What's professionalism to a young upwardly mobile person?
Many years ago, I was a sort of ad hoc webmaster for a portal-a-like that TBH was a pointless venture. Especially as the dot-com bubble had burst 6 months earlier. The MD at the time was a nice bloke, talked a bit like Mr Bean, but had attempted to launch a site at the wrong time.

Consequently, he was given the elbow and in came a new young dynamic MD who was about 33 at the time. Now don't get me wrong, I'm 95% certain that he reached that lofty position on merit alone. However, when your career rises that quickly, you've had no time to develop any wisdom or any air of professionalism. And that's what let him down.

During the first week, he called every member of staff into a meeting to introduce himself. A 90min meeting where no one manned the phones, as if the company had closed early. At the busiest time of the year too I might add. A 90min meeting that comprised of his CV as a PowerPoint presentation, plus then he outlined his intentions, which were as vague as a minor-party's election manifesto, interspersed with utter contempt for his predecessor including the line "couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery"

Back to the portal. Because the CMS (and most of the other components) was a bit too bespoke, and badly constructed I might add, my first task of the day was to take the site offline, run an obscure script that produced a completely useless statistics report and then restart the web-server. I kid you not.

One morning, I forgot to restart the web-server and went back to my desk to turn the stats report into something more presentable. Even though the site was offline for 20 mins it wouldn't make any difference. The site was getting maybe 15 hits a day, and most of those were internal, the rest were AltaVista's webcrawler.

The MD approached me and reprimanded me loudly, in front of everyone.

"Why is the site not working? That's your job, as soon as there's a problem, you need to be on it straight away. It's costing us money"
Everyone had stopped working and were doing that thing where you pretend you're working but watching something more compelling. The sales manger had stood up in his office and was looking through his partition window.

I explained how I have to disable the site every morning and that I'd forgotten to turn it back on. I also tried to explain that no revenues from advertising had been lost because of the lack of visitors, but he cut me off mid-sentence.

"So you fucked up then, that's not good enough, how much do we pay you again?"

I wasn't in the best of moods anyway because some commotion out in the street the night before had meant I'd only had 4 hours sleep. I'm an exceedingly tolerant person, but he'd picked the wrong time to kick off. I stood up. He stopped talking and looked slightly taken aback. I was not 18 inches away from him and I said in a calm, quiet voice, just loud enough for him to hear.

"I will go sort the problem, but if you talk to me like that again, I will kick your arse off the top of your legs."
"Don't threaten.." his voice wavering and none too confident anymore.
"and if you try any disciplinary crap, I will fill your computer with illegal images, doctor the relevant log-files and email them to Crimestoppers. The police will show up here, confiscate your PC, and by the time they get you to the station, the board will have found out and you'll be on the dole. Never piss off the tech-guy, Ok?"
We looked each other in the eyes for maybe 10 seconds or so, his mind mulling it over before shouting "I want it sorted, now" and he stormed off back to his office.

I sat down. I didn't care, I was in the last 3 weeks of my 12 month contract and I still had 4 days holiday to take.

A couple of days later, a courier delivered a new laptop for the boss. It was part of my job to set computers up for people, so I took it to him. He said he'd set it up himself. He also said he'll dispose of the old computer himself. Old computers tended to end up on a shelf in the server room until they were so old, they were worthless and were usually donated to some charity.

In those last few weeks, his old computer never appeared in the server room. Funny that.

Length etc
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 19 Jun 2009, 12:27, Reply)