The last three weeks at SmallAgency have been brutal. Not because the management style has changed, and not because we have a client who is being a righteous pain in the ass. The last three weeks have been brutal because I have a co-worker who doesn’t know when to ask for help.
I know I shouldn’t be one to judge for a lot of reasons the most major of which is I should probably have “please confront me if I don’t ask for help” tattooed on my forehead. The reason for that is muddled. Some of it is how I was raised, some of it is personality bent, and some of it is learned behavior for in the realm of geekdom there is very little more annoying than the user who just wants you to do it for them and hasn’t bothered to try any solutions himself before asking for help. That is a key distinction in the geek ethos: try to find the solution before you ask for help. It is the distinction that led to my co-worker’s downfall.
It takes a certain amount of self-confidence and maturity to admit you were wrong. Since we won the project, the one that turned all fruit shaped, this co-worker has been claiming it as her own. The organization does work in an issue space that matters to her, the client’s reps who came in to meet with us for the kick-off impressed her personally (I think there may even have been a little crush action going on.), and the implementation used a content management system (CMS), in this case WordPress, with which she has a high degree of comfort. Confidence, however, is not this co-worker’s strong suit. Combine that with her inability to think strategically, her other major weakness, and you have the perfect conditions that end up with all four developers working 10 hours a day for 12 work days and still missing the client’s soft launch deadline by a week and their hard launch deadline, which luckily turned out to be not all that hard, by two days.
Working a ten-hour day, full out, with a project lead who is flustered and who must distribute the tasks but hasn’t thought enough about what the tasks are to be able to parse them out turned me into a lump of oatmeal by the end of the day. I wasn’t capable of doing more than grunting and staring at the television when I got home from work every day. Because I was looking for the lowest pressure possible narcotic to soothe my overloaded nervous system I did that thing that everyone with hundreds, or even dozens, of available channels and a searchable interactive program guide does when she wants to zone out in front of the TV: I aimlessly flipped channels. This is how I found Cozi TV which having just read its Wikipedia entry to find that link makes complete and utter sense with respect to programming.
Cozi seems to run nothing but classic TV shows from about 1960s through the 1980s and on this particular evening they were running back-to-back episodes of the quintessential television narcotic Charlie’s Angels. This particular episode was vintage Angels, second season so we’re dealing with Kelly (Jaclyn Smith), Kris (Cheryl Ladd), and Sabrina (Kate Jackson). And as I’m watching the flickering images on a TV that’s in a form factor no one could have imagined when this show originally aired in 1977, as I”m being lulled into submission by the simplistic plot, the quaint lighting and camera techniques, the set dressing, the clothing, and that oh so familiar frission of sexual attraction that was so scary when I was eight and is less scary at 40-something I noticed something interesting. Sabrina was wearing a pinky ring…on her left hand no less. This may not seem significant at first but it is when you locate Charlie’s Angels in its cultural context. [Read more…] about One ring to rule them all