The crazy party excuse.

A person can be either socially incompetent or technically incompetent, and still succeed in IT. Somebody who is technically incompetent, but can still talk the talk, can certainly get by on charm, and (that most elusive of all traits) people skills. On the other hand, if somebody is a technical genius, nobody really cares if they are awkward, or stinky, or unable to maintain eye contact. And so, everybody is constantly oscillating in their little niche on this technical-social competence spectrum.

Bob, however, is both technically incompetent and socially unbearable. It’s hard to believe, but really, it’s true. We don’t know each other so well yet, dear reader, but you will have to trust that I am not making this up.

Bob came to BPU with “15 years of professional experience” in IT. That’s what he says every time somebody challenged one of his idiotic ideas. Truth is, Bob went directly from being a hardware grunt of the lowest degree (the fellow who physically moves your computer from one desk to another but lacks the expertise and authority to turn it back on) to an IT manager. It literally happened overnight. He was promoted during the dot-com boom, when all talented people left their moderately lucrative jobs with financial institutions for extremely lucrative jobs with startups. And one evening, when everyone who knew anything about technology walked out of the office forever, it was a choice between Bob and the janitor. And because Bob was a US citizen and had an Associates Degree, he got the promotion. I have come to accept it as just one of those completely unfair karmic accidents, like homeless kittens or juvenile diabetes.

Everything Bob knows about technology he read in a trade journal. And not even the good kind of trade journal, but the kind written specifically for IT managers. Furthermore, I don’t think that he actually reads the articles, but rather, gets most of his information from advertisements. In fact, I don’t even know that Bob can tell the difference between an advertisement and a legitimate, unbiased report (that’s probably why he continues to forward bogus SPAM about pharmaceutical stocks to the rest of the staff).

Because Bob worked at a corporation (although, it’s probably more accurate to say that he received a paycheck from a corporation) he looks down on what we do at our small university IT shop as quaint. In his mind, a technology is worth only as much as it costs, and so he sees our patchwork of affordable open source applications as a scourge that must be wiped out with enterprise solutions.

The first victim of his big-picture thinking is our ticket-tracking system, Bugzilla. It’s unclear if he hates it so much because it’s free, or because it’s easy to use, or maybe because it works so well and fulfills all our needs. Either way, at the beginning of the week Bob announced that we would be replacing Bugzilla with Jira – an expensive, bulky, Java-based system we know nothing about.

And that is the long story (the short story is always simply “Bob is an idiot, and here we are”) of how I found myself stuck in a conference room with four Jira sales-people, a small wall clock ticking away the minutes of my life, and a large pot of coffee. The leader of the sales people poured himself a third cup, and gave me an awkward smile, which I understood to mean “when the coffee runs out, we are leaving.” Bob, who scheduled the meeting for 8am on Monday morning, was nowhere to be found.

By 8:45 the coffee was at a dangerously low level.

Ding, new email! Ah, of course.

From: Bob Bossman
To: Anna Shore

Anna,
I am running late. Something must’ve happened to my alarm clock. I had a crazy party at my apartment last night with some artist friends of mine, and we got totally drunk! You know what I mean. Anyway, stall the Jira people for as long as you can, I am on my way.

Peace out,
Bob Bossman, Executive Director

I inform the Jira people that it’ll be just a little while longer, and relate a version of the excuse that makes Bob seem like a normal human being and not an obnoxious jerk.

By 9:15, the Jira people are packing up their glossy brochures, Jira-branded pens, and other shiny sales gear. The leader gives me a dirty look, mumbles something about unreliable university hippies, and leaves.

To nobody’s surprise, Bob doesn’t show up just as they leave. Nor does he show up an hour later, or two hours later. At 1pm we get the following email:

From: Bob Bossman
To: sitg-staff@bpu.edu

Terrible headache, need to sleep it off. See you all tomorrow.

- Bob
————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

As we later found out, the drunken debauchery with sexy artist friends was in fact an all night Magic the Gathering tournament at a downtown comic book shop, where Bob was sighted by one of our interns. The terrible headache was probably real. The intern reported that Bob took a serious beating from a 12-year old boy, and left the scene distraught, his mana depleted.

: : : :