Serendipity

Today when I've arrived in office and I've seen Jack and Big Boss, after some minutes I've got a strange mind association:


What the... The true form of my bosses ;)

Occam's razor

A few day ago I was protagonist of a chain of dramatic events of my work life, and naturally the author of most of those events was Jack, my boss. The chain of unlucky events started with the proposal to go to Pycon conference in Florence (http://www.pycon.it), a very interesting manifestation with Python as main object of discussions, which Jack immediately labeled “the language for non professionals”. I told Jack that I was interested in going, and I proposed him and Prince Charming to go together, at this point I was waiting for a nonsensical or sarcastic answer from Jack but with my big surprise he told me that our society will pay tickets for us (!!), he also told me that those days will be considered working day for us, and hence we’ll be paid! Wow I was very excited at first, but unfortunately only later afternoon of the first conference day is working day for me because Pycon will be on the weekend. So Jack got me as ususal.

The second event that excite me very much was that we got gadgets from Red-Hat - JBoss for our certification! Wow I immediately grab a T-shirt with Logo! What is a developer without an informatics logo on his t-shirt? ;). Well, we took some funny photos, Jack proposed to be the photographer and in one of these photo there are me, Prince Charming and Big Boss, but Big Boss made me a pair of horns ( funny man..., this is not a good sign in Italy ) and Jack immediately posted it on this blog; then they took the T-shirt away from me. Until that point business as usual, I'm always in mood for jokes, but that fool posted on the blog with as tag my real surname and offending remarks, and Google indexed that tag in a few seconds, so, while Jack was laughing hysterically, I got terrible calls from my fiancé... I forced Jack to remove the tag, but it will remain forever indexed in Google, like a tattoo...

The truth about Open Lab

Here it looks a splendid place where to work. but look in the picture the horrible conditions in which the webcasts have to be recorded!

JBoss gadgets..

We have become JBoss certified without even asking for it, the hardest certification process of all times, and we even got gadgets by mail... the girls refused to wear them, sorry.

The worse demo EVER!

A couple of weeks ago we received the usual bothering phone request for a live demo, this usually comes from lazy and sloppy companies, which instead of trying things out, want somebody else to evaluate things for them, which is just nonsense. Actually it is not even the companies directly, it's some overpaid and actually actively damaging "consultant" (called useless consultant from now on). The first thing I told the guy is that conference calls and remote desktops sharing always have technical problems, and that this things usually don't work out well, why don't they just try the damned software? But he insisted, ignoring my warnings.

Then he sent almost a book of "specifics", smart questions like "can one access Teamwork through the web?" or "does Teamwork have reports" (having reports made sense when before the web, in pre-history, IBM AS400 applications were incapable of giving feedback in real time). This specific requests were just so silly that it inspired writing a blog post about it, which actually was quite successful. The heart of it is how silly the useless consultant is.

So I said: ok, now that I've put him in public shame, the guy and his crappy corporation will leave us in peace, and finally they'll buy some horribly expensive ActiveX 1982 "project management" software which fakes the web and runs in InternetExplorer 5. No! The guy was non pissable: he still wanted a demo, and still carefully avoided trying anything out. We agreed that we had just to do a short demo, ignoring the specifics.

Still, he kept sending new documents, always shorter and more nonsensical. I did SHIFT-CANC with all that junk mail.

The day of the demo came; the guy sent me a phone number to call, which was supposedly a free 800 number for international calls. Of course, it was only free from the US, and actually it was the wrong number. I suddenly remembered that I had to leave the office for a personal irrelevant matter, so I left Roberto there to do the demo. The rest is what I have been told by the guys in Open Lab, when they recovered from the hysterical group laughter state in which I found them when I came back.

So it went like this: the guys started calling again and again, Roberto tried to instruct them about the desktop sharing session, but it seemed that there was nobody there listening. When finally Roberto managed to get some attention, with the background noise in Open Lab of our 24/7 table-tennis tournament, he overheard skeptical laughs coming also from the remote session; evidently nobody was taking the demo seriously, and even they understood that the useless consultant was just useless and clueless. So, as we were also paying for the call to this crappy company, Roberto simply asked "so what you want from us?"

The guy (the useless consultant) at the other end was shocked by the question which supposed the presence of some intelligence on his head planet, so of course the answer was vague "well, Pietro [me] knows what to talk about" - to which Roberto answered "but Pietro is not here"

At this waiting for Godot exchange, Roberto overheard at the lazy brains end several people getting into a state of unstoppable laughter: so many things had gone wrong, and they were shouting "And Pietro is not there! And Pietro is not there!"

The useless consultant suddenly interrupted the phone call. That is when of course I came back (Gino holds that it is not by chance, and that all the time I disappear when there is any real problem).

Ok, it was all a waste of time; but we did have a good time at the end of it!


P.S.: After this all-time worse demo, believe it or not- the useless consultant wrote back! Calling me Giancarlo instead of Pietro (in what state must his mind be while writing to "Pietro Polsinelli" and calling me Giancarlo, a most unlikely name???)! And asking for customer references (still work on our part, and still avoiding trying the software). Maybe they pick bizarre suppliers in order to have a good laugh now and then? The world of IT is just toooo bizarre...

Gino self-mobbing

Last week Gino had remote access to Prince Charming' machine (a new PM); so he wanted to play a dirty joke on him, putting a soft-porn picture as desktop background. Today when the girls working with Prince Charming went to open his desktop for debugging, Gino was watching hidden and laughing. The first thing the girls said "What an idiotic desktop. It must be the usual not-funny joke by Gino" :-D

The generous manager

In an unprecedented impulse of generosity, I’ve decided to give Gino permission to participate to a useless and outdated congress on Python, the language for non-professionals.
I also remarked that he was going to get a full paid day with expenses covered, but checking we saw that it was on Saturday, anyway…