Dilbert does Perl

Okay, some of you are aware of how "fascinating" my current position has become. It's a great group of people that I work with, but it's impossible to avoid those Dilbert moments. As a way to relieve the stress of my 17th straight day of working (to be fair, it's my choice. They didn't ask me to do this), I am sharing with you one of the funniest Pointy-Haired Boss situations that I've seen in quite some time.

I consider myself fortunate that the owner of our company (I'll call him BoB), is moderately "tech-savvy". Unfortunately, he watches money like a hawk -- understandable since it's his money -- and this sometimes overrides his tech-savvy nature.

BoB refused to shell out the cash for anti-virus scanners.

Yup, you guessed it. His hard-drive got wiped out. He came out of his office cussing up a storm. BoB walked over to the IS director and asked him if he could restore BoB's computer from the back-up tapes.

At this point, the IS director explained that since BoB refused to pay the license fees for our backup software...

You would have been proud of my ability to keep a straight face.

What Dilbert stories do our fellow monks have? I need the stress relief and I'm sure our fellow monks would enjoy them!

Cheers,
Ovid

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Comment on Dilbert does Perl

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RE: Dilbert does Perl by kilinrax (Deacon) on Oct 26, 2000 at 00:00 UTC
Earlier today, I got handed an anonymous, confidential, voluntary 'Employee Satisfaction Survey'. On the front sheet it says 'employees who participate will be rewarded with a special gift when the results are available'. HR failed to grasp why I might be dubious as to the 'confidentiality' of the report. Then, there was the time management stuck big 'ATTRACT, RETAIN, MONETIZE!' posters everywhere, to 'improve motivation and morale'. I swear, my life gets more like Dilbert with each passing week.	[reply]
RE: Dilbert does Perl by extremely (Priest) on Oct 26, 2000 at 10:57 UTC
At my previous place of employment, we were purchased by a large company as a strategic checkbox on their resume in a bid to get slurped up by an even bigger company. Also we had a nice revenue stream. =) After months of torture and wishywashing about, they came up with a plan to unify the (now 7 or 8 smaller companies and 2 big ones) billing systems. After a few more months they scrapped that plan. All this time, we are sitting on our hands, knowing the cobbled together billing system we have could do more than all theirs put together. It couldn't do it all but still we could do a better job of holding them over while they attempt a new plan (none of the smaller companies billing people are in on any planning, keep in mind...) More months go by and they decide, having a new and exciting unworkable plan, to fire us all. They keep a minimal staff on for a few months (isn't nice to know you will be released 6 months in advance?) to keep things going while the "integration takes place." In order to get severence packages they made us sign waivers and guarantees that we wouldn't have contact with current employees or try to get our jobs back or work for the company in a consulting role for 1 year. At 10 months gone, the few who didn't quit are making huge salaries (to keep them from quitting) and our old jobs are up on monster.com. Best of all, they can't get people to take the jobs supporting our old billing systems while they try and finish obsoleting the job they are hiring for since people really aren't that stupid. Meanwhile, our perl and C code, MySql and Sybase DBs, and mod_perl websites continue to tick along, being maintained by one or two programmers, flawlessly making them money as they slowly alienate more and more customers who can't get anyone on the phone who knows how to fix their billing issues. Try and guess if I'll take their calls in January? =) Oh yeah, they would never let us change any root passwords after they bought us so the same one is still there 2 years later, even though they have fired almost everyone who ever installed or managed the boxen! -- $you = new YOU; honk() if $you->love(perl)	[reply]
RE: Dilbert does Perl by jepri (Parson) on Oct 26, 2000 at 10:30 UTC
My boss recycles my excuses, to the point where he forgets where he got them from, and uses them on me! It's truely chilling to hear my own words coming straight back at me. The other great one is that I have domain admin privileges at work, but I have to fill out the correct form before I'm allowed to do anything with it. This form has to be approved by the computing support department which usually takes about a week. Sometimes the temptation to fool around is (almost) unbearable. It's not healthy to have the power to edit the CEO's mail. I'll update this message sometime after I give my two weeks notice... ;) ____________________ Jeremy	[reply]