Re: It's Friday, I want to hear a funny IT, system i, computer Story.

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Oh man.... well.... ok. Here's the rest of that story. Shortly after
that my boss was fired and he was replaced as IT Director by a fellow
with one year experience with PCs, I was let go soon after that. The
one who did the job changes was fired soon after that.

But more to the one year experience... Prior to coming into this IT
Department as a minimum wage gopher (his "one year of experience"), he
had been a worker in a Marina where his nickname was "Captain Backwards"
because he had apparently inadvertently sailed a customer's yacht
backwards across the marina basin, causing a whole lot of damage.

Was this the company owner's nephew? Isn't this how totally clueless people
get hired as an IT Director? I mean, I've seen some managers that you just
knew were there only because of nepotism, but that one takes the cake,
Booth.

Oh, and so, to answer my earlier question, I'm guessing all you got before
you were let go was a nice attaboy.

I remember when I was working for a consulting company back in the 80's,
they were one of IBM's largest business partners at the time, and I was
working at a branch that employed, IIRC, 50 people or so. There was a
large, nay, HUGE project that saw about 15 people working on it. It
suffered from a manager who didn't know how to manage out-of-scope add-ons,
and, before you knew it, they were getting close to deadline with almost no
hope of delivering anything usable. Those 15 people (salaried, BTW) worked
80-hour weeks for two months to get this thing cranked out and delivered on
time. At the following monthly branch office meeting, the branch manager
brought the 15 people forward to acknowledge their efforts and gave them
each an envelope which contained a "reward", as he put it, that they could
use towards "a nice dinner on the town". Man, if you've never heard a pin
drop... Someone eventually started that awkward applause, you know, the
kind that starts out slow, and then others finally regain consciousness to
join in. If that doesn't motivate your workforce, I don't know what will!
(Yeah, motivate them to find a new job!)

- Dan