Hasta la Vista, Monkeyhands (part 2)

At this point, I had a decision to make. I could say, "Screw it. Serves these idiots right if this application doesn't launch on time." I could make a big stink about why the application didn't launch on time, and all the executive directors would get to explain to their clients that the CEO of Galactic Invertebrates is a retard and that while each and every one of our clients is super-duper important to us, all of them stacked in a pile don't mean shit compared to BeeStings Unlimited. Hell, I could take the next three weeks off and just pull up a lawn chair to watch as a barrage of countless gigantic clods of shit hit the proverbial fan.

But nooooooooooooooooo, I'm too nice a guy to do that. I won't trouble you with the horrific details of what happened over the next week; suffice it to say that I worked nearly a hundred hours over the next seven days (the week of my anniversary and my daughter's birthday) to make last minute changes to the Interstellar Portal, catering to Asshole's idiotic whims. I tried to get ahold of Monkeyhands to communicate my displeasure at this turn of events, but -- surprise! -- he was unavailable, vacationing somewhere in Europe.

So I buckled down and got the thing done. It wasn't perfect, but it launched without major incident, on time. I walked out of the building that day to the sound of trumpets heralding my accomplishment, because I was hallucinating from lack of sleep.

The next day I fired off an email to Monkeyhands letting him know that I was extremely upset about the situation, and that this was going to be the LAST time I would ever be working 100 hours in one week because of someone else's screwup. He responded -- several days later -- with some noncommittal reassurances.

By the time Monkeyhands finally got back from vacation, my anger level had dropped from White Hot Seething Rage to Barely Controlled Fury. I stopped by Monkeyhands' office a couple of times, but he was always in a meeting or about to leave for a meeting or trying to squeeze his upper torso into his colon. Eventually I gave up.

Now as you'll know if you've read pretty much anything else I've written, I'm completely full of myself. But you're just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I'm a damn good programmer.* I built GI's entire application infrastructure from the ground up, in roughly a quarter of the time it would have taken a typical programmer. "How is that possible?" you ask. Well, it's all about leveraging your work.

Let's say, by way of illustration, that you need to mow a lawn, and all you have is an old hand-powered mower like that one they used on the Brady Bunch. A typical programmer will look at that problem and say, "I could build a gas-powered lawn mower for you and save you a lot of time and trouble." Which, of course, is a good idea. When I look at that problem, however, I think, "I could build a lawn mower for you and save you a lot of time and trouble. But frankly building lawn mowers sounds like a pain in the ass, and I don't want to have to be building a lawn mower for every poor sap who needs to mow his lawn. So how about if I spend an extra three weeks and build a machine that builds lawn mowers?" So it costs me an additional three weeks up front, but after that I can crank out lawn mowers in my sleep. And once I get bored with building lawn mower building machines, I might build a lawn mower building machine building machine. You see where this is going. One time I inherited a project that a subcontractor had been working on for 6 months with minimal results. I told the subcontractor he was done and rewrote the entire application myself in a week. If you want some software built, I'm a good guy to have on your team. Or instead of your team.

Thus it's fair to say that in this company of 35 people, I was one of the three or four key people that kept GI afloat. A smart CEO would do everything he could to keep those three or four people happy. So if one of those key people was oscillating between Barely Controlled Fury and Cynical Resignation, he might want to make a point of meeting with that employee to at least hear his concerns. His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands was not a smart CEO.

Eventually a coworker, who had only been with the company for a few weeks and therefore had not yet had his spirit crushed, set up a meeting with the CEO to express our concerns. At this point I had no real interest in expressing my concerns, because Monkeyhands clearly couldn't give a shit about my concerns, but I went along because I thought it was cute how my coworker thought he was going to accomplish something at this meeting. My coworker laid out a very compelling case that some drastic changes were in order, and I did my best to back him up.

The CEO was clearly displeased with this attempt by the serfs to tell him how to run the castle, and he sat in stony silence while we laid out our case. When we were finished, he suggested that we "write up a proposal" and submit it to him, and if it was one of the best proposals he got that year he would see what he could do about it.

Keep in mind that we weren't asking for raises. We weren't asking for more more autonomy for our department. We weren't, in fact, asking for anything. We were simply telling him what, in our opinion, absolutely had to change about his company in order for it to succeed and make him the millions of dollars he clearly felt he was entitled to. As low as my expectations had been going into this meeting, Monkeyhands had managed to limbo a good 26 inches under them. I was rendered almost speechless by his unprecedented obtuseness.

Having just spearheaded the launch of our flagship product under near impossible circumstances, I felt emboldened to speak up. I said, "You know, I don't really have time to be writing proposals. I think we've told you everything you need to know. My job is to write applications."

He glared at me with his beady little extraterrestrial eyes and said, essentially, "Your job is whatever the f---- I tell you it is."

That's when I went to my happy place, because the alternative was to punch Monkeyhands in his fugly little alien face until he stopped wasting oxygen. I coasted through the rest of the meeting in a sort of dreamlike state, nodding and smiling and thinking about how I wasn't going to work for this ass-hat one second longer than I needed to in order to make sure my family didn't starve to death. That night I went home and started researching my options for refinancing my house. We have ten acres of valuable land in California, so I had some equity at my disposal. It took me a few weeks, but I managed to negotiate a loan that would give me enough money to take a year off and finish building my house. As soon as the papers were signed, I put in my notice.

And wouldn't you know it, Monkeyhands immediately made time in his Euro-touring, rectum-examining schedule for the two of us to go out for a beer, like the two best buds that I had always suspected we were. He used this outing as an opportunity to dispense fatherly advice while I nodded and continually swallowed little bits of vomit that came up in my throat. After establishing that he was my mentor and quite possibly my NBFF, he asked me why I was leaving.

"I feel like it's time to move on," I said.

He pressed for more information, and I kept giving non-answers. Is it Human Inertia? "No, Human Inertia is a manageable idiot." Is it The Snake?** "No, The Snake is just a symptom of a bigger problem." Ok, so what is it?

"Just time to move on. That's all."

I was determined not to give him the benefit of my opinion of him and his company, because after ignoring me for three years he could go f--- himself. Besides, if I told him what I actually thought, it would be really hard to keep working for him for another three weeks. I would have been fine with speaking my mind and walking out, but that would have left a lot of my coworkers in the lurch. So I gave him nothing. I could tell he wanted to lash out at me like a spoiled child again, but he was at least smart enough to know that he desperately needed to hold on to me for as long as he could, even if it was only three weeks. He couldn't afford to piss me off at this point. In fact, he began to offer me everything he could think of to keep me. He even told me I could work from home pretty much all day every day if I wanted, even though I had been specifically told on prior occasions that I wasn't allowed to work from home even two days a week (which I did anyway, of course). Funny how a little perspective changes things.

But I was past the point of being mollified by anything they had to offer. I simply couldn't stomach working for that petty little sphincter nugget any longer.

I wrapped things up as best I could over the next few weeks, but when it was clear that a lot of important projects were not going to get done after I left, they asked if I'd be willing to do some work as a consultant. "Sure," I said. "At an hourly rate of [fill in exorbitant rate here]." I added that every time I picked up the phone, there would be a one hour minimum charge.

I was actually kind of hoping they'd say no, but I made the offer because I still felt a little bad about my coworkers who were already overworked without having to pick the pieces of my unfinished projects. Monkeyhands spat and sputtered, but eventually agreed to it, because what else could he do? Thanks to the official GI policy of "F--- Documentation"***, I had three years worth of exclusive knowledge of GI's systems tucked away in my little brain. No one else at the company had a clue how anything I had built worked. If something broke, God help them.

The Monday before my last day, Monkeyhands called me into his office and tried, once again, to get me to tell him why I was leaving and what it would take to get me to stay. I once again politely refused to tell him shit. I could see that he was fuming behind his beady little alien eyes, but he still couldn't afford to aggravate me.

When I continued to refuse to cooperate, he resorted to trying to make me feel guilty, launching into a big speech about loyalty and some such bullshit. He seemed to be trying to tell me how valuable I was to the company, but somehow his monologue degenerated into a self-aggrandizing account of how he had continued to fund application development (read: Diesel's salary) even when everybody told him he was crazy. Rather than, "You're extremely valuable to this company," it was "I'm such an amazing visionary to have recognized how valuable you are to this company, and if a lesser man were in charge you'd have been out on your ass a long time ago." I began to literally feel sick to my stomach. Whatever germ of a notion that I might have had about sticking around was completely obliterated by that pathologically egomaniacal speech.

I continued to give him only the vaguest of answers about why I was leaving.

Finally he came out and said, "Diesel, you've been working here for three years. I think you owe me a little more than that."

What happened next is one of my happiest memories. I replay it in my head, over and over, the way you might revisit a day of riding around on your dad's shoulders at the fair, getting your cotton candy stuck in his hair. It's a memory that always makes me smile. Sometimes when it's cold at night, I think about it and a sort of ineffable warmth radiates out from my heart to my toes and fingertips, making me feel all snuggly and cozy. If I ever have to get a root canal without anesthetic, I will just think about that day when I was sitting across from Monkeyhands in his office.

"So, you think I owe you more than that," I said, gazing thoughtfully out the window. "Well."

I thought of all the empty assurances that Monkeyhands had given me in the past. I thought of the times I had seen him demonstrate "leadership" by belittling employees who had failed to meet impossible goals. I thought of his transparent gestures of magnanimity and his condescending paternal advice.

Then I looked him straight in the eye and said, in my most patronizing tone:

"You know, sometimes we don't get what we feel we're owed."

And I smiled.

***Seriously. Monkeyhands actually said this to me once. Possibly the dumbest thing ever said about software development.

Labels: Jerks, Work