Bob versus Jim

Bob is an insecure man. On its own, that’s not an especially terrible affliction, one that can certainly be dealt with through some carefully timed compliments and an occasional sugary treat. But combined with nine community college credits worth of management courses, the insecurity can grow into a full blown pathology. That’s what happened to Bob.

The primary source of Bob’s professional insecurity is Jim, our former manager.

A few words about Jim. Jim is a god among managers. For every one of Bob’s flaws, Jim has at least a dozen merits. He is competent and educated in both technology and business. He is pleasant, helpful, and fun. He is the sort of manager who engenders trust and loyalty not only toward himself, but toward the entire organization. Working for Jim was a blast, and at that time I even thought that a career in IT was not a terrible way to go. The best thing about Jim is that he always did the right thing and stood up for his staff, regardless of the unpleasantness such actions evoked from the powers above.

Jim created SITG when he was a student at BPU. He spotted an administrative need, which he was able to fill perfectly from the comfort of his dorm room. SITG was a one-man shop that grew into a respectable university IT group. And even though Jim left, his influence here remains.

And so, I commiserated with Bob. Jim is not an easy act to follow. But it’s not impossible to succeed in his footsteps. A clever manager would try to capitalize on Jim’s popularity with the staff and the clients by embracing his principles. A clever manager would understand that change has to be gradual, and would allow ample time for a smooth transition. A clever manager would try to embrace his predecessor’s best decisions, and avoid immediate massive overhauls in operations and culture.

Bob, however, is not a clever manager.

In Management 101, Bob learned that when you take a position as the new manager of a group, the first thing that you have to do is completely wipe out all signs and memories of the previous manager. (In actuality, that is probably not what was taught in the class, but it is nonetheless what Bob learned).

“I have to establish myself as the top dog,” he confided one day.
“You are the only dog,” I told him.

But he didn’t care. He imagined himself in an intense death match with Jim. He could smell the smoke from the circle of fire around our office. I could see the flame in his crazy, delusional eyes every time that Jim’s name was mentioned, (which was often). Jim, of course, was oblivious to all this. He had a new job, half way across the country, SITG and it’s problems a distant memory.

Bob’s first idea was to completely replace the entire staff. Hiring all new people would benefit him twofold. The new people wouldn’t know about Jim, and Bob would be free to re-invent the place in his own, hideous, incompetent image. Also, the new people would harbor obligatory feelings of loyalty for the man who gave them their jobs (this bit was from Management 102). Fortunately for me, this didn’t pan out for Bob. The uber-boss categorically denied him the right to fire everyone. This wasn’t out of any particular affinity for us, but primarily because the paperwork involved with firing somebody is too much of a hassle for busy HR administrators. (Touché, university bureaucrats, touché).

Unable to get rid of us, Bob launched an assault on the technology infrastructure that Jim built. Each day saw a wacky new proposal to replace something that was working quite well with something unfamiliar, impractical, and expensive. This was met with much resistance, but it could’ve worked, had it not been for the expensive part. Delirious with Oracle dreams and Java fantasies, Bob failed to realize that university IT budgets were about as opulent as a PhD student whose stipend check hasn’t cleared yet.

Stuck with Jim’s staff and Jim’s technology, Bob turned his attention to the culture of SITG, where Jim made his most lasting contributions. When his comments about loud music, loud conversation, and lack of a strict corporate dress code didn’t make an impression on us, he began to frantically replace our cutesy, sarcastic wall decorations with fascist motivational posters urging us to “step up to the challenge” and “work to fulfill the greater vision.” We just stood back and allowed his madness to manifest itself in this fairly innocuous form. After all, an intentionally funny poster wasn’t as entertaining as an intentionally serious poster made funny with a few strokes of a black marker.

But that wasn’t enough, and Bob launched his foolish attack on our quips. The quips are a database of short quotes that Jim began to accumulate since the early days of SITG. Over time, each staff member made a lasting mark on the quips database. Our collection is eclectic, with selections from Mitch Hedberg, Rita Rudner, Jason the Intern, and many others. The quips are a happy addition to our day. They pop up on the pages of our ticket system, so whenever you start getting bummed out because your work queue is so very large, you can be cheered up with an amusing sentiment from Douglas Adams or Yakov Smirnoff.

And because about half of the quips were entered by Jim, Bob saw this as a direct threat, which had to be dealt with immediately. So one day, Bob stayed late, and manually (oh, yes indeed) deleted every single quip entered by Jim (about 1500 of them). This could’ve been done with one brief line of SQL, but Bob, of course didn’t know that. The following morning Dave noticed that the quips database had shrunk, and assumed that there was some sort of corruption or malfunction. So, he promptly restored the original database from the previous night’s backups. That night Bob stayed late again, clickety-clicking his way through 1500 records. This continued for a week – Bob’s futile deletes, Dave’s unassuming restores.

During staff meeting, Bob was visibly on the brink of insanity.

“Who keeps re-inserting all the quips?”
“What?”
“The quips! I keep deleting them, and somebody keeps re-inserting them!”
“Oh! I’ve been restoring the quips database,” Dave confessed in utter confusion.
“What? Why?” Bob began to sweat profusely, even though it wasn’t even warm in the room.
“Why are you deleting quips?” Nick jumped in.
“What? They are inappropriate. Clients might see them.”
“Clients won’t see them. They are restricted to pages that only staff can access.” Nick refused to relent.
“I spent a lot of time deleting them,” Bob was visibly losing it, “and you just keep putting them back, and it’s such a waste of time, I can’t believe you would do that.”
“Well stop deleting quips,” Nick said with surprising authority.

There was definitely a new, scary edge, plainly audible in Nick’s voice, and Bob must have picked up on it too. Because after that, he left the quips alone. So just like that, Jim won a fight he didn’t even know he was a part of.

Bob lost, and we joked, rejoiced and drank beer. But our little party ended abruptly as we realized that the next morning we would be back at the office, together with Bob once again.

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