A funny and well written story about one mans opinion and revenge upon management...
http://web.archive.org/web/200110181456 ... ews54.html
[quote]Everyone has stories of subtle and not-so-subtle terrorism intended against their managers or fellow workers in the search for a decent work environment. I remember one manager for an insurance company who found that her serfs spent their lunch breaks at their desks playing computer solitaire because they didn't have enough time to go out and get lunch anywhere else
Revenge of the Mad Shitter...
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E~Man
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Revenge of the Mad Shitter...
...pulling back the foreskin of ignorance and applying the wire brush of knowledge.
Chakra: Any place where, if you hit it with a baseball bat, you'll die. Joe Bob Briggs
Chakra: Any place where, if you hit it with a baseball bat, you'll die. Joe Bob Briggs
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Mind Pollution
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Squidflakes
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ahhhh fucking classic.
I had some friends who were sentenced to the hell that was TI, and I always thought I was smart enough to escape any doom along those lines. However, I did my time in the hell that was called Everyones Internet.
Oh the stories I could tell.. I somehow made it in to middle management there, but that only means you're a bigger target for shit. I'll just hit the salient points for now, but suffice to say, this place was horrible. The pay was obscene. I'm not kidding, Linux webserver trouble shooters were getting $7 USD an hour, no benifits, no vacation, no holidays.
My position wasn't much better, but at least I got a week off every year. The CEO of this place, Robert Marsh, was a fucking loon. He would buy the latest cool thing.. the new beatle, a Segway, a WNBA team, then hold company wide meetings to show off his new toys.
He'd make announcements to the staff along the lines of "Ok, we've descided to change our support model so we now offer full support to all customers. To compensate everyone for the additional work they are going to be expected to do, well, we'll think of something, its not going to be monetary, but we'll think of something."
Be bought a new Lamborgini but tore out the exaust system and destroyed the suspension when he brought it home for the first time, because his driveway was too steep.
Neputism was RAMPANT. Favoritism was just the way things went. You spoke up, you got fired. You made too many waves, you got fired.
The facilities were awful. The building was one of those non-descript 10 story numbers in the middle of town. It was falling apart, the bathrooms.. jesus christ.. not only were the bathrooms bad to begin with, but the people that worked at EV1 had the poorest hygine. If you've seen "From Dusk Till Dawn" then you know what the tiolets looked like sometimes. Did I mention that as a manager, I was expected to monitor the bathrooms for a week, and fire anyone who wasn't using proper bathroom techniques? Yea..
There was a transformer that exploded in the HVAC room, and started a small fire. Not only were the managers instructed to keep the employees working, but after the fire was put out, it was discovered that the transformer was made in 1974, and contained a nice HUGE dollop of PCBs. The stench was HORRIFIC. However, no one was permitted to leave. The upper management solution to the issue? Febreze. When all the calls and letter to OSHA finally paid off, the company was forced to clean the office. I'm not kidding when I say that the water from the steam cleaner they brought in was BLACK AS TAR every time they changed it, which eneded up being after every couple of rows of cubes.
Ahhh.. but I finally got out of there. My manager made it out two weeks after I did, but where as I got fired for standing up for my employees, he died from a drug overdose.
I had some friends who were sentenced to the hell that was TI, and I always thought I was smart enough to escape any doom along those lines. However, I did my time in the hell that was called Everyones Internet.
Oh the stories I could tell.. I somehow made it in to middle management there, but that only means you're a bigger target for shit. I'll just hit the salient points for now, but suffice to say, this place was horrible. The pay was obscene. I'm not kidding, Linux webserver trouble shooters were getting $7 USD an hour, no benifits, no vacation, no holidays.
My position wasn't much better, but at least I got a week off every year. The CEO of this place, Robert Marsh, was a fucking loon. He would buy the latest cool thing.. the new beatle, a Segway, a WNBA team, then hold company wide meetings to show off his new toys.
He'd make announcements to the staff along the lines of "Ok, we've descided to change our support model so we now offer full support to all customers. To compensate everyone for the additional work they are going to be expected to do, well, we'll think of something, its not going to be monetary, but we'll think of something."
Be bought a new Lamborgini but tore out the exaust system and destroyed the suspension when he brought it home for the first time, because his driveway was too steep.
Neputism was RAMPANT. Favoritism was just the way things went. You spoke up, you got fired. You made too many waves, you got fired.
The facilities were awful. The building was one of those non-descript 10 story numbers in the middle of town. It was falling apart, the bathrooms.. jesus christ.. not only were the bathrooms bad to begin with, but the people that worked at EV1 had the poorest hygine. If you've seen "From Dusk Till Dawn" then you know what the tiolets looked like sometimes. Did I mention that as a manager, I was expected to monitor the bathrooms for a week, and fire anyone who wasn't using proper bathroom techniques? Yea..
There was a transformer that exploded in the HVAC room, and started a small fire. Not only were the managers instructed to keep the employees working, but after the fire was put out, it was discovered that the transformer was made in 1974, and contained a nice HUGE dollop of PCBs. The stench was HORRIFIC. However, no one was permitted to leave. The upper management solution to the issue? Febreze. When all the calls and letter to OSHA finally paid off, the company was forced to clean the office. I'm not kidding when I say that the water from the steam cleaner they brought in was BLACK AS TAR every time they changed it, which eneded up being after every couple of rows of cubes.
Ahhh.. but I finally got out of there. My manager made it out two weeks after I did, but where as I got fired for standing up for my employees, he died from a drug overdose.
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Squidflakes
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Illithid Tentacles
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Schol-R-LEA;2
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I worked as a security guard in Stamford, CT, in the early 1990s. This was corporate security, mind you, which is a sort of honor guard companies hire to get a break on their property insurance; the main duty was to show up and not leave or fall alseep, and maybe walk around the building every few hours to punch the Morse keys (or Detex keys, in a handful of really old sites). No one in corporate security is sane; long hours of nothing, late at night, has an eroding effect on the mind. One cow-orker of mine compared it at times to radiation exposure, or to owning the One Ring - a little bit doesn't seem to do much, but the cumulative effect it to turn you into a misshappen, deranged troll.
Supposedly, one of the other guards was leaving plastic cups of crap around in the building stairwells at one of these sites. While I doubt it was true - the MGT never said anything about it - I knew it was possible, because I was involved my own bit of guerrilla surrealism at the time: I would sneak off to the company copier machines, dup off a dozen or so copies of the Principia Discordia, and hide them in various places around the office. I also took large numbers of the copies home with me to pass around or hide elsewhere; all told, I must have made something like 600 copies of it, which at one sheet per four pages amounted to something on the order of 42000 sheets of legal paper. I was never caught while I worked there (though I found out later they had started investigating it after I was canned for falling asleep).
As for idiot basses, well, I worked for a software house once where the boss announced at one meeting: "If Microsoft can get people to pay for beta software, so can we." He then cribbed a line from the old Paul Maisson commercials: "We will test no software before it ships". The results we predictably dismal, especially for a niche-market product which was already gravely inferior in quality and function to it's competitors. The products were sent out on CD-Rs with paper printed labels, and our bug tracking consisted of putting the burn date on the labels. I'm not kidding. Even when one of us went out to a client site to install the software for them, it rarely worked well, and sometimes not at all.
This same bosss hired a friend of mine as a web developer based on the fact that he was able to show him how to steal a design from another companies website. When I quit/was fired (which it was was a matter of dispute), he went to this same person (a graphics designer who knew nothing of programming and had no interest in it) and the other web developer, and told them both, "I need you to be up to speed on Access programming by next Monday." They both fell out of their chairs in shock and laughter.
This same friend was later hired by another company as a web developer, and there he ended up an unofficial sysadmin. The boss there refused to buy backup media; predictably, when the main server drive failed, my friend was blamed for not having made backups...
In another job, I was hired as a "Y2K Remediator" by a company contracted to Kaiser Permanente. The contractors' plan was to gather together every single piece of software used by KP (!) for testing, and fix any that they could.
This was a massive undertaking, for which they were woefully unprepared; the staff which was supposed to inventory and collect the software and data was too small by an order of magnitude. What is more, due to a quirk of hiring, many of these people were H1B employees who, while technically competent, spoke poor, heavily accented English, doing a job where communication with non-computer people (doctors, nurses, and medical secretaries) was key. The fact that the people they were speaking with about it often had no idea what the software they were running was (i.e., we got several listings of "Windows" under "word processor", and conversely, "Word" for oaftware were all lumped together without clear indication which was which, made the inventory process a mess.
This was complicated by the structure of KP; they were built out of tens of thousands of hospitals and clinics of every size and type, which except for the HMO system were largely autonomous. Most of the real power was in the regional directorates, and many of them were opposed to the plan, even though the Board of Directors had OKed it. As a result; there were many places which refused to help the project at all; one director told them thhat if they even stepped foot in one of her sites, she would have them arrested. This meant that even if the collection process worked, they couldn't do any collection in those areas.
The only thing they got right was the testing lab, an $N million secure site designed to prevent any confidential data from getting out. The inner lab even had a Faraday cage around it, IIRC. Unfortunately, it took them over a month to get the security cards for the staff, so the manager had to open the door to the lab in the morning and the door was often left propped open over the lunch hour. It hardly mattered, though, as not one bit of confidential data ever made it's way there anyway.
When they finally hired us, the remediators, in mid-1998, they were projecting a 22 month operation, which would take us into April 2000 (sigh). This was dependent on getting the software for testing, and the testers (who were a separate group in the same building) working on them. The idea was that the testers would catalog the problems, then pass them to us for fixing, then we'd throw it back over the wall to them for confirmation. The problem was, they bever actually got any testers, but that didn't matter because for the first three months, there was no software to test anyway. Thus they had 20-odd skilled programmers sitting idle at pay rates ranging from $30/hr (for run-of-the-mill Access and VB folks like me) to $90/hr (for these two specialists in some obscure database systems). We tried to be productive by vetting the inventory data they actually had managed to get, and we did a bunch of prep work in expectation of getting some software to fix, but the truth was they'd started us far too early. They finally did get a trickle of software (mostly Visual Foxpro and some old DOS-based junk, most of which was thrown out out-of-hand as irreperable), which we did the testing on ourselves, but by then the writing was on the wall, and sure enough I an several others got laid off in the first round of re-org. The whole situation was bizarre.
Supposedly, one of the other guards was leaving plastic cups of crap around in the building stairwells at one of these sites. While I doubt it was true - the MGT never said anything about it - I knew it was possible, because I was involved my own bit of guerrilla surrealism at the time: I would sneak off to the company copier machines, dup off a dozen or so copies of the Principia Discordia, and hide them in various places around the office. I also took large numbers of the copies home with me to pass around or hide elsewhere; all told, I must have made something like 600 copies of it, which at one sheet per four pages amounted to something on the order of 42000 sheets of legal paper. I was never caught while I worked there (though I found out later they had started investigating it after I was canned for falling asleep).
As for idiot basses, well, I worked for a software house once where the boss announced at one meeting: "If Microsoft can get people to pay for beta software, so can we." He then cribbed a line from the old Paul Maisson commercials: "We will test no software before it ships". The results we predictably dismal, especially for a niche-market product which was already gravely inferior in quality and function to it's competitors. The products were sent out on CD-Rs with paper printed labels, and our bug tracking consisted of putting the burn date on the labels. I'm not kidding. Even when one of us went out to a client site to install the software for them, it rarely worked well, and sometimes not at all.
This same bosss hired a friend of mine as a web developer based on the fact that he was able to show him how to steal a design from another companies website. When I quit/was fired (which it was was a matter of dispute), he went to this same person (a graphics designer who knew nothing of programming and had no interest in it) and the other web developer, and told them both, "I need you to be up to speed on Access programming by next Monday." They both fell out of their chairs in shock and laughter.
This same friend was later hired by another company as a web developer, and there he ended up an unofficial sysadmin. The boss there refused to buy backup media; predictably, when the main server drive failed, my friend was blamed for not having made backups...
In another job, I was hired as a "Y2K Remediator" by a company contracted to Kaiser Permanente. The contractors' plan was to gather together every single piece of software used by KP (!) for testing, and fix any that they could.
This was a massive undertaking, for which they were woefully unprepared; the staff which was supposed to inventory and collect the software and data was too small by an order of magnitude. What is more, due to a quirk of hiring, many of these people were H1B employees who, while technically competent, spoke poor, heavily accented English, doing a job where communication with non-computer people (doctors, nurses, and medical secretaries) was key. The fact that the people they were speaking with about it often had no idea what the software they were running was (i.e., we got several listings of "Windows" under "word processor", and conversely, "Word" for oaftware were all lumped together without clear indication which was which, made the inventory process a mess.
This was complicated by the structure of KP; they were built out of tens of thousands of hospitals and clinics of every size and type, which except for the HMO system were largely autonomous. Most of the real power was in the regional directorates, and many of them were opposed to the plan, even though the Board of Directors had OKed it. As a result; there were many places which refused to help the project at all; one director told them thhat if they even stepped foot in one of her sites, she would have them arrested. This meant that even if the collection process worked, they couldn't do any collection in those areas.
The only thing they got right was the testing lab, an $N million secure site designed to prevent any confidential data from getting out. The inner lab even had a Faraday cage around it, IIRC. Unfortunately, it took them over a month to get the security cards for the staff, so the manager had to open the door to the lab in the morning and the door was often left propped open over the lunch hour. It hardly mattered, though, as not one bit of confidential data ever made it's way there anyway.
When they finally hired us, the remediators, in mid-1998, they were projecting a 22 month operation, which would take us into April 2000 (sigh). This was dependent on getting the software for testing, and the testers (who were a separate group in the same building) working on them. The idea was that the testers would catalog the problems, then pass them to us for fixing, then we'd throw it back over the wall to them for confirmation. The problem was, they bever actually got any testers, but that didn't matter because for the first three months, there was no software to test anyway. Thus they had 20-odd skilled programmers sitting idle at pay rates ranging from $30/hr (for run-of-the-mill Access and VB folks like me) to $90/hr (for these two specialists in some obscure database systems). We tried to be productive by vetting the inventory data they actually had managed to get, and we did a bunch of prep work in expectation of getting some software to fix, but the truth was they'd started us far too early. They finally did get a trickle of software (mostly Visual Foxpro and some old DOS-based junk, most of which was thrown out out-of-hand as irreperable), which we did the testing on ourselves, but by then the writing was on the wall, and sure enough I an several others got laid off in the first round of re-org. The whole situation was bizarre.
Schol-R-LEA;2, First Speaker, Last Eristic Church of Finagle and Holy Bisexuality
#define KINSEY (rand() % 7) // Keeper of the Tent Peg of Homosexuality +5
You draw it, we misinterpret it. - Bo Lindbergh // Oinos! Oinos! Pentadaktyloi phylloi!
"Shakespeare gets so much better when the bodies start thumping against the Danish earth." - Sir Thomas of Cornwall
moderator of the GenderShifters LJ community
#define KINSEY (rand() % 7) // Keeper of the Tent Peg of Homosexuality +5
You draw it, we misinterpret it. - Bo Lindbergh // Oinos! Oinos! Pentadaktyloi phylloi!
"Shakespeare gets so much better when the bodies start thumping against the Danish earth." - Sir Thomas of Cornwall
moderator of the GenderShifters LJ community
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WhatMeWorry?
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Illithid Tentacles
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Re: Revenge of the Mad Shitter...
Er, what's rara avii mean? A mispelling? Google didn't turn up anything that appeared informative.
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Prettydragoon
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Try 'rara avis'.
This webcomic, seen here is hosted on the free web host Comic Genesis which pretty much proves its not popular.
Oh noes! Read all about the tormented artist I am!
Oh noes! Read all about the tormented artist I am!
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Kittyboymuffin
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So ... girls are rain forests?
A catboy is fine too. And I dancedancedance and I dancedancedance!
Kinkymuffin ^^
Quote: "The only thing better than tentacles is twentyacles." -- Dori, at TS MUSH
Kinkymuffin ^^
Quote: "The only thing better than tentacles is twentyacles." -- Dori, at TS MUSH
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Kingofthemorlocks
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I don't have any good stories of vengeance, other than telling everyone I know not to eat at the Ted's Hot Dogs on Meadow Drive in North Tonawanda. I worked there for 9 months, there were more managers than regular grunts, they hired new people constantly because people were constantly quitting, but they never had enough people on shift, resulting in people working multiple positions at a time. One of the managers was batshit crazy, he once told me he someday wanted to kill someone, just so he could hide the body in the giant ice machine in the back room, another manager was a 4'6" Latina control freak who'd make up names for you rather than learn your real name, the head manager was 52, had been working there for 20 years, and once yelled at me for flushing a used tampon that had been left in the women's toilet instead of fishing it out with my bare hands. She refused to provide me with a pair of rubber gloves, saying that they were only for the people who handled food.
Oh, and one of my coworkers I caught eating melted cheese out of a dispenser in the backroom.
Oh, and one of my coworkers I caught eating melted cheese out of a dispenser in the backroom.
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Indigo Violent
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I used to have a shift supervisor I despised. For a long time I couldn't put my finger on what it was about her that bothered me - and then one morning, when we were both scheduled to open, she was fifteen minutes late. Which meant I had to wait outside, by myself, at a quarter past five in the morning, for her to show up and unlock the damn door so I could get some caffeine into myself before I fell asleep on the urine-stained doorstep of a downtown Starbucks. That was strike one.
Strike two was that she didn't apologise.
Strike three was that she told the store's head manager that I had been late as well, and I almost got written up for it until I explained that I had been there at ten past. Why she did this, I don't know, but it was enough to make me realise just what an inconsiderate bitch she really was.
Strike two was that she didn't apologise.
Strike three was that she told the store's head manager that I had been late as well, and I almost got written up for it until I explained that I had been there at ten past. Why she did this, I don't know, but it was enough to make me realise just what an inconsiderate bitch she really was.
"In operating system terms, what would you say the legal system is equivalent to?"
"Slow. Buggy. Uses up all allocated resources and still needs more. Windows. Definitely Windows."
~Freefall
"Slow. Buggy. Uses up all allocated resources and still needs more. Windows. Definitely Windows."
~Freefall