The CEO’s Ticket

If Corporate Politics and Mismanagement were an Olympic sport, I guess this incident would probably take the Gold this year.

Some CEO’s stupid e-ticket inadvertently got voided when it was not supposed to and needed to be re-issued manually. Now, things like this happen all the time due to system glitches (this is the part where the guy at the check-in counter gives you a blank look and tells you have to wait for a while because of some ‘computer error’), but anyway, stuff like this happen all the time in a normal working day, to normal folks worldwide.

Unfortunately for us, this time, it had to be a CEO.
As usual, the half the management jumped us and drove us crazy to resolve the issue, but then I wonder:

Do CEOs stand in line at those obnoxious check-in queues and get told, “Sorry mac, but your ticket’s no good” like the rest of us?
What do they do then; call up the office and ask to waitlisted on the next available plane…and then sit at a waiting lounge for their name to be called?
Do they then call up their other CEO buddies and play online Monopoly or something?

Its all good for the imagination, but I’m willing to bet none of the above happened and Mr. CEO probably didn’t even have an idea that something was wrong with his ticket. If anything, he was probably just informed of a ‘small mishap on the system’.

Which means my entire week-long data analysis of what exactly happened to his ticket and the technical reasons for the untimely void, is worth nothing.

The max that can happen is that it ends up as a report on his desk, waiting to be tossed in the trash along with yesterday’s newspaper when Mr. CEO comes back from his trip!

The things you hear...

Overhead at my office recently:

"Oh, no I don't need to know any of that. You see, I'm a manager."

Manage-mental Issues

I don’t usually talk about my work life, but the past couple of days were a roller coaster ride that so rocked the management – something that went live the day before brought half the system down and we for the life of it couldn’t figure out what the heck was going wrong.

The entire corporation met to discuss this in endless meetings and I had the privilege of being in one such meeting with the top of the top management. The following are excerpts from that meeting.

(The statements in quotes were made by one of the morons managers. The italics are my thoughts at the time.)

“We need to fix this as soon as possible”
Tell me something I don’t know!

“I’m starting to lose my patience here with this problem”
You moron, I lost sleep last night, had to skip lunch and breaking my skull over this, you think I’m having fun here?

“The way I see it, there are two things that could have gone wrong”
The way you see it? Dude, when was the last time you looked at code. There’s a zillion things that can go wrong.

“You guys go ahead with your work, we’ll take care of the management issues”
So why the heck’d you bring me to this meeting? This isn’t exactly a technical discussion.

To another person on a call:
“Don’t worry; we have our people working on this as we speak”
No you’re not! I’m right here - listening to this stupid call.

“Do you require our assistance here any longer”
Any longer? Since when did you help us with to begin with? And what are you gonna do, compile a couple of programs for us? Maybe load a library?

“If we have to work over the weekend, then we will work over the weekend”
We? You mean “I” am going to work over the weekend. You’re probably gonna be sitting home watching TV asking me for a status every half hour.


Now, everybody has told me top managers are a waste of time, but after that call, I was convinced! How do these guys run the business without a clue of what’s going on!