Were King Hurls

In which our Hero stops at the clients offices a moment to really take in the wummins

Every once in a while there’s something or another that makes me notice someone at the office, a moment, a movement, a gesture… and I keep forgetting or the entry is too short… so I make a note. And another note. Until gradually, I discover that I have a lot of notes, that there is a recurring theme and that I’d better get this down.

So here are a few portraits, moments, clips with a few of the women I work with.

The Forlorn

Technically, this is the least relevant story of the bunch, and really, it’s not even a story about her, but at the same time, it comes to my mind most strongly when she’s around.

The actual issue is The Slob, my client manager, who earns this name by taking advantage of Casual Fridays to come to work in a shirt that’s rumpled and faded and worn so thin that he must have had it for decades. I’m embarrassed for him because he doesn’t seem to see or care how his manager dresses, or the other people in the room, even casual.

And that care is what leads me to this lady who I will actually name. Leslie. Pronounced, LESS-lee. But with some people he never manages to adapt, which means every meeting The Slob talks to Lezzly. Small, subtle, but she cares enough to correct him every meeting. And he cares enough to never get it right.

The Dog

Because my style runs to subtle, I choose the name I assigned with care. Because my indignance runs high, I point out that this entry is about females and step back to let the reference percolate.

I’ve worked with The Dog for 4 years, with a few months of gap, from project to project. She’s a part time employee and somehow that means that I’m the bad guy when work can’t finish in time for her to test before she goes home. I’m the bad guy because the features she asked for don’t do what she thought they would, even after I explained. But those are typical user things and make her unremarkable, really.

Where I get annoyed is that she does not acknowledge my existence outside of necessity. If I’m fixing her mistake, she’ll say hi. If she’s in a meeting, she’ll talk to me. And otherwise… not only will she avoid eye contact, she won’t respond when I greet her. A few times, coincidence. After that… a little insulting.

She gets promoted. Sucked along in the vacuum left by more competent people moving up the ladder. I think she may have come back to full time work. I don’t know. All I know is that I have no particular patience for her left.

The Mournful

She has this beautifully sad face, even though it’s not pretty at all. And in a meeting last week, her vacation plans solved the strange riddle of her marvelous accent. Because she speaks in a very colonial english way, and it’s always a little jarring to me when someone with an obvious ethnotype has an unexpected connection to a different place.

So she’s not a great talent, but I love to listen to her in the meetings, just for the sound of that accent. Turns out she’s south african, though her accent is changed by oriental heritage.

The Nutter

There are definitely types of people in an office environment. Some people are outgoing, some are not. Some have tight cliques, some do not. And there are always the outlier personalities, the people who would have got picked on in high school, but are protected now by HR and labour laws. One of these is the Nutter

She’s not a bad person, mind you. But her communication skills are not strong. Neither are her work skills for that matter. She gets the job done. She dresses for the office. And yet she always looks bedraggled to me. She looks like she’s put herself back together after being dragged to work behind a car. Or maybe riding down the highway in the bed of a pickup.

She’s younger, and doesn’t throw cats, but when I see her in the hall, I wonder about her. I wonder what her world centers around, and what the depth of her humanity might reveal. I wonder if she knows she’s outside the group. I wonder if she sees herself the way I do, like Ophelia wandering the Theatre Halls.

The Sister

I love this woman. Not romantically, or anything, but I’m genuinely grateful she’s on my project. Normally, someone who talks a mile a minute would wear me down but she’s got a genuine sense of humour, and more important than that, she’s got common sense. Which means that I can teach her the technical side of the things we deal with, and she can actually teach me when I need to know the business side. She’s not married to her ideas which means we can actually talk about them and refine them and figure out how to meet her needs without

Sure, she slows down the meetings. But the fun of having a meeting where people are talking and occasionally laughing is worth the extra time. And because she is just so utterly friendly to everyone and open, she draws out people who might be quiet otherwise.

She’s like everybody’s kid sister. Except she’s actually a fairly senior player. Oh, and she’s the one I’ve mentioned earlier who has just a little bit of a round belly that makes me think of my ex-kitten. And I caught a measure of shit for using the phrase pot-belly, but I think she’s a pretty lady so nyah.

The Frump

I have to write about this lady because she’s honestly like the missing twin to The Sister and it’s hilarious. On the other hand, I can’t really think of anything to exaggerate cartoonishly into a caricature, so I’m going to be a shit and play off a stereotype she doesn’t particularly fit.

She’s like The Sister in competence and humour and both of them are a great add to the meetings, productivity-wise and misery-wise (more and less, respectively). She’s a leetle tiny woman, and she’s… I don’t know how to describe this properly. In my mind the word is flabby, because she’s got an extra roll of fat at her waist. But flabby is negative and she’s a pretty girl, and not even pudgy by any standard.

The curious thing to me is that she always has a lock of hair curled inside her glasses. Just the thought is maddening to me, but somehow it’s always there. It makes her look so very young.

The Monkey

The Monkey, at least in this context, is a short, older woman who is quiet and competent, but also has a very bad habit of falling asleep in meetings. But what I can’t stop noticing is that when she’s got her haircut all freshened, in that tapered pageboyish kind of a do… with her skin tone and the brown of her hair…

Does anybody remember a toy/doll from the 80s called Monchichi? Maybe this was just a Canada thing, but its a japanese import so probably north america scaled. Anyway, I swear to you, every time I look at her, the commercial jingle spills into my head a little.

The Bee

When I first met The Bee, I thought she was an officious, process-obsessive nuisance whose only value as a project manager was the persistent blame of everybody but her own people. Longer exposure has tempered that a little bit in that I understand her a little better, and I thinkshe’s genuinely trying to do the right thing and protect her people, which now has expanded to include me.

But she’s still very process-bound and not very good at guiding the team through that. Which is frustrating for me since I’m *not* the project manager but have the skills she needs to do her job. And the understanding of what parts of the process are *important* versus are just formality. Do we need a RACI chart for this project? (Actually, yes, but not usually, and this is the time she’s not setting one up)

I think that maybe I’ve been very fortunate to not only learn the process not only as a textbook concept but also as more of a battlefield surgery sort of practicum, where everything is secondary to the result. Like I’ve said, one of my talents in my job is that I make an awesome berzerker.

I’m curious that she’s warming to me, because I’m still not all that tolerant of process for process’s sake. But I guess she’s starting to see that for all my brutality, I’m very easy to manage, and keep her updated and of all her managees, I actually have updates for her action items each week.

The Expert

The Expert has been at the client a long time, and is valued and trusted. And when she joined my project, I was looking forward to working with her as one of the exceptions to a rule of contempt that my former organization had developed for her former organization’s people.

And she really is very knowledgeable, creative and adaptable. She’s been at the client for decades and knows their business systems. I know small pieces in great detail, and can’t match her. But I got to see a very revealing meeting where The Bee asked for an estimated timeline.

When you’re planning a project it’s all about planning the unknown. It seemed magical when I first started working and somehow despite the fact that we hadn’t even designed the solution, the project manager could say, “We’ll be done in 6 months.” Except it’s really simple. Because the amount of design for a 6 month project isn’t much smaller than the design for a 12 month project. And if we’ve already said we’ll be done in 6 months, then we only design 6 months worth of work.

Stupid? Yes, but it works.

Well The Bee asked our Expert how long she needed to design a solution. In my head, I guessed 6 weeks. But that wasn’t the answer. The answer was an increasingly anxious list of unknowns and actions to address the unknowns. And I have a feeling that if I’d joined the conversation and kept pressing, I think I’d have made her either panic, run out of the room, or just plain start to cry.

It calibrates her skill level for me. At my former employer, I’d put her two notches below me. Which, mind you, would have been a senior role, respected and trusted. But she’s very brittle outside of her element. And she doesn’t deal well with being pushed outside her comfort zone. And her expertise is such that I don’t think she faces the condition very often.

Fascinating.

The Ghost

I sat down in a meeting with an extra person, someone I’d not seen before. And… it’s hard not to glance her way. Because she reminds me of my ex.

Not in personality. She’s very cool, very comfortable in her subject matter and seemingly unperturbed when the subject moves away.

Not in looks, either really. She’s taller, dark brunette where the ex was naturally just brown. But there’s something about her face, the set of her eyes, the shape of her profile, something I can’t look at her long enough to pick out… but something that I recognize.

What pleases me is that she is a ghost who doesn’t haunt me. I don’t find myself wondering what if. All I want to figure out is what is it that makes me make the connection.

It’s nice to get the reassurance that I’m not imagining being done. As strange a mechanism as it is.

The Queen

This woman is an executive and it shows, in her dress, in her style, in her voice and her manners. In the cut of her jib. She is confident and she is decisive and she is beautiful. She is also a treat at the management meetings, because if she’s there, stuff gets done. But I’m also very appreciative of someone from the sales side who doesn’t treat us grunts like rotten meat stewed in cat vomit.

I worked for another such a few clients ago, and I was always impressed at how utterly unwavering her courtesy was, whether she was scolding or cheering, she was profoundly respectful. And this lady is a lot like that.

But as elegant as she is, as elegant as she dresses, I had to fight from breaking into fits of giggles because her very very fancy dark grey worsted wool (at least if I understand worsted wool correctly) dress had bright shiney zipper with dangling, glittering pulls. At her neck, at her waist, and at the sides of her chest. The latter of which, in particular, if you didn’t notice the dangling glittering zipper pulls at all the first time, suddenly announce themselves when your peripheral vision informs your suddenly horrified brain that the elegant, beautiful woman sitting diagonal from you must surely have dangling glittering tassels hanging from her breasts.

The Troll

I first worked with The Troll about 10 years ago. At the time she had an albino complexion, blonde hair styled like her eponymous doll and a mouth that would make a sailor weep for mercy. (And let’s be clear, it wasn’t that a girl was swearing, it’s that the girl didn’t seem to know any other words).

Since that project I spent a few years away and then I came back this client and she and I have occasionally greeted each other in the elevator but she goes to her floor and I go to mine, secure in the knowledge that she works for the other guys and is therefore not very interesting.

I’ve always assumed she was at least minimally competent because as low as the standard is at my client, outright unproductivity is hard to hide. But the other day, while I was in a meeting, she passed the cubes Hollywood and I occupy. I have the story from him and I do not doubt it for an instant.

The building is something of a cylinder. Office space on the outside, elevators, and meeting rooms on the inside. And a circular ring running between the strata. And The Troll walked by once, twice, and a third time in great laps of the floor before stopping near Hollywood and saying, “I have a meeting, I can’t find my meeting. It’s with A and B, and it’s supposed to be near Legal.”

“Well,” Hollywood explains, “There’s two rooms near legal, that way. Did you check those?”

And The Troll replied, “I checked one, but the other one had the door closed.”

This is where I pause, telling this story, for effect. She can’t find her meeting, it’s in one of two rooms, one of which is empty, and the other one has a closed door.

Maybe you can argue that it’s a social dysfunction or a disorder or something, I’m aware of that as an abstract possibility, Gentle Reader. But for me, this is the new watermark for stupid.

The Bat

Or rather, it was, an undignified record that stood for just two days before The Bat stepped in. Actually, in fairness, she was the third in a sequence of people who did this, but in my head, that just equated all of them at the bottom of my opinion.

Because for our training, we were in the odd meeting room, the one where the projector screen is off to one side for reasons that are not obvious but justifiable. So the presenter sets up, the projector is on, and people file in and sit around the table avoiding the place where the projector shines up to the screen.

Until someone doesn’t. Someone comes in, starts to set up her laptop while standing in the blinding glare of the projector. Finally the voices around her register, saying “The projector, the projector” and she stops and starts to move.

Saying these very words that I now share, “Oh, I was wondering why it was so bright.”

In order to do this, she had to not see the projector which is pretty much the centerpiece when you walk through the doors, overlook the projected image that she’s walking at least half the length of, and towards before paralleling it, and then, completely fail to question the blinding beam of light in her face.

I was floored. I was stunned beyond words. I could not conceive of how this could have happened. I am perhaps harsh and judgmental but to my mind, this performance does not meet the minimum standards of a Darwinian world. This is a missing survival adaptation and this person is one late evening street crossing away from death.

So imagine how I felt as I saw the process repeat. Not once. But twice.

Two women, one male; old and young; various in ethnotype; glasses and not; but I honour them equally, because each and all of which came in to stare into the light and had no more a thought in their minds than, “It sure is bright in here.”

Today, after plugging in my laptop, I came up from under the meeting room table to discover the presenter had turned on the projector. The light in my eyes was painful and wiped away the rest of the room. My response was to wince and move out of the beam. Which supports my general theory, observed over the course of many meetings, that people, generally, when confronted with a very bright and localized light source, will step out of the beam.

Which just goes to show you that I prefer to be dim when some folks can’t see their own brilliance.