Chief Information Officer of the Twilight Zone

My boss is funny.   Not funny ha-ha…. Funny like breaking your leg when the bone sticks through.

Two weeks ago she chewed me a new one for some imagined event that had no basis in reality.  We seemed to get past that relatively decently but we still work in the Twilight Zone<tm>.

As proof, I offer the events of today, when the boss comes up to me to ask my opinion on a few things concerning some new software they’re looking at.  I had all sorts of relevant questions like what kind of horsepower do we need to run it and is the desktop client heavy.

I began to suspect things weren’t going to go well when she told me that the salesman didn’t know the answer to those questions.  We’d obviously have to get a multi-site, multi-state, multi-party phone conference going with the salesman’s best technical people (only because all of the videoconferencing equipment was in use at the time).

Mind you, the software sounded like it might be decent.  It would replace software that is older than the computers on which it runs by many orders of magnitude.  It was about time to find a replacement.

So just out of curiosity I asked what the time frame was for implementation.

A week or two.

A week or two?

A week or two.

So now I’m being expected to completely implement new client-server software in a week or two.  Never mind that we don’t know if we have the client or server capacity to run this alleged software.  Never mind that we have no idea how it works.  We’re here to support the business of the company, no matter how *$&#ing bizarre the software is or how poorly-conceived the plan (or lack of thereof).

Meanwhile I’ve spent the last few weeks being yelled at because a few pieces of spam have slipped past our filter.  The way people talk to me, you’d think I was standing there at the firewall, personally allowing the errant emails in and putting them in select mailboxes.  I even took time to explain that for every piece of spam that slipped through, up to five hundred got caught by the filter.  Yet the next time something came through, they went right after me as if I had never given any explanation at all.  “Can’t you DO something about this?”

It takes less than a second to delete an email.  It takes several minutes to type out an accusatory email to the Computer Department.  Guess which one most people prefer to do?  These are the same people, mind you, who can’t possibly do something you request because they’re so busy.

We’re also finishing up our email project after almost a year.  A long year.

So I want to ask Mrs. Boss Lady which emergency is most emergent during this particular five minute segment: One Week Software Implementation, getting yelled at about spam filtering, or finishing the email project.

And you know the answer is going to change with the weather, the wind, and the time at which the question is asked.  It’s not like I want to be a bad sport or anything…. I didn’t go to college but I managed to grasp this much about project management: there are finite resources and infinite projects; therefore you cannot accomplish the infinite with the finite.

Being the creative type, she’s probably going to suggest One Week Software Implementation while simultaneously being yelled at about spam filtering, after which I can finish the email project.  And while I’m juggling flaming chainsaws, perhaps I can shove a broom up my bottom and sweep the floor.

I have to mention at this point that I read the above paragraph to my wife, who looked up and said she’d pay to see that.

Now I’m really frightened….