"Imagination is silly / you go 'round willy-nilly..." Harry Connick, Jr.

Weekly Web meeting. All of the sudden Rod’s concerned that our e-mail list isn’t growing fast enough.

Rod: “The number of names should be growing by 30% or so each month, and it doesn’t seem to be.”
Us: “That’s pretty ambitious. What makes you think it should be growing by that much each month?”
Rod: “Well I’m sure other companies grow their lists by that much.”

Um, why are you sure of that? Geez. Let’s work on our pulling-a-number-out-of-the-air skills, shall we? Since we have several thousand addresses on our list right now, we should have more e-mail addresses than there are Internet users within like 3 years.

Rod: “Why do we take so many addresses off of our list every month”
Us: “Some ask to be removed, some cancel or change their e-mail addresses and forget to tell us.”
Rod: “How can we get the new e-mail addresses for these people?”
Us: “If they come back and ask to be added, we’ll do so, otherwise there’s nothing we can do.”
Rod: “Can’t we track them and put them on the list ourselves?”
Me: “No. And if that were possible and some company did that to me, I would sue the SHIT out of them. Pardon my French.”
Rod: *dumfounded look*


I had a good slip later, though, that gave him another dumfounded look. We’re Tyler Gifts. Our biggest competitor is Lillian Vernon. I accidentally referred to Lillian Vernon as “Lillian Tyler.” Captain Sunshine was not happy.

Good things, when short, are twice as good. --Baltasar Gracian

This morning, Rod forwarded Mike a spam e-mail from Barnes & Noble. Rod’s instructions along with it? “Add.”

Add what to what? Are we freaking mind readers? What in the hell?!

Mike reply e-mailed him, “Add what?” Which Rod responded to with one of his famous phantom phone messages. Apparently he wanted Mike to add him to B&N’s mailing list because they are a competitor.

How were we supposed to deduce that? What in the hell is going on in your head freak-boy? I mean, let’s totally ignore the fact that we run a gifts catalog that happens to have ONE BOOK in it so we have no reason to think of them as any kind of competitor. Never mind the fact that we aren’t his secretaries, and that he could have done this himself in the time that it took him to forward the e-mail. What did he expect us to do with this one-word e-mail? Is it really too much to ask to have a subject to go with the predicate in this sentence?

It’s a power-play. It’s the kind of thing you do to force someone to come back to you and ask for your permission to have the rest of the sentence. What an egomaniac jerk.

Oh, it's bliss alright

Mike e-mails everyone an Excel sheet every morning with the sales figures from the day before. I recently added some things to the sheet to help process the information more easily. Apparently when I did, the saved printing preferences got lost. I don’t know how, but these things happen, no biggie.

So VP Rod sends Mike a four page printout of the spreadsheet with the handwritten note “Doesn’t print on one page. Fix.”

Captain Intelligence’s grasp of sentence structure aside, adjusting your print settings to do this is a fairly simple process. I’m not a computer illiterate hater, people that don’t know how to use their machines mean job security for me, so I'm happy to help. So I wrote a little how-to with six steps and sent it to him in an e-mail with a note that said I’d be happy to show it to him in person if he wanted.

Two hours later, I get a phone call from HR. “You sent Rod the instructions for printing the spreadsheet, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, this is too much for him and he called me to ask you if you would just find some way to make it work automatically.”
“Possibly, but all he has to do is right there in front of him, and it takes 10 seconds more than it does to print anything.”
“I know, but that’s how he wants it.”

First of all, why would you not want to know how to do something so simple? It’s just basic, and it helps you understand the functionality of this machine you use EVERY DAY. I have no respect for people who stay intentionally ignorant of something so simple.

Second, instead of taking two minutes to learn this basic process, he tied up me and the HR guy for at least a half hour. How’s that for efficient use of corporate resources?

Waste of flesh.

Printer? I hardly know 'er

Mike tells me that Rod once bought a brand new printer and had IT set it up for him. It worked famously for a long time. One day it ran out of ink. Rod didn’t want to look stupid for not knowing how to change the ink cartridge, so rather than having IT come to look at it and order more ink, he THREW IT IN THE TRASH and had his whipping-boy in HR order him another printer. Now, I’m not the biggest tree-hugger in the world, but this makes me want to walk in there and slap the snot out of him for being so stupid and wasteful.