Effluvia

Music for today's entry is provided by Dave, former coworker and lead singer of Crash Into June:

The Sounds of Gordo, lyrics and strings. Recording to come soon, hopefully.

Concord.wav - a touching little ditty.

Journal Roulette

Reacharound - Just for the name.

Siobhanorama!

Siobhan drinks a lot and doesn't go to school.

The Coworkers
Ain't Cool Dep't.

Yesterday I went into the bathroom and opened the door of the far stall, intending to go in and take care of some business, know what I'm saying?

Sitting there, in the pot, peeking over the very rim, was one of the largest piles of crap I'd ever seen.

"Hello!" said the poop, "I'm pretty darned big, aren't I? Get a wheelbarrow, get me out of here, I'll win a blue ribbon at the state fair!"

I backed away slowly and closed the door.

I mean, it was like a cow had backed up to the toilet and let 'er rip.

Whichever coworker did that is so not cool. But I will admit he has the large intestine of an ox.

Two Years Ago
I confirm my geekiness.

One Year Ago
I wrote a little poem!

My former coworker Trey has encouraged me on several occasions to write about my experience with our mutual former employee. My life is slow right now, so I'll do just that.

Well, Trey never said I should write about it specifically, but he said someone should. So I will.

So back in January of last year this headhunter calls me at work. I was quite happy at that job (great coworkers, lots of experience, what have you) and I'm prepared to blow him off.

But this headhunter is insistent, and asks only that I give him a chance to make his full pitch. I give him the chance. What he tells me about sounds interesting: it's a bank that primarily does credit card transactions. They're about to start selling e-commerce services to the credit card customers they already have, and they're going to need someone to build hundreds - and maybe thousands - of sites.

I'm curious.

I tell the headhunter that I won't do customer service work and that I won't work extra hours without getting paid. He says those things are fine. I tell him to schedule me for an interview.

A couple of weeks later I go out to this bank (in an office park out by the Wolfchase Galleria - the Siberia of Memphis, as fas as a Downtown dweller like me is concerned) and talk to Tracy, their VP of IT. It's a good interview; I think as you get older and more experienced interviews get easier. I remember going on interviews for jobs when I was right out of college and it was like two quick rounds of sparring with Hannibal Lecter, vicious and disorienting. This was nothing like that. Tracy wanted to get this thing off the ground quick, and he wanted good people to do it. He mentioned a raise, stock options and bonuses. It was more of a pitch than an interview. I told him I was going to London in March, and if that was a problem he'd need to look for someone else. He assured me that was fine and asked me how much money I wanted. I added 20% to what I was already making. He accepted immediately.

The next day I was offered the job. The day after that I accepted. As far as I was concerned, this was a gold-plated opportunity.

A few weeks later I report for my first day of work. I have coffee with Tracy, who then hands me off to the man who will be my immediate supervisor. He reeks of coffee and cigarettes and has a white beard. The Kenny Rogers resemblance is extraordinary.

Yes, this is the Boss Kenny I wrote about this summer. He quizzes me on the different types of software and programming languages I know. I feel like a fraud as I tell him no again and again when he asks if I'm familiar with something.

"That's all right," he assures me, "with as much work as we've got to do you'll be a Java expert in thirty days."

Okay.

Kenny takes me deep into the telemarketer-infested bowels of the building. Hidden in an obscure corner is a small conference room dominated by a strange paper-folding machine. Here I meet two coworkers: John and Chris. John is an HTML utility player kind of guy, like me, and Chris is a UNIX hacker.

There is one computer in this room, and it is not connected to the internet.

Kenny leaves me with Chris and John. They are cool guys, and pleasant to hang out with. John and I both bring our lunch and take to eating it outside. Sometimes we go do some shopping when we have extra time at lunch.

We always have extra time at lunch.

Eventually they hook the internet up to that one little computer and add two more machines. I meet Dave and Adrienne, graphic artists, and Trey, a web wrangler and overlord of our little group. Our computers are connected to the internet. Kenny comes by occasionally. He sits, visits, tells stories about the war and assures us that lots of work is on the way, starting as soon as tomorrow.

"You're in for the ride of your life," he assures us.

John brings Rollercoaster Tycoon to work. We both install it on our machines and build happy theme parks.

During that first month we had a little work to do. There were six of us, though, and seven if you count Tim, a combination tech/webguy who would pop up infrequently and then disappear for months. Thus, any work that appeared would be pounced upon and done away with as soon as we knew about it. I actually left some stuff undone when I left for two weeks to go to London, but my coworkers assured me they could take care of it. It seemed that the much-rumored big project was slowly but surely arriving.

When I got back from London two weeks later I had to delete six e-mails. That was all the catching up I had to do. And I got paid for the time I was gone, too.

Kenny kept coming by and telling us lurid stories of how busy we would be. Those weren't the only stories he told. We'd be moving in to our own offices soon, he'd tell us, in preparation for spinning off from the company and getting ready for our own IPO. This was heady talk just before the internet stock crash. Hundreds of sites needed to be worked on next week. Thousands of sites needed to be completed by tomorrow night. We'd soon be working nights and weekends.

After a while we started to doubt Kenny's honesty.

I should have seen at least a part of the problem immediately. During my first few days there a man came to teach my more technically-minded colleagues how to run the software that would enable our e-commerce efforts. John and I sat in on this course just for the heck of it, since we had nothing else to do. I can safely say it was totally over my head. But the people whose job it was to install and run the thing couldn't make it work. Neither could the instructor, who was a horrid little man and if I ever see him on the street I'm going to punch him in the head.

Our internet strategy did not work.

"I'm done feelin' guilty, then," I told John one day at lunch, "we've got an excellent scam going on here and I'm going to burn this company for all they're worth."

Soon after that John and I started going to movies at lunch. We would take long, extended trips into Bartlett to browse at the used CD shops. Life was idyllic.

Ond day Kenny burst in and jumped on all our asses, telling us that a demo site had to be ready by the following Monday or all the bigwigs would throw a fit. He assured us we would be working nights and all through the weekend to get done.

"I've let you get away with a lot," he admonished us, "Harold, you got to go to London..."

Whoa there, Gambler, I thought to myself, that had nothin' to do with you... The coworkers were similarly irked.

We finished the project that afternoon. Kenny was a bit mollified.

And we knew. There weren't thousands of sites that needed to be built. There was no urgent need for the few sites that did exist. There was no work. Kenny was a liar.

As summer got started we all moved into a group of cubicles recently vacated by telemarketers. Before that we'd been in the aforementioned conference room or in scattered cubes throughout the building. So we were all together.

This led to more closeness and cohesion within the group. We started to compare notes. We all realized that we hadn't done a full day's work in three months. The slacking got out of hand quickly. Two-and-a-half-hour lunches became the norm. Artwork making fun of Kenny was Photoshopped and e-mailed constantly. Quick games of football and whiffleball became more and more common.

Kenny was removed as our supervisor, apparently because he didn't know what the hell was going on. Trey was named the Lead Web Designer, but there was still nothing for us to do. Management was more pleasant, though.

We were joined in our little area by Eddie, the network guy, and Gordo and Gordessa, customer service people who dealt with the constant calls from our handful of e-commerce sites that had somehow come into existence. No one knew who had made these sites, but they were on our server. Gordo had a deep, gruff voice that was pleasant to listen to. Once he had hung out with REO Speedwagon. Gordessa talked guardedly out of the side of her mouth, as if she were afraid someone was eavesdropping, and showed around pictures of herself in bondage gear at a Halloween party. She was fired shortly after she arrived; according to her boss she was massively stupid.

By the end of June I was coming in well after nine and leaving whenever I felt like it. One day I took a four-hour lunch. Sometimes I would clock in, sometimes not. My check stayed the same every week.

After the Fourth of July we knew it couldn't last much longer. Dave kept an aerosol can of furniture polish in his cube, with a new label taped on it:

"FIRED!" the label said. We knew it could come at any time. We had literally not done any work in months. Resumes were sent.

Then Tracy quit. While the reasoning behind this was never clear to me, as far as I could tell Tracy never had the proper authorization to hire a web development team. That makes sense; he could hardly give work to workers that weren't supposed to be there, right?

Luckily, I was already talking to my future employer in Louisiana by that point. Dave handed in his two weeks notice that Friday, I gave mine the next Tuesday. We left on a Friday, two weeks later. The new boss was glum to be losing people so fast.

But we'd all liked Tracy. John and Trey quit soon afterward. Chris had plenty of work to do, knowing UNIX and all, so he stayed on. Adrienne seemed terrified at the idea of losing a job; as far as I know she's still there.

Gordo was arrested for stalking his ex-girlfriend.

While it was a fun job, I'm glad I don't work there anymore. The stock options would have been nice, but all the free time and no schedule was a bonus that I collected on the job, as it were. Would I do it again? I don't know. Maybe.

In a lot of ways it was a dream job; I quite literally got paid for doing nothing. But that was over, and I'm afraid we were all so spoiled that we would have resented actually having to do work at that place. I did more work at my job today than I did the whole time I was at Concord. It's no way to live.