Kill, kill, kill...

is what I wanted to do to my neighbor when I worked in a cube farm. I called him the "cherry bomb" because he'd often explode in anger, making a loud noise, but with little real effect (except to deny him promotions and raises). Needless to say, sitting next to him was unpleasant.

When one of our users/customers had to deal with the clunky and confusing interfaces and actually was <sarcasm>stupid enough</sarcasm> to forget to set a minor switch on the third page of a 7 page setup screen, the system would do unpleasant things. Naturally, the Cherry Bomb would be called and he'd tell the users that they shouldn't be so stupid and need to learn how to read the documentation and now he has to clean up after them, etc....

Then the worst would hit: he'd stand up, lean over the cube wall and start ranting to me how he was sick of working for a Micky Mouse (TM) company and how all users are losers, and how blah, blah, blah. My productivity was ruined. Even after he stopped ranting, I would have to go on a break to calm down.

Until I figured out the solution...

Brilliance Strikes!

I don't claim to be the most brilliant programmer around, but sometimes a wonderful idea strikes me. Our network allowed us to send messages to other computers in the form of a pop-up window. I wrote a VBA app -- it's the tool I had available -- that would automatically send a "Call me, I'm being assaulted" message to a select group of co-workers. Then, I created a new icon (with a picture of a cherry bomb, naturally), which I embedded in all of my VBA-capable programs.

When the Cherry Bomb would go off, I'd reach for my mouse and click the icon, which invisibly sent the message. A few moments later, my phone would ring and a "user" would have an "emergency." This went on for several months until I left the company. The Cherry Bomb, so red with anger, never caught on :)

Cheers,
Ovid

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