Article: 12310 of alt.peeves From: Michael A. Atkinson Newsgroups: alt.peeves Subject: More Tales From The Cubicle Farm Followup-To: alt.peeves Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 17:55:03 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Chaos Lines: 51 Sender: chaos@shell.cifnet.com (Michael A. Atkinson) Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: shell.cifnet.com X-Trace: vallen.koba.ee 1022867703 45301 198.63.208.11 (31 May 2002 17:55:03 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@cifnet.net NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 31 May 2002 17:55:03 +0000 (UTC) X-Html-Lart:

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 X-No-Archive: yes Originator: chaos@cifnet.com (Michael A. Atkinson) Path: news.meer.net!dfw-read.news.verio.net!dfw-artgen!iad-peer.news.verio.net!news.verio.net!news.maxwell.syr.edu!nntp-relay.ihug.net!ihug.co.nz!nntp.cifnet.net!not-for-mail Xref: archive.mv.meer.net alt.peeves:12310 One of our customers called in a rage this morning. When his mailserver died a month ago, I was sent out to fix it. I determined that a software upgrade would solve the problem, applied same, and informed the customer that he would need to buy an upgrade license before the thirty-day trial key expired. I promised him that we would sell him this upgrade license well before the month was out. I followed up with the project manager for that account. Recalling peeves passim regarding conversational reciepts, I covered my ass with an email. When the trial key expired today, The Powers That Be began discussing the outage near my cube. Wordlessly, I printed the reply from the account's project manager stating that he would arrange the new key, and handed a copy to each of the two Powers. After reading the email, I reminded them that I'd brought up the customer service complaints that the customer had aired in front of me a month ago. Wailing and gnashing of teeth followed. After lunch, I found out that the key strategic technology we've been working on has been discarded by our sales force as being too hard to make money with. By order of the owners, the technology team has spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on learning this technology. I have personally been taken off of interesting billable work to take a piss-poor online training seminar for over a week, so that I will be certified to support this technology. I would normally have billed about $8k during this time. Another $5k of billable hours were lost passing the previous exam in this certification. I asked the minor Power what the blue blithering fuck the owners were thinking. No satisfactory answer was made available. I speculated aloud that since the head sales weasel works for the owners, that they should achieve fecal cohesion and decide whether or not we should be spending our time, money and mental CPU cycles on this technology. One of our senior engineers wondered aloud how we were going to make any money. The answer was not encouraging. Apparently, if we make any money at any point between now and the heat death of the universe, it will be due to the blessings of a nameless god of corporate fortune, and not because we know what the fuck we're doing. The only comfort I can find in this is that I'm still getting paid. Mike -- Michael A. Atkinson "I would like to be an arbiter of what, exactly, does or does not constitute an erect penis." - Peggy Currid