and told him the triplets needed to go to sleep. He said “Sure, take them home. But your husbands’s not going anywhere, because he’s got work to do.”
The Comedian
The Comedian was like a Colombian Will Smith. Charismatic, self-deprecating, and full of hilarious (and hopefully exaggerated) stories of childhood abuse from his mom (he says he cut his hair short so she couldn’t shake him by it), he always had us rolling, even when we were hanging onto dear life by a thread. The pressure to work practically 24 hours a day and without breaks was so intense, he and I would keep an eye out for The Manager and, if we lost sight of him, would literally RUN out of the building so we could go out for lunch. When work hours exceed 80 hours in a week, you learn to treasure the comedy, because it’s basically the only thing to keep you going.
The Business Analyst
The Business Analyst was frazzled. We would count the hours each day before she dropped her first f-bomb and it rarely grew larger than one (however, Starbucks seemed to lengthen the times). One time, I was the recipient of one of her streams of profanity after she’d heard enough of my reasons about why a deadline was unreasonable:
The Business Analyst: “Just tell me it will be done by then.”
Me: “Fine. It will be done by then.”
The Business Analyst: “Thank you.”
Me: “You know, just because I say it will be done by then doesn’t mean it will ACTUALLY be done by then.”
The Business Analyst: “*@#$&* @#$&**@ $# you &**@#*!!”
One time, she worked all night long. The best programmer from the “gnome typists” cracked and started crying in the middle of the night, admitting that he just couldn’t do it anymore. After he left, her team somehow patched together a demo in time for the scheduled meeting in the morning, but she just about lost it when the CIO criticized her for not wearing the company t-shirt on “wear the shirt” day. For some reason, she felt like she had a good excuse, since she was still wearing the same clothes from Thursday.
When she wasn’t at her breaking point, we would do our best to keep her spirits up with lots of friendly teasing. We’d tease her about her fear of trains (she’d practically jump out of the car if you were stopped at the tracks when a train came by), we’d tease her about the fact that her boyfriend looked exactly like The Manager, we’d tease her for adopting a strange mouth expression from a co-worker (evidently weird faces are infectious), and we’d tease her about her two pictures of what looked like the same cat. She insisted that she had two cats, even making a point when we were by her apartment to run in and bring out a cat and shout “one cat!” and then run back in and bring out another cat and shout “two cats!” Later, I asked her how I could be sure she wasn’t just showing me the same cat twice.
Junior (“Boy”)
Junior was a soft-spoken and reasonable programmer. Thanks to him, we once saw a softer side of The Manager that we didn’t know existed…
The Manager: “I’m not really comfortable calling you ‘Junior.’ What’s your actual name?”
Junior: (three syllable name that’s hard to pronounce)
The Manager: “… um, didn’t you have a nickname in the Philippines?”
Junior: “Yeah!”
The Manager: “Great! What was it?”
Junior: “Boy.”
The Manager: “Never mind. I’ll call you Junior.”
Junior was one of those guys who always seemed to have misfortune strike him for no reason. He told us that one time at his prior job, he got a haircut at lunch and the hair-cutter thought he wanted a buzz-cut and had already started to shave a stripe down the middle of his head before he grabbed her arm in protest. It was too late to fix it, so she shaved off the rest of his hair, which alarmed his co-workers when he returned to work. Another time, he woke up at home in the middle of the night with a bang and a bleeding lip. His baby son had head-butted him in the mouth while he was asleep and since he woke up with a yelp, the startled kid began to cry. Evidently his wife actually got mad at him for scaring the child.
The Smiley Guy
This was The Smiley Guys’s first on-the-job experience with programming, so he thought that maybe all projects were like this. He did suspect that it wasn’t healthy when he calculated that due to our annual salary and the ridiculous hours (he worked 98.5 hours one week), we were earning less than workers at Burger King. He seemed strangely impervious to the pressure. He just sat there happily programming, even when The Business Analyst was literally shaking his chair and saying “Is it done? Is it done? Is it done?” When someone cruelly glued his favorite candy, a Peep, to the top drawer of his desk during Lent, when he wouldn’t indulge in such treats, he didn’t even take it down.
In some ways, he was the anti-Business Analyst. His leisurely pace sometimes drove her kind of crazy when we went to lunch. He would twirl each spaghetti strand around his fork one at a time and she would watch him like she was ready to pop. Also, he NEVER cursed. In fact, he made up words he could use instead of curse words, like “Tokugawa!” “Toodily Do!” or “Zut Alors!” He also probably had no fear of trains whatsoever.
The Bot
The Bot took things literally. Literally. I actually got a kick out of talking to him, because I’m a programmer and it was like a game to try to phrase things as unambiguously as possible. Other people weren’t as amused. The Business Analyst once asked him if he could do something and he said yes. A week later, she asked him when it would be finished and he responded “you asked me if I COULD do it, not if I WOULD do it.” He had a habit of starting every other sentence with “point being” until the day he paused in thought and I said “point being…” With a surprised head tilt, he said “yes!” and for a moment seemed puzzled that I had spoken the exact words he was about to utter. He must’ve figured it out because he never spoke the phrase again.
Boots
While The Bot constantly started sentences with “point being”, Boots stole the show with his opening: “the thing is, though, is that…” Visualize the red-haired bully in A Christmas Story as a programmer who wears infantry military boots every day and a scowl. He always wanted to share his cartoons with us where the main character was basically him being pissed off about everything. He was a knowledgeable programmer, but seemed drawn to unreasonable complexity and we paid the price for that several times. For example, the application took 30 minutes to compile each time, because it was a collection of about a dozen dlls that were all tied to each other in some weird way that required them to each be compiled in a precise order (known as “dll hell”). He also got great pride from the fact that he used Windows API calls to create an application where the outside of the screen was actually a different program than the inside. Of course, this led to bizarre bugs like when two buttons somehow had the focus highlight at the same time. One time, he seemed to think he was vindicated when he was asked to change the icon at the top of the program. He changed it once, in the “outer” program and explained that if he had done things in a more traditional way, he would’ve had to spend 10 minutes going through and changing it in all of the sub-screens. “THAT’S why the program is made this way!”
He was a pretty disgruntled guy, with his triplets adding sleep-deprivation to his list of complaints, so when he was fired and threw his keys at the manager, we were all a little on edge that he’d be back with more than just military boots. Thankfully, the only thing we heard from him after that was a creepy phone call months later to The Business Analyst, opening with “do you miss my voice?” She said that it literally made her shiver.
Bloody Knuckles
One guy who didn’t seem angry at all had bloody knuckles one day. We were like “what happened?” “Oh, I just got frustrated and punched the wall.”
The kickboxer
Even scarier was the Muay Thai kickboxer with a scar on his eyebrow. He famously told us that his strategy for dealing with The Manager’s questions was to “blast him with bullshit. Just BLAST him.”
Some lady (“wiggle worm”)
There was some lady who would disturbingly sneak up behind me and try to rub my back while I was working. I quickly learned to always swivel my chair around and face her anytime she came close to my desk. The day they had to let her go was the funniest firing conversation I’ve ever heard about.
The Business Analyst: “I’m sorry we have to let you go.”
Lady: “But you said you had wiggle worm in the budget!”
The Business Analyst: “What? Wiggle worm?”
Lady: “Yes, you told me there was wiggle worm in the budget and that I didn’t have to worry.”
The Business Analyst: “Wiggle worm?”
Lady: “What?”
The Business Analyst: “Did you say wiggle worm?”
Lady: “I SAID WIGGLE ROOM!!!”
Me
I suffered along with everyone else, but jumped at the chance to build a loan pre-qualification screen, since I was planning on buying a home soon and wanted to learn everything I could about the various loan options out there. I binged on Home Loans for Dummies and anything else I could read on the subject. Evidently not realizing that the confluence of my work and personal interests was what had put me into turbo learning mode, The Business Analyst got the impression that I was some kind of a superstar (she told someone “if all programmers were like Jay, I wouldn’t have a job”). She and I were trying to meet with a loan officer in the building to get some important questions answered, but for some reason the meetings kept getting put off and our deadline was approaching fast. We finally met with the guy and it couldn’t have been two minutes after we sat down in the kitchen with him when the power in the building went out and we were plunged into total darkness. We sat there for another minute or so, hoping the power would come back on before finally giving up: “I guess we need to reschedule again.”