frustrations of a plebeian (2)

[continue rant]

My last post, via the computer-use-in-meetings anecdote, is an example of how Mr. D is frustrating to somebody (myself) who gets peeved about almost any kind of idiotic computer use. There are also, however, ways in which he projects his incompetence to any and all people in his presence.

When somebody asks Mr. D a clarifying question, he is often unable to understand what the question is really asking. Mr. D ends up trying to dumb down his response every time the question is re-asked, since he feels the other person must be mentally handicapped if they aren't understanding his explanation. Here's a typical example...

Mr D: "Please measure the width of these boxes."
Person 2: "Okay. Do you want width from front to back or from right to left?
Mr. D: "Width is the linear distance between two, opposite sides of an object."
Person 3: "Yes, but that distance is different depending on which sides you pick."
Mr. D: "If you take the total volume of a cube, and take the third root of it, you'll get the width."
Persons 2 and 3: [under their breath] "We're going to ignore you and/or scream now. Okay?"

Of course, the incompetence doesn't stop there. Mr D is totally unable to think on his feet or carry on a constructive argument/discussion. Let's say he has prepared for a meeting by charting the defect rate of widgets over time. Now, imagine that somebody in the meeting suggests that it might be more insightful to view the defect rate as a function of production volume. At this point, Mr. D is likely to wig out. He'll get flustered and irritated, completely unable to function usefully. He /could/ spend a minute or two rearranging things to create the charts that were suggested, but because he sucks with computers (as seen in the last post) and is wigging out, he'll attempt to recreate everything from scratch and waste 20 minutes in the process, all while muttering to himself: "Dammit, I should have done it that way from the start. Sorry, everyone, just let me redo this entire spreadsheet." You can never tell who he's yelling at: himself, the person who suggested the change, or both.

[/rant]

frustrations of a plebeian (1)

I am but a simple, subsistence farmer in the society that is my company. Sure, I'm a landowner and [more or less] have a good deal of freedom, but I am wholly unremarkable with respect to money and power. Mr. D (a pseudonym, of course) is a also a farmer, but a much more powerful one. He does not have his own commercial farming organization, but he runs a co-op that includes several farmers in addition to himself. Consistent with the Peter Principle, he seems to have been promoted [at least] one level past his competence.

To be fair, running the co-op does not take all of Mr. D's time. The portion still spent farming is quite productive; he's not a bad farmer at all. To run the co-op, however, requires different skills: namely, leadership. Such a leader needs to not only inspire confidence in the other co-op members, but also command respect from the outside farmers with whom he competes and/or cooperates. Needless to say, Mr. D does not have those skills.

This whole post started because of Mr. D's ability to all-too-frequently make me shake my head and mutter [under my breath] "Good Lord... get your shit together, buddy." His beginning-of-meeting routine is a good example. Meetings at my company are inevitably shifted 5 minutes late because the people in the conference room before you never leave on time, so neither do you, or the folks after you, and so on. People calling in from their desks are normally on time; so not only are you starting late, but the poor fellas on the conference call have been listening to hold music for 5 minutes before you even enter the room.

At this point, a smart Meeting Leader would dial in to the conference call, bring his laptop out of standby, refresh the Sametime webpage (the software we use for online collaboration), and be up and running within 30 seconds. Mr. D enters the conference call, apologizes for the previous meeting lasting too long, then proceeds to delay the start of /this/ meeting by at least another five minutes. First, he unpacks the A/C adapter and mouse. Apparently, nobody told him that laptops have a battery and pointing device built the fuck in[1]. Once those are organized and plugged in, he turns on his computer: not 'resumes from standby', or even 'resumes from hibernation', but 'turns on' his computer. For the laptops in my group, booting up can waste anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes; resuming from standby takes about 15 seconds. Once powered up and logged in, he has to search for and open the Sametime meeting and any documents germane to the topic at hand. If, during the meeting, he has to find a new file, he often closes all the other open windows. Of course, if he needs any of those now-closed files again, he has to find and reopen them. Maybe all these things aren't frustrating to other Luddites, but they make me want to pull my hair out. Technology exists to make our lives easier, faster, cheaper, and more productive, but Mr. D uses technology to waste my time and make himself look like an idiot.

This has been nothing more than a rant, and I apologize for that... not because I don't think it's a worthy topic, but because I don't think I took enough time in composing it. This guy projects a constant aura of incompetence, and I was hoping to provide a clear picture of the computer-related aspect of that aura.
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[1] At least he's smart enough to use the wireless network instead of taking the time to set up a wired connection.

extreme naivete

For your reading pleasure, I will describe a recent conversation between myself and an intern in my workgroup. He and I sit in adjacent, four-person cubes, so this conversation was easily overheard by at least six other people.

Intern: "Ben, you have a girlfriend, right?"
Ben: "Yes."
Intern: "Have you ever made her mad?"

At this point, two things happened simultaneously. First, I just about fell off my chair laughing. Second, everybody within earshot turned around to look at the intern, trying to figure out whether he had really said what they thought they heard. This kid isn't /that/ young (21 yrs old, I believe); how is he still so naive as to ask such a question? He's even in a long-distance relationship, which by definition is a reasonably serious relationship. How is it possible that's he's never effed up before? Guys are hard-wired to do things that, through no fault of our own, piss off our mates. Anyway, the intern continues...

Intern: "Where's a good jewelry store around here?"

Here is where this post switches gears, and I move from questioning the intern's 'lady smarts' to decrying the ridiculous 'standards' to which relationships are held in modern America. What does it say about our society that a useless, pointless, worthless gift is supposed to help 'fix' a fight? The jewelers and florists love it, but it's a hot, steaming, Biff-enveloping load of crap. Even worse, the standard only goes one way; if a girl messes up, the guy doesn't get a Borla cat-back, or a new Xbox game, or a stack of Playboys.

The ideal, however, is not to expect the post-fight gift giving to go both ways. The ideal is to eliminate it. The two people involved should discuss the things that caused the fight and try to come to an agreement on those issues. An apology (or two) is probably a good idea, but gifts are not. As with lawsuits, fights are often a way to vilify your adversary and obtain some kind of payback, to which you feel you are entitled as the 'victim'. In reality, things are almost never so black and white. I'm not saying that blame is always 50:50 in every situation, but there /are/, to be terribly cliche, two sides to every story. Only by taking an objective look at both sides can you truly and justly 'solve' a dispute. Now, please return to your regularly scheduled laughing-at-the-dumb-intern. ;)