Monday, February 25, 2008
Jerk? Or Not A Jerk?
Well, after complaining for many moons about my current job situation, I finally did something about it. I just wanted to get through the holiday season with no interruptions and then set my inner Monster.com free. Like I said, I'm a small pond fish. Big companies make no sense to me, at least the two I've been part of don't. So I updated the resume and ran it up the flagpole. I applied to four company postings and interviewed with three. I only went for very specific job requirements, proximity had to be close and the company needed to not have more than 250 employees. I landed at a place about 13 miles away with 110 employees with a job description that really fits my skill set. Hopefully I've landed for a while. In 17 years I've had a 12 year run and a 3.5 year run. I don't want to change jobs like I change underwear - but I also want to feel productive at the end of the day and I think I can only accomplish that at a smaller place where you aren't paralyzed by emails, meetings and people running your department who have no business running a lemonade stand. So why the jerk title? Well, if you remember a post from a while ago about me being the TPS Report runner, you may also remember that I run reports on weekends and on vacation days. I can be out with the family on Saturdays and get a call at 2 pm saying it would be so helpful if I could run a report when I get home. Well, as it turns out, as important as those reports are to upper management, would you believe nobody ever asked me to document the manner in which the reports are produced? I take native results from one piece of software and cut/paste them into Excel where about 25 macros are run on the data. I think I forgot to give those macros descriptive names that might suggest which order to run them in. And no matter what anyone tells you, I also didn't leave lines of comments in them that made no sense in reality but if you take the first letter of every line and read down instead of across - it spells out things like....well, use your imagination.
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6 comments:
Congratulations!
I am so glad that you can now dedicate your posts to the truly relevant topics such as Steelers football, drinking, grilling, and teachers having sex with students.
I hope you like this job. And speaking for Still A Wife, I'm sure she's REALLY glad you're out of the old place!
but...jerk? or not a jerk?
I vote "not a jerk". They stuck it to you with those reports and you stuck it to them back. It's not like you booby-trapped a server or erased a few databases. You could always consult for them until they figure it out - and please charge something more appropriate this time!
Jerk. But that being said, I'd probably have done the same thing.
Look, you worked for jerks for what, over 3 years? And you had to fit in somehow, right?. Simple evolution.
Plus I love the idea of having the macros or VB routines or whatever you used spell out Suck My Cats Ass. They've got to understand that's better than going Postal.
What I find incredulous is the interview stories. Every time I think HR people cannot become more idiotic, some business school comes up with a question(s) that can determine instantly whether you are capable of killing women and children, eating dead burnt bodies, and efficiently testing computer code all in 5 minutes.
i was only with the jerks for 9 months. in between my two small company gigs i spent 9 months at a place with 12,000 people and 9 months at a place with 1,200. at least the place with 12,000 had an IT dept that was full of bright people. there was just too much red tape to deal with. after you spend 12 years working at small pace - you simply cannot put the brakes on and work like a tree sloth.
the macros were hilarious and some of my best work to date. there are 5 driver macros and each of those run 4-5 others. while they (the drivers) used to be named things like "refresh", "delete 2", "now setup tab4" and the minis used to be named "clear tab 1", "clear tab 2", "format tab 1".......some idiot last october changed everything to things like "Ro003", "XL4T3" and "B2E4". It looks like he was even careful enough to strategically place A's, B's, 1's and 2's as names of things to be run LAST, while X's, Z's, 3's and 4's were given to things that should be run first. bwahaha. BWAhaha. BWAHAHAHA.
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