Matching Tracksuits

An email message I sent to Chhavi yesterday:

I just experienced one of the most disturbing, disgusting experiences of my life—today, heads are literally rolling at DLI. The board of directors had their big meeting Monday, and the rumor circulating since then has been that it didn’t go well. Today, the truth of that rumor sort of hit full force—nine people got fired.

As part of a prime directive from the board of directors, DLI is streamlining and a lot of projects got killed. Including religion. So Steve got the axe, as did Jenn. Kiki got fired, two graphical designers, a project manager, a two product managers (including Jenn), and a content developer or two. Ten percent laid off. So it’s like a funeral around here today. Nobody is going to accomplish anything whatsoever. In fact, Kevin came by and told me that he realized as much and that I could just go home if I wanted to. I think I might in the early afternoon, though I don’t know what the hell I’ll do. He also explained to me that even he had no say in this. He was given a list of two names from his department and told to fire them.

Anyway, we’re all going out to lunch today and mourn, and probably bitch about the situation and how it was handled.

So that’s the big event of the week. We at DLI can’t go too long without some kind of shit hitting the fan, and I guess this was the biggest load yet. The complete list of people who got fired:

1. Steve
2. Jen
3. Lisa
4. Lisa R
5. Kiki
6. Anna
7. Marie (the receptionist)
8. Dave (graphic designer)
9. Chuck (graphic designer)

All this happened around 10:00 yesterday morning. By lunchtime, everyone had cleared out and the depression level was just enormous. Kevin came over as asked me how I was, and told me that if I was not in good working order mentally that I could just go home. I hung around, though, but I took a two-and-a-half hour lunch break with Armando, Ann P, and Marlon. Afterwards I went back to DLI and worked a little on the macros I’m creating for the XML tagging effort, and that was about the end of my day.

How were the decisions made? Apparently, even the lower levels of upper management didn’t even have a say in the issue. Both Kevin and Tom Flynn said that they were given a Post-It note with two names on it.

On first thought it seemed that Kevin was fairly upset about it, but it doesn’t seem to jive with his past actions. Look at how he fired Carl—get your ass out, basically. And the same thing with Alan. Perhaps I’m being too cynical. At the same time, if I buy the story, perhaps I’m being too naïve.

Firing Kiki was a particularly stupid move. We’ve basically dismembered this big mess we call a website, and now we’re in the process of figure out how to put it all back together. And who’s the only person who really had an idea how these things went together? Who could answer the question, “If I make this change in the file structure, how will it affect the links?” Who in our company basically played the biggest role in creating the current website? Kiki—the one who’s now fired. Isn’t that great?

The interesting thing about the firings is the gender break-down: 66% women. Both of the product managers who were fired were women. Who stayed? White men. How many women work at the company now? A handful. How many non-white women? One—Kyoungwa. Lots of eye candy for Layne.¹

Patricia summed it up perfectly: this is our first last gasp. And last gasp it is—we are so fucked. Basically, the religion project is dead—meaning Jacob Neusner once again will be told, “The project has been canceled.” A curmudgeon like Neusner is not someone you want on your bad side; he is not someone you want dismissing your product, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Here’s something, as Adam would say, that is even juicier: there is a large history conference next week where DLI will be presenting. John Monfesanni is planning to repudiate publicly his authorship of the last third of Western Civ I. He is basically going to say, “These people say this textbook is by me. The last third, in fact, was written by someone else.” He might as well say, “These people are liars.” We are so fucked.

1 Two amusing exchanges concerning Layne: Anna Socrates was terribly upset about the whole thing — the only person to show emotion there — and she sort of shrugged it off toward the end by saying, “He’s just a fucking gay porn director.” And at some point earlier, Allan Levitan said something about not being ordered around by that “short porn producer.”

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

Yesterday we had our MS Project training downtown. It was actually rather well done, I thought. I know I learned a lot of things and I’m fairly sure everyone else did too. I think that since most of the project managers had been playing with Project before, they were familiar with some of the basics but I think yesterday’s class probably helped make some of their basic knowledge a little more grounded. I don’t know even if that makes any sense . . .

The truly interesting part of the day, though, came at the end when most all of us (excluding Mitch, the new religion project manager, and Teresa, the new American History project manager) went for drinks. The conversation turned, among other things, to Kali and how everyone felt when they found out she was leaving. Sonny said, “I was thrilled. Matt [Maslin] and I started dancing.” It turns out that Kali was quite disliked (or even hated) by a several of the project managers, including Armando. Sonny said that she was very harsh on all of the editors, especially Matt — and that she was even getting Matt set up to be fired. And that before Kali announced that she was leaving, Matt told Sonny, “After this upload, I’m out of here.” And that Sonny had interviewed at two other places and even had a job offer because she was sick of dealing with Kali. In Sonny’s opinion, Kali was an awful editor, a terrible manager, just generally power-hungry, and so on. She especially took exception to Kali’s tendency to re-write whole chunks of chapters. And I think Sonny was probably a little annoyed with how Kali would make CD’s sit down with her and help her as she re-wrote their stuff.

I believe Rob and I were the only ones who really had anything positive to say about her. He pointed out how she had stood up to Adam during the W-Civ1 upload a few months back concerning broadening the scope of things. And I said that I never really had any problems with her and that I felt as an editor she looked out for my interests. To which everyone responded, “Well, you were one of her favorites.” I guess I always knew that — she was always calling me over to fix her computer and such, but I never really thought of me being a favorite. I’ve never really been anyone’s “favorite,” at least not to my knowledge. I guess I don’t know what the signs of favoritism are when I’m the object of it.

The real surprise was to hear Sonny talk about how Matt was catching so much hell with Kali. According to Sonny, when he was called over to Kali’s cube he referred to it as his “bi-weekly dressing down.” I never really heard what was being said in those “meetings” but she had them with a lot of editors and I think that’s what she was referring to as “training.” She wanted everyone to be like her as far as editing goes.

Yesterday was as stressful a day as I have ever experienced. It started out fine — I knew what I had to do and I really didn’t expect I would have much trouble doing it. A simple task really: add email functionality to the new professor demo account pages. Simple. In fact, I looked in some of Allan’s ASP books and they all basically said, “In ASP it’s a snap to send email!” All you have to do is have a function SMTP¹ site. Fine.

I went onto the live server and, lo and behold, there’s an SMTP site set up. So I made a little ASP page the consisted of nothing but an attempted email. I got a permissions-related error. I did a search on Google for this error and found it. The first hit was to Microsoft’s support page, and it even included instructions for a fix. Simple enough — just change a few settings on some folders in the “mailroot” directory and it should be fine and dandy. I talked to Luis before fiddling with this on the live site (the staging server doesn’t have SMTP). He said the proposed changes would have no security problems, so I made them. With great anticipation I re-uploaded my little “testemail.asp” file and loaded it. Same error. I double checked the folder permissions and found that some of the changes didn’t take. Odd. So I made them again, re-uploaded yet again, tested again, received the same error message again, and muttered, “Fuck” again.

Before any of this happened, though, I talked to Kevin about it. He told me there should be no SMTP configuring necessary, and that I should throw it on the staging server. “If it doesn’t work there, it doesn’t work. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and resources on this.” He said something about using Kiki’s mailto functionality and asked how that was going. I told him I didn’t really know but that I thought she had it working more or less. “Is the mail getting sent to sales reps?” Potential trick question. I should have simply said, “I don’t know.” I should have lied in other words. Well, no — that’s not a lie. I don’t really know whether or not sales reps are getting it, but I don’t think they are. At any rate, I told him that she was and that she had set up her Exchange account to route the stuff to them. Stupid thing to say — he called Kiki and told her he didn’t want it done that way. So now she’s working on that same damn mailto functionality problem that Kevin seems to think would be a snap. In fact it should be a snap if SMTP were working, but it’s not.

I really don’t like my job now simply because I don’t feel comfortable going to anyone for help. Kiki either is not there or has her own stuff to do, and I almost always feel I’m intruding — that my questions are an annoyance to her. I can’t go to Kevin because he’ll just tell me to go out to such and such site and grab some script and throw it in.

If Peter were still the CTO, he’d have been there yesterday helping me with this damn SMTP problem. He would have called his dad; he would have talked to Microsoft (or give me the ability to do so). I see now what Brian meant when he said Peter seemed much more knowledgeable about the actual technical minutiae than Kevin. With Peter I could ask, “How do I do this?” With Kevin I feel uncomfortable even saying, “I can’t do this.” And that’s really quite ridiculous. I have no formal technical training whatsoever, and I’ve been working with ASP stuff for just a few weeks now. I’ve done everything I could to get this stupid thing working, but I just can’t get this function to work, no matter how easy Kevin tells me it should be.

I was walking home last night — terrible night not to have a ride because it was freezing. In the morning it was warm enough that I took off my hat and muff on the way to work; by the time I left at 7:30 last night, it was frigid. Anyway, I was walking home thinking about this and I realized one of the reasons I loved my job in Lipnica: it’s the only job I’ve ever had in which I was 100% confident in my ability to fulfill my responsibilities. Nothing about my job there intimidated me. I never woke up thinking about what I had to accomplish that day and thinking, “God, I hope I can figure out how to do that.” The closest I came was the first time I was in charge of the Strasbourg trip, but that wasn’t really work-related. It had nothing to do with my ability as a teacher — it was a test of my resourcefulness as a person, of course.

1 I’ve been tossing that acronym around all week now and I don’t even know what it means.

My current project at work is rather large in scope: I’m creating a series of new ASP pages for professors so they can get a two-week demo without having to talk to a sales rep beforehand. I ended up creating four pages for the job, including one that is entirely in VBScript, run at the server, which then dynamically creates the HTML page. In other words, all HTML is done with “response.write(“<B>Blah</b>”).”

I had an interesting discussion with Kevin Friday. Some dolt had given out the office username and password for the live site (both of which were “proftext”) and Kevin sent me an email about it, asking me to disable that user name and create a new one for office use. Later I was filling him in on the situation, explaining it was a fairly simple task but it took a little while longer because I had to look for some stuff in the code.

“Tell me this isn’t hard coded in,” he said, shaking his head.¹

“Well, yeah, it is,” I responded, somewhat hesitantly at first.

He went off on a little tangent about the stupidity of such coding practices, then paused to say, “I’m not criticizing you, of course — just giving some advice for the future. If DLI folds up and you end up slinging code somewhere else, don’t do that — it’s poor coding practice.”

“I honesty doubt that I’ll be doing this for any indefinite time,” I said. “I’m just learning all this stuff while I have the opportunity, but it’s not my first love. I just find — well, I wouldn’t say that I’m gifted at it, but I find that it’s very easy for me to understand. It’s very logical.” To which Kevin responded, somewhat surprisingly, “I think you’re fairly gifted at it.” A nice, affirming moment.

1 All of this, of course, is a very rough paraphrase of what we actually said to each other.

Yesterday I attended my first last editors’ meeting — at least my last one as an editor. Natalie is going to do the paperwork Monday to make my move to IT official.

So after a year of basically knowing what I was doing and how to do it, I’m more or less in the dark. I have to admit that Tuesday, before I left work, I was more than a little anxious about my lack of technical background. I was working on getting links to public Outlook folders and I was, for a moment, terribly afraid that I had to know XML to get the job done. I was looking at the Outlook Today page’s code and thinking, “I might as well be trying to translate German.” But yesterday Kevin showed me where in the Programming Outlook and Exchange book I could find how to do it. It’s simple — and somewhat impressive. All I have to do is this: <A HREF = Outlook:\Inbox>. Or something like that. I can’t remember the details about the slashes and such. (I never remember whether it’s / or \ until I do it a thousand times.) Anyway, I’m feeling much better about it now.

I’m finding, though, that as a supervisor Kevin will not be quite as laid back as Natalie would be. I’ve already received two emails (addressed to all IT folks) about issues such as hours.¹ I’m not worried about it — but still, it was a little disconcerting to read an email that began, “I thought I made myself clear in last week’s meeting, but just to reiterate . . .”

I finally responded to Jasiu’s email of last week. I wrote a terse note in crappy Polish saying that I was terribly busy at the moment and didn’t have time to write a proper letter but that I would send him the pertinent information by the end of the month. I dread writing such a letter in Polish — trying to leave myself as much wiggle room as possible in a language I haven’t used much in eighteen months. Won’t that be fun.

Even more entertaining will be trying to decide whether or not I actually want to return. I’m surprised, though, that I’ve managed to keep my mouth shut with people at work. No one has the slightest clue (at least as far as I know) that I might not be working at DLI this time next year. I’ve managed successfully to keep it to myself.

1 We’re expected to be in the office by 8:30 and stay until at least 5:30.