A Constellation Of Unabnegation

I Don't Care If It Wasn't A Word Before

It is now, and I'll want royalties if ever money changes hands because of it.  O very well, it's the opposite of 'Abegnation' or a 'Denial of self' thus meaning a bottomhole who is surpassingly fond of themselves.

     Don't be distracted by the word "Constellation", either, in any of it's several iterations.  Art!

Not this

Nor yet this

Especially not this

     The reason we have today's title and the intro to the Intro is because I have another cautionary tale about Manglement, both direct and implied, in a very large IT company that had developers working on computer code.  Don't worry, you don't need to know anything about - Art!

 - just the stupidity and arrogance of Hom. Sap.

     Problems began when the new Vice President Of Development decided to mark his territory with a new, innovative structure and system he proudly dubbed "The System".  Flexing manglement muscle like this is always a bad idea, and the more senior managers committed the sin of omission by not reigning him in or stopping him dead.

     The idea, such as it was, behind his system was that it would impose an enormous layer of extra management, who would make all the decisions previously made by the developers.  Art!

Before 'The System' there was only one of them

     Original Poster's boss, Pat, was one of this new tranche of middle-management, and a person so utterly lacking in intellect, ability, experience or people skills that the suspicion is that she was a family hire. Her sum total knowledge of IT was 0%.  She could not grasp any concept more complex than those requiring counting on fingers.

     On the plus side - no, I was lying, she had no plus side.  Also on the debit side, she got the only black employee on OP's team fired, for 'staring', which led to weeks of remedial training and memos and meetings and bad entries on OP's performance rating and no bonus.  Art!

     Then came implementation of THE SYSTEM, where a process of testing, integration, verification and especially deployment management had to be undertaken to remedy the slightest issue with coding.  Nor was that all, as THE SYSTEM required multiple alternate options to be presented to management for them to decide on.

     As you may expect, this came a cropper with Pat, who knew nothing about what was shown to her, and whom tried to divert to her manager, who diverted it back to her stating it was her responsibility.  I mean, if you insert a giant wedge of managers into your org, you should at least get a bit of work out of them, right?  She also needed to deal with the legacy workload left by the man she had sacked, which nobody else knew anything about.  Art!

     Her solution was to ignore all her e-mails, and indeed just generally ignore her job completely.

     OP, confronted with dual Sisyphusan tasks of doing his job and persuading Pat to do hers, tried to reach her supervisor, who smacked him down with "Don't ever go over Pat's head again".  Again manglement!

     Then came the day when THE SYSTEM collapsed, and all heads were called into an emergency meeting on a three-line whip.  OP was in the Mastermind Chair, told to give an explanation.  

     So he did.  He detailed that Pat had: been given 166 'Significant' tasks to complete; 82 'Critical' tasks to complete; none had been completed.

     He had sent 72 e-mails PER DAY to her, copying in his whole team and Pat's manager.  Art!

     Every member of his team had participated in daily meetings with her.  They had all gone to great lengths daily to explain everything in terms a five-year old could understand.  When Pat, desperate to wriggle out of this bind, tried to shift blame, saying that OP could have gone to another supervisor - Don't ever go over Pat's head again" was printed off and passed around the meeting.

     Net result:  Pat was fired; her supervisor was fired; the VP Of Development was fired; THE SYSTEM was immediately ditched for a sensible industry-standard structure.  None of this would have happened if the other senior management weren't completely out of touch about day-to-day operations, so there is plenty of blame to go around.

     Pat was unemployed for a year.

     Then, when she got another management position elsewhere, OP found out (stalking, much?)  she had lied about her tenure at his company and her position, and she was promptly fired from her new job, too.

     One fondly imagines her next job involving asking the pertinent question "Do you want fries with that?"

The Lowly Yet Mighty Corporal

Yes, another in our intermittent range of nuclear ordnance that was both familiar to Ol' Herm (author of "On Thermonuclear War", do keep up!) and around at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  This is one of the earliest nuclear weapons that the South Canadian Army put into service, and it was rather a rush job simply to get it out to the missile squadrons.  Art!

     It embodied the current philosophy that a nuke was merely a (vastly larger) form of battlefield artillery, intended to hit large static targets such as divisional concentrations, military airfield, ports, dams and suchlike.  It came with a handy W7 fission warhead that could be jiggled to produce a relatively small 8 Kt blast, or a considerably larger 60 Kt one.  The range was what you'd call 'tactical', being only from 30 to 60 miles, hence to be used on big-ticket items close behind the enemy's front lines.  Art!

     That unwieldy beast is a transporter-erector-launcher, intended to putter about the main Corporal site and get it to a semi-distant location to be lofted into the heavens.  I know, I know, it looks as if Heath Robinson cobbled it together.

     On the whole, Corporal was not a shining success, since principally it had been adapted from an experimental rocket, but the South Canadian Army loved their problematic child.

The Biter Bit

There was recent coverage of Szabolks Fekete being fired by his employer, Citibank, over a sandwich.  Well, actually two sandwiches.  And two cups of coffee.  And two bowls of pasta.

    He was, supposedly, dining alone in an Amsterdam cafe, but, under relentless cross-questioning, admitted that he'd shared the meal with his partner.

     BAD SZABOLCS!  NAUGHTY SZABOLCS!  LOSE YOUR APPEAL!

     Citibank, like a lot of large employers, have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to ILEGALLY PADDING YOUR EXPENSE ACCOUNT AND LYING ABOUT IT.  Just to emphasize the point.

     The real kicker?  Ol' Szay was employed by the bank in order to deal with  -

     Financial crime.

     Can you facepalm a facepalm?

"City In The Sky"

What might have been a pleasant bucolic interlude is getting a little frayed around the edges.

     The Doctor pointed an index finger directly upwards, smiling gently.  The townsfolk didn’t take long to realise what this meant, their eyes growing wide in amazement.  Whilst they tried to process this information, more people began to gather to view the mysterious new arrivals who appeared from nowhere and who looked so strange –  both in their dress and by having such pale skin.

     ‘From the Stars?’ asked the younger of the trio, pointing his spanner at the heavens, to nods from all three travellers.  A chorus of impressed babbling ran around the crowd.

     Tooth-Missing looked thunderstruck, unable to speak.     The bearded man spoke up, with a tone of wary cunning in his voice.

     ‘Aye, Don, remember the mails mentioned those who landed at Forrest.’  He looked intently at all three in turn.  ‘Decided to come back again, have you?’

     Mister Tooth-missing – Don – shook his head.

     ‘You can’t just arrive like this.’ He surveyed the crowd, now grown to at least thirty people.  ‘Or hang about disturbing the peace.’

     ‘Do you have an office?’ asked Ace, pre-empting the Doctor.

     Don nodded, obviously thinking.  He pointed at the spanner-wielding young man.

     ‘Terry, go get one of the teachers.  We’ll need this recording.  Alright, you lot, get back to work!  Entertainment’s over!  You three, follow me.’  He pointed at the small, shrewd-faced elderly man.  ‘As Assistant Mayor you can come along as an official, too, Lenny.’

     Only a little frayed.

Conrad's Perceptive Eyes Narrowed

No, Dog Buns! I keep telling you that makes me look mean and not to be trifled with, not that I have a bad case of flatulence in t

     ANYWAY there I was, gloating over the "Official History Of The Great War", two volumes of which had been re-bound by Woolwich Public Library, and - Art!

     That's a typo right there; when I took a look further inside the volume, it's actually Part II.  You can tell because the title is "FROM JUNE 1917 TO THE END OF THE WAR", so definitely a typo.

     Old dog, sharp eyes.