Perhaps the worst job I ever had was at the same time the best job I ever had. I was working for a ‘call center’ company. That’s a nice way of saying ‘Collections Company’. The place I worked was the 3rd largest ‘call center’ company in the world. It was run by a man who, with little room for doubt, was the worlds biggest jerk. As CEO, he would host staff meetings in Manhattan that would start at 10:00, and run until 2:30PM without a break….unless he needed to excuse himself for a moment. He had lunch brought in for himself, but no one else. He would pontificate as he picked at his baked chicken. He would put the phone on mute, and instruct someone at the table to ensure that the person speaking on the phone from one of our remote locations was fired by the end of the day. Everyone had a nickname. I was the Redneck. He was Voldomort.
For about half of my career at this place, I worked in New Jersey with a collection of lunatics. The Douchbag, my manager, was probably the finest manager I have ever worked for. Once, when I asked for direction on a matter, his reply was “I don’t care what you do, or how you do it. Just make the damn thing work.” I may love this man.
His boss, Captain America, was incredibly effective at shielding us from the whims of Voldomort. The Big Wop was a giant Italian guy whose 3 year old girl regularly conveyed messages from the Big Wops grand father. Pretty cool, except that the Big Wops grandfather had been dead for about 25 years. The Big Wops grandfather trained horses when he was alive, and he, or perhaps the three year old girl, was still pretty good at picking horses event though he had been dead for a quarter century. The Greek was Don Rickels. One of the nicest guys you would ever meet, he had an uncanny ability to piss women off. Ben, the storage guy, was a girl magnet. Once, while at a strip joint in Atlantic City, a group of the strippers kidnapped Ben and it took him three days to escape. The Princess was the administrative assistant to Captain America. She was a former New Jersey Women’s Prison guard who somehow became Captain America’s admin during his time at Toys-R-Us. Her loyalty to Captain America was absolute. This whole damn circus used to work at Toys-R-Us. We had a couple of religious nuts in the mix. Both were members of competing cults, and used to argue frequently, each claiming the other was a ‘heretic’. I used to enjoy setting them off until Douchbag told me I had to stop.
This place was a mad house to work in. All of these guys were incredibly good at what they did, but they were all nuts too. One day, The Douchbag came into the office. He walked over to the isle where the Big Wop and The Greek sat. He looked down the isle of cubical and struck the pose of pitcher standing on the mound at a baseball game. The Big Wop was standing outside of The Greek’s cubical talking. The Douchbag went into a stretch and then threw a pretty good fastball, nailing the big Wop right on the kidney. The the Big Wop hollered, and clutched his kidney. He glared at the Douchbag. “What the hell was that for?”, he screamed, as if getting hit by a baseball in the office was a reasonable thing to have happen.
“Shut up, take your base”, came the reply and the Douchbag walked off.
Nurf gun fights were a common occurrence. Everyone had the biggest baddest nurf guy they could buy stashed somewhere in their desk. I never saw what started nurf gun battles, but when they occurred, whoever was paired with Captain America was sure to win. Captain America was probably the most gifted natural leader I ever met. He shouted commands to folks who he chose to be on his side, and may God Help you if you turned out to be on the other side. Death by nurf gun isn’t a pretty thing.
Suddenly, however, someone would shout ‘India’s down’. The battle would stop. Someone else would shout ‘I can see ickystan’, or ‘Manila is bouncing’. You could hear loud tapping as keyboards were assaulted across the room. Shouts rang out as reports went back and forth, updating everyone as these raging lunatics checked there systems and ran diagnostics. In a matter of minutes, it was determined that an undersea cable somewhere had gone down. Minutes later, our network traffic was rerouted. Everyone shouted out their status as systems came back on line, and production returned to normal. This was the most incredible self-directing team I have ever seen.
When I first started there, we had an outage probably once a week. My systems were as flakey as any systems I have ever worked on. They were poorly configured, improperly maintained, unpatched, and unreliable. We were a 24×7 shop without a 24×7 infrastructure. Voldomort would absolutely not allow any maintenance outages. Most of the things that were wrong with our Unix boxes were big things, and fixes required, at the very minimum, a reboot to address. Just like nearly everyone else, I was getting flogged on a daily basis on the calls where we reviewed open issues. I had major systemic and fundamental problems that were causing outages and they were not going to get fixed without an outage, but I could not get an outage to fix them. It’s a tough spot….but it was not without opportunity.
It dawned on me that all of the systems and network components were as poorly configured, improperly maintained, unpatched as unreliable as mine were, and they too suffered outages on a routine basis. So, I staged fixes on my systems, and the next time we had an outage because of someone else’s system, I implemented a couple of fixes and rebooted my environments. It took 8 months to complete all of the remedial things, but after 8 months of opportunistic work my systems did not suffer another outage for 24 months. A full two years passed before a Unix box suffered a problem. By the time something failed, I was already gone.
It is true that no good deed goes unpunished. A mere 6 months after my servers because stable, my success brought me to the attention of Voldomort. Now, rather than working near the Data Center and enjoying a quiet liquid lunch at the Pub in the Hyatt on Rt. 10 in Parsippany New Jersey, I was required in Manhattan at our corporate headquarters. Voldomort would hold meetings that would last for hours. No notes were ever taken, in fact it was strongly discouraged. At the conclusion of the meeting, there were no direct action items, no followups planned, just a vague sense a being adrift on a sea of shifting requirements. Because we had so many people in the meeting, the meeting room could not seat everyone. Voldomort took to holding his meetings in a large walkway, a hall. He would sit and pontificate, and everyone else stood in the hall. These meeting would go for hours. I went to exactly one.
After that one afternoon of standing in the hall on the 34th floor of the 334 Madison Ave, Manhattan, I was cured. I begain to arrive at Headquarters on Madison Ave early so that I had an opportunity check my environments and do any actual IT work that was necessary. My environments were clean and stable so usually there wasn’t much to do. Then, I would make sure that Voldomort saw me. I would smile as I casually encountered him in a hallway. We would sometimes chat for moment about social stuff. Occasionally the furry little bastard would go on about his college days on the ‘skulling team’, or perhaps about his amazing rhetorical triumphs in the Debate Club at Princeton. He was impressed that I studied at Oxford. Truth be told, while he thought it was Oxford, England and had he asked, I would have told him it was Oxford, Mississippi, home of Ole Miss. Hotty Toddy.
After that my brief encounter with Voldomort, I would then leave the office. We were on the 34th floor. I took the elevator down to the ground floor. I walked across 43rd Street to a little Irish Pub where I would watch soccer, eat lunch and drink wine until 4:00PM. At that point, I returned to my office, collected my things, and began the trek home.
Just when you think it cant get any worse, it gets worse. When our CTO went out on medical leave Voldomort hired the Jolly Green Giant as our new senior executive fuzzy deluxe Vice-President. He was about 7 feet tall, and was consumed by a burning ambition to become CTO. He was, unfortunately, poorly equipped for his lofty goal because despite having tremendous ambition, determination and drive, he was a putz with the intellect of a house mouse, the vision of a bat, and the leadership qualities of a three legged, de-nutted beagle. I left on bad terms with him, as I don’t suffer fools easily.
Between Voldomort and the Jolly Green Giant, the last year and a half of my time there really sucked. It sucked more than any place I have ever been. But in that first year and a half or two years there, I worked with the most incredible group of IT professionals I have ever seen assembled anywhere. All were crazy as outhouse rats but all worked together in a self-directing team that performed under amazingly adverse conditions and achieved a level of performance and raw competence that I have never seen matched anywhere…….not at Verizon, not at Merck, not at Bristol Myers Squibb, not at Sprint, and not at HP.
I have no doubt that I will never again work with a manager the caliber of the Douchbag, or a team like the one Captain America put together. At some point in your career, I hope you get to work with guys like them. They were definitely crazy, but damn they were good. I would do it all over again just to get to work with those guys.
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