Today, the VP of my old group at FirstJob is retiring. At long last, the principal source of our torment for years on end is gone.
It’s a completely hollow victory, of course. The guys who gathered in the basement in January of 1998, with nothing on the org chart between us and the enemy, are for the most part scattered to the winds. Only a couple are even in the same job they had then.
Everyone who was on staff with years under their belt and talent had pretty much flown the coop before. All that was left were the people who had just started, the people who weren’t going to walk out on their generous defined-benefit pensions, and the people who didn’t actually have the skills to go elsewhere – and this was at a time when Hooters girls were being hired at $50K to sit the help desk because everybody more technical had a better job. So it was down to just us, organized two by two like Noah’s Ark: PC hardware, PC software, Mac hardware, Mac software, PC rollout, plus a guy to handle the avalanche of incoming equipment and our lead. The Dirty Dozen, in a place with PCs running 3 or 4 different operating systems and three different forms of networking in place (four if you count the modem pool that fully half the user base needed to get onto the Internet) and three completely separate email systems, all administered by former big-iron operators who got the job because a study said their salary was commensurate with that of an email administrator.
When I say we were in Tech Vietnam, I’m only serious. And the VP was head of the Viet Cong. Petty, arbitrary, oblivious to any concept of workstation support, and interested only in not having his phone ring – despite the fact that two PC software techs plus a dog’s breakfast of systems plus a thousand users meant a nine day wait for your Windows trouble ticket to be addressed, let alone resolved – which makes the phone ring.
We fought like hell. We had to be smarter, faster, better, and more conniving than the users OR the management. And when the VP finally relented after orders from the C-suite to bring in contractors and reduce the number of tickets, one middle manager after another was brought in as well, with orders to subjugate us. And invariably, they turned on him, because we were right and he was wrong.
In the workplace, I reserve my lowest contempt for a manager who has no discernable talent or skills or knowledge, but just stirs the shit constantly – either in hopes that some order will spontaneously form out of the chaos, or so that there’s a constant stream of things that aren’t his fault so that he can roll the aforementioned shit downhill. This guy got away with it for fourteen years – finally retiring with most of his power and responsibility gone, standing up for a retirement ceremony that he didn’t deserve, because any one of a half-dozen people he fired or quashed did more in a year to save the IT infrastructure than he did in his whole tenure.
I suppose I should thank him. The chaos and bullshit he engendered forged a team like none other. But we could have burned steady for twenty-five years instead of flaming out in six. So instead, I will send him on the way from afar with the worst curse you can lay on a human being – that he gets precisely what he deserves.