Anecdotes from a Week

One whole week at my new job. Here's the odds and ends.

One meeting per day I spent most of Friday setting up one meeting. One meeting. I spent a lot of time asking people if they needed to be there and talking to the woman who would have to leave early because she has to go to the dentist because she has a broken tooth so could I change the time again, etc. By the end of the day it was done and everyone accepted. I even learned to use the room reservation web site. My coworker told me that was great and I should just go home (it was 2:30).

Meetings Everywhere During my first day I noticed a bunch of interesting/funny spaces all through the building. They are like big colorful cubbies, some with chairs and some with a table and no chairs and most of them irregularly shaped. During my second day I starting seeing people holding meetings in those spaces, usually standing up! I wonder how you schedule a meeting for the triangular purple space near the back door?

Quality Two jobs ago I was involved in several annoying and ultimately unsuccessful quality programs (TQM, ISO 9001) at a mainframe company. At Widgets, quality was a personal effort, not regulated but appreciated, we hoped, by the users if not by the people paying the bills who just wanted everything/anything asap.

In my new job I'm actually the person who makes sure that there is quality by making sure that everything that needs to be tested is tested and passes the tests. Because of my past experiences with quality, I was surprised the other day when I heard a senior manager say "Well, when there's a choice between having a quality product and making the schedule, it's obvious that having the quality is more important."

Acronyms I've worked in a lot of places as a writer/project manager now and the funniest/most tedious part of the first weeks is learning the company's acronyms. It's funny because everyone is spouting out these letter combinations that are meaningless to me and often sound quite funny but are deadly serious to them. I've become an expert at keeping a straight face when someone says something like "If BXS doesn't talk to the INZ subsystem, we'll get a failure in the IBS and you know what that means."

At Widgets we didn't have that many acronyms because the products all had one, usually obscure name. My favorite was the server named after an Egyptian god that had a spelling that almost everyone mispronounced.

At my new job I have a cheat sheet that I keep with me at all times with the key twenty or thirty acronyms. My experience so far is that no one knows them all. In a meeting on Friday my manager asked me what an acronym meant, then started laughing when he realized that he asked the new guy.

I had a classic acronym moment in the middle of last week. We were in a meeting about a product and someone was drawing on the wall (there's one wall covered in sheets of hard, clear plastic in every room). A guy wrote an acronym on the wall as part of a flow chart and a woman next to me said "That's not where the &&& system is." The chalk board guy looked around and said, yeah it is. The woman said, the (product name) isn't there. He said "no, &&& stands for (another product name)." The woman shook her head and said "Great, now that acronym stands for more than one thing."

Working/My Father Friday was the anniversary of my father's death back in 1978. When I think of my father, I always think about the government job that he held until his death, leaving the house every day at 7:30 and returning every day at 4:30 for thirty years. His job meant stability, a good living and the promise of retirement for a guy that grew up really poor in the Hill District in Pittsburgh (now famous as the setting for August Wilson plays). He didn't like his job much toward the end but he stuck it out because, I think, he knew things could be much worse. As a brainless teenager and twenty-something year old I saw his frustration and knew I would be different.

So how different am I? I always think my job should be better--that the management should be more appreciative, the work more challenging, the workplace nicer to be in, etc. That's why I was a union steward in two different places and, strangely, that's how I approached being a manager at my last job. (My manager apparently thought it was weird too.) I have, however, for many years worked regular hours at a number of companies so we could buy a house, new cars every decade, and send my kids to college. Not so different from my father really. I wonder what he would think about it.