How to ruin team communications in three easy steps

Step 1: Create a mailing list for developers, but allow non-developers including higher management to join it.

Step 2: Tell developers off for using that mailing list to discuss things that development needs to discuss but that management shouldn’t know about until it’s resolved.

Step 3: Use ad-hoc collections of mail addresses for real development communications, and then yell at developers for missing meetings that they never got invited to because you left them off your ad-hoc collection of mail addresses.

Is anybody surprised that I’m both the developer who got told off for using the dev-list to talk about development issues and the developer who accidentally got left off the invite list for the Thursday weekly meetings and got told off for missing them? Is anybody surprised that the issue I got told off for using the dev-list for was a complaint that when I mentioned a particular issue in meetings people ignored me and went onto the next item, and the person telling me off said that he’d never heard me mention this issue, thus proving my point?

Fascinating Facts

Fascinating Facts My Coworkers Don’t Appear to Know:

  1. Cubicle walls are not infinitely rigid membranes, but are in fact quite flexible.
  2. As well as transmitting motion, cubicle walls also don’t do much to stop sound.
  3. The other side of the cubicle wall that bounds a hallway frequently bounds a cubicle that contains a human being. Sometimes that human being is actually trying to work, or at least feign it convincingly. Flexing his or her cubicle wall by leaning against it, punching it or grabbing the top and shaking it or having loud hallway meetings just on the other side of that cubicle wall may be distracting to him or her and make it hard for him or her to accomplish their goal of working or feigning work.
  4. If you are unable to stand on your own two feet for the duration of your loud and distracting hallway meeting, our employer helpfully provides chairs that you can sit down on. You will find those chairs back at your cubicle, or at the cubicle of the person you are talking to, or in our many meeting rooms, or in the break room. They are not provided in hallways, for reasons that might become apparent if you carefully read the previous points.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.

(I should probably stop using this as a title – Firefox actually filled it in after the first couple of letters)

I took my Powerbook into Apple to fix the problem with the DVD drive not ejecting. This is the second time I’ve brought it back – the first time they replaced the drive itself, but told me the frame of the laptop was twisted and they may have to replace some of the case if it happens again. And it happened again.

They gave me the usual spiel about how they can’t guarantee that they won’t wipe your hard drive, so make sure you’ve got a back up. I said “yeah, yeah, yeah” since I have a nightly cron job that backs up my home directory to my Linux server, and besides they worked on it before without killing my hard drive, so why should they wipe it this time?

And of course, they did wipe it. My restore restored the files, but of course now I have to find and re-download all my apps. Hope my iTunes Music Store purchases still work.