Yesterday I went out for Vietnamese with Marlon, Armando, Mitch¹, Beth, and Niki, and of course we ended up talking about work, specifically management. Niki told us about the advisory board meeting on Saturday that she had to record and relayed her lunchtime experience with us. She was apparently sitting near Kevin, Tom Fynn², and Sam Mayo³ and overheard a significant portion of Kevin’s conversation with them. Apparently he was criticizing the project managers, saying they didn’t know how to manage projects, didn’t know how to use MS Project properly, and so on. This got Mitch quite upset and he said that Kevin was an asshole. It’s amusing—Mitch is so quiet in his speech and mannerisms, but he’s quite ideologically ferocious about certain things.

Armando at one point said that he felt upper management in our company was pathetic. I can’t remember all the words he used, but he provided a long list of adjectives, including arrogant, malicious, and others. He said that most of upper management had no business being in management, especially Bob, who’s an academic by training. He also said that Bob was the source of a lot of this new attitude from upper management.

At one point I mentioned that if Rob Fuller were still with DLI, he would have left by now because of the implementation of MS Project. Armando said, “Oh, and if not he would have left after Monday’s meeting.” He added, “He never put up with any crap, and I admired him for that.” It was strange because all I was getting at was Rob’s techno-phobia. I honestly never thought of Rob as being admirable in that way. I found him to be a bit of a pain in the ass a lot of the time, and helpless-by-choice when it comes to anything computer related.

I worked until 7:30 last night, then stayed another hour eating dinner and messing around on the web. That’s over twelve hours spent in front of a computer. Twelve hours on my ass, in front of a computer. Of course there was an hour-and-a-half lunch break (essentially that long—I hate going out to lunch in a big group because it always takes so damn long), so I guess I only worked nine and a half hours. As if I’m going to admit to that, though. I take long lunches (i.e., more than twenty minutes) so seldom that it’s a moot point as far as I’m concerned. The point is, though, that I spent half a day sitting in front of a computer, doing nothing but writing shit like, “If not rs_something.bof then.” Such nonsense. I hate my job sometimes.

1 I don’t think I’ve mentioned him. He’s the new project manager for religion.

2 A new guy hired as something of a macro-level design consultant for modules

3 From Real Time Enterprises, the company that for a mere $30,000 evaluated our procedures and methods and found them rather lacking — which I would assume is a big motivation behind the Big Dig