A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

(I started this as a response to Joan’s comment to the post below, but it was getting a little windy even for me.)

This is, without a doubt the most minor example of this behavior he’s exhibited in the last two years. It isn’t slightly exaggerated.

I was talking about it last night and I realized that I had actually moved beyond ranting about it to a friend of mine and into the land of general concern. It really seems as though there’s something wrong with his head.

It drives me out of my mind. He and my boss were standing at my desk when I was trying to get a profoundly simple answer to a reasonably simple question out of him. Once I distilled the issue down to a yes or no question, I stopped him mid-stride every time he would say anything else with a “wait, first yes or no.” It had been going on for 10 minutes.

Partially it was for the benefit of my boss, who needed to see this for herself as I was starting to sound like a ridiculous hot head (an interpretation of my bearing which is not without merit.)

Finally I saw the light kick on when she squinted curiously at him and finally said “Jorge, Mike is asking you a very simple question.”

Once cornered he stood there in complete silence, getting angrier and angrier. I just kept repeating the question as his face got redder and redder, interjecting with an occasional “Jorge, you have to answer. We need to know this. You can’t just not say anything.”

Of course there’s not a lot in this world that infuriates me more than this kind of thing. I was monumentally unprepared for him to have dug his heels in this hard, so I lost it. I finally balled my left fist yelling “Answer the fucking QUESTION!” which I punctuated by slamming it down on the edge of the desk with sufficient force to bloody myself and fuck up my knuckles for about 4 days.

My manager realized I was disturbingly likely to put Jorge in intensive care so she diffused the situation with a “Jorge can I talk to you at my desk?” Whereupon she had the good sense to bring him over and make smalltalk about nothing so the blood vessel didn’t burst in his head.

We have status meetings 3 days a week. Quick things. “What did you do yesterday and today? What are you going to do tomorrow? Is there anything in your way?” Bullet list items. He can’t do it. He can’t speak succinctly. He waves his hands in the air talking at nauseating length about how compricated his task is and how you really need to be an expert to understand.

Now I just dismiss him out of hand. I point it out whenever it happens (which is …every day) because it can’t be allowed.

The absolute worst part of it is: I… I actually like Jorge. He’s a good guy. He’s got some neat experiences, knows a few languages (though to hear him speak French will truly make your ears burn) and, when properly motivated, he tells an interesting story.

If I were a manager I would have bounced his ass 18 months ago. But I’m not. So I have to just avoid dealing with him, for both of our sakes.

So I work with Jorge. Jorge is a PhD in…something entirely unrelated to what we do.

In an IM conversation with Jorge today we had the following exchange:

“Mike do you have the credentials for the ftp upload? We need to send them some files.” (I’m paraphrasing out the proper nouns.)
“I have the username and password: Foo/Bar. But I don’t know the hostname.”
“Hostname?”
“Yeah. Don’t know it.”
“What’s the hostname?”
“…I just said I don’t know the hostname.”
“Oh, I missed that part.”

I read that, blinked a couple times unable to believe what I was reading. I then nodded, stood up, put my jacket on, gave the computer a three finger salute and wished the room a good weekend. (I work from home on Fridays.)

And I walked out. It was 4:40.

I literally left the office when I read that. I’ve been trying to figure this guy out for almost two years now. He’s not an idiot. I know he’s not an idiot. I’ve seen him brain before, so I know it goes.

This really is just the latest in a long line of profoundly inexplicable “communication problems” that he and I have. Profoundly simple direct questions which he will simply ignore. This particular issue for instance: I’ve been saying, in four status meetings a week (which consist of 4 people. Not 30. 4) that I needed these credentials and didn’t have them. There’s only one thing I could have meant.

It’s not rocket surgery.

But I’m really running out of “there must be a reasonable explanation for this.”

As I mentioned, I got the job. It’s now about 10 hours later and I have to say I’m still marginally stunned. That’s not to say I’m surprised really. It was all going in that direction. But as I’ve said all over the social networking universe, I’ve been out of work for so long that I don’t quite know what to do with myself now.

Fortunately (frankly) I’m down to the wire financially and indeed will be called upon to make some embarrassing phone calls to stave people off until the first couple paychecks come through. It may seem an odd thing to call fortunate but I know myself well enough to understand that were I to have a significant cash reserve here at the end of this that I would blow it. The spending itself wouldn’t be such a travesty. In fact I plan on doing just that after a token savings build up.

No, the fortunate part about this is that I now have a bit over a week where I can afford nothing other than some serious introspection and meaningful effort towards a few distinct goals without the distractions of hangovers or $500 dinners.

I’m definitely starting to enjoy the idea. Tomorrow I take care of the administrivia and then I’m set loose on the world.

And I have to say I’m surprised how much is unwinding from my head. Sure, I knew I was covered in emotional cruft and I expected it was a layer thicker and heavier than I realized, but this is crazy. I exhale twice for every inhalation I take. The surest most frightening sign of all this is looking around my apartment at how thoroughly I’ve created a living space that mirrors my mental and emotional state over the last year or so.

I’ve started cleaning that up as it’s so incredibly oppressive and while I have an awfully long way to go, it’s progress towards equilibrium so there’s something of a gravitational pull to get it done.

But now, pushing two o’clock, I’m beginning to feel the effects of my excited lack of sleep last night.

Good night everyone. o/

Well, the job recs anyway.

Go to indeed.com which aggregates a rather distressing number of the job sites out there.

Enter your search criteria and hit search. Then click on “RSS Feed” up there and subscribe to the resulting feed in your feed reader of choice.

Tada!

Repeat as necessary.

Then use your time and energy doing stuff that bears fruit rather than typing the same fucking search criteria in to 15 separate sites every morning for an hour, only to see the same jobs again and again.

(Yeah, yeah, I suppose you could click on “save as email alert” instead. But… why? I’d rather NOT have another login/registration process, thank youverymuch.

Haven’t been shoppin’ but I sure as hell haven’t been around here, as you’ve noticed.

I’m really up against the wall on this grand experiment of mine.  My success is getting to be pretty consistent.  But when push comes to shove I’m not “making my numbers.”  It’s a horrible curse, and I may yet be able to pull this off.  But it would be “pulling this off.”

It’s hard being scared when you go to sleep; worrying about money, worrying about your performance, realizing that the only obstacle is your ability to get out of your own way and do the things you know are right.  Add to that the knowledge that there’s something else you love doing but if seemingly the only way you can do it is if you have to sell a bit of your soul.

If I didn’t hate financial IT so much this wouldn’t even be a discussion.  But I’m near pathological about it now.

The big problem at this point (here comes the justification… wait for it… waaaaiiit….) is that my resume looks less focused than a pollack painting.  I’ve been doing programming work I can’t stand for so long that it’s really crippled my marketing power due to a bad case of ADD job hopper syndrome.

A friend of mine is a recruiter and she just shakes her head in disbelief at my resume.  “Mike, you’re great once you get in front of them.  But how the hell do you expect me to get you in front of them?”  Which is true.  I interview pretty well.  I tech out moderately well for my skill set.  But the recruiter’s got a bitch of a sales job.

Of course when I say “no financial” she damn near hangs up on me.

Yeah so that’s that about all that.

I can’t even describe to you how unbelievably frustrating it is to finally see success coming and realize it might just be too late.

For the first time in a very long time I spent Sunday night in nauseous anticipation of work.  Sure, part of it was due to the vacation hangover problem (which is in full swing this morning.)  But it’s not actually that ambiguous dread.  There’s a raft of things I’m dying to simply not face.

I really love the XP thing and I’ve seen the benefits both in my own coding and on small to medium sized teams (upwards of 20 developers.)  It’s interesting, painful (in that learning a new thing brain stretching way) and fun.

Dealing with management is also pretty interesting stuff.  I get to take part in some pretty high level meetings for an organizational leaf-node, and I enjoy it a great deal.  I’m a part of the decision making process at a level which allows me to be pretty solidly involved with the company.  And that’s something I’m rather good at.  Problem is I couldn’t really care less.  This place could burn for all I care.   I’ve no animosity.  But if I woke up tomorrow to an email that said my company dissolved I’d miss a couple people and my felt bat decorations.  The problem with that, in turn, is that I simply can not be made to pretend to care.  Can’t do it.  It’s not in me and it’s one of the things that I simply refuse to see looking back at me in the mirror.

So I teach, guide and coach people in Extreme Programming and in Agile practices in general, the motivation and principles behind it, the tools and technologies that facilitate it and the communication that helps business and developers actually understand each other.  I do this in two scenarios:

One, when people come to me and ask enthusiastic questions, dying to soak up information and hear what there is to learn.  That’s absolutely wonderful.  There are a couple teams of people who just can’t get enough and who are really doing things, looking all over their code and processes for improvements.  I see them out of the corner of my eye trying to decide whether or not to ‘disturb’ me, as if they could.
Two:  I’m the methodology police.  I’m the guy who comes in and says “See, you’re not actually testing anything.  You have to test your code.”  I’m the guy who says they have to have the bi-weekly meetings and this is the way to do them.  Sure, I know FULL WELL that you really can’t impose process like that.  So does everyone up the chain from me (mostly.)  But the bloodbath of dragging people kicking and screaming to better work is abhorrent.

Now #1 is a blast as you might imagine.  I love working and talking with people who are engaged.  I don’t care if it’s about ink and paper.   The irony of it is that people come to me for guidance and end up teaching me far more than I teach them and everybody goes away happy.  Sure, fine with me.  #2 is pretty repulsive.  I’m a rather fundamentally uncontentious person.  People who lust for conversational blood-baths simply have to take a long walk off a short pier.  People who insist they’re doing things the one true right way… gak.  I like this stuff because it works.  It’s not easy to get used to, so grow up and give it an honest shot.

But all of that aside,  I’m simply not DOING it.  I’m teaching it.

For years I’ve simply not been able to talk about what I do with friends.  There’s just no shared context.  I mean how do you describe the madness of writing cross platform multiplexed c++ server code with the single obstacle being the fact that the third parameter to ‘accept’ is signed on one platform and unsigned on another.  Nobody I know has the faintest idea what the fuck that means, nor should they.

So now, in addition to that, I no longer do any of this.  I teach it.

My greatest professional skills are perfectly untapped instead of being ‘mostly’ untapped, per usual.

Here we go again.