I was asked about last week’s episode: “What does the Master Plumber have against Trevor?”
 Despair.com |
Absolutely nothing. The Master Plumber wants Trevor to succeed. He has been forthcoming with Trevor about his strengths and areas of improvement. Unfortunately, why I broach this is El Jefe has latched onto using Trevor as a pawn in a wanton and short-sighted quest to build an empire.
We work on a thin margin. Before we can incur the overhead of a second plumber, we need to be confident we’ll have the work to support it. Plumbing is important, but not the most pressing business need. Frankly, we think Trevor can handle the upcoming work we have. Furthermore, El Jefe’s track record of hires in positions he alone champions1 is a concern. If this went forward, we might find the new person was ring-bearer at his wedding, one whose only qualification was “have previously used a public toilet.”
… which is a good segue about the BM. Despite his having been here several months, I have limited visibility into what he actually does all day. By proxy, I’d have to say “not much.” Tasks that I thought were to fall under his purview end up having to be picked up by the same people who did them prior to his hire because they’re tired of his fucking it up. Getting El Jefe to acknowledge project risk related to BM’s tasks has taken months. He remains unwilling to concede BM is a C-player.
To mitigate the risk to Project Unicorn, El Jefe recommended we find another engineer to pitch in. The best qualified was Grace, the lead on project Swamp Thing. She’s smart, stubborn, and cares deeply about her work. We get along well. Before Swamp Thing was officially wrapped up, Grace added some more customer requested features. This cost her an extra eight days past the “code complete” date. Wrist-slap. Don’t do it again, especially on Project Unicorn. Wink. Wink.
El Jefe’s reaction is to blame Grace for everything. The structural components the BM was tasked to work on in May got done at the last minute? Blame Grace! El Jefe forgot to budget inspectors because the Rube Goldberg machine didn’t predict it? Dammit, Grace, why couldn’t you use your superpowers to fly back through time and fix things before they broke? The ThermoMeter has inaccuracies because he is incapable of consulting his own team? Graaaaaaaaaaace!
While sitting in the monthly project review meeting, I hear El Jefe blame the entire half-man year overage on Grace because she had the audacity to put in an extra eight business days. The project was budgeted for 1,000 hours; El Jefe’s magic worksheet shows nearly 2,000 spent.
Captain Sarcastic cannot listen to monkey boy any more. “Your math doesn’t add up. On my planet, eight days would add up to 192 hours at most. It’s more like 64 hours of actual engineer time.”
With a wave of the hand, El Jefe retorts, “My data is from the time sheets. Grace worked a lot of overtime.”
“But wait,” I say, “Grace is an exempt employee. Her overtime costs the company nothing. Are you saying employees should never put in extra effort?”
El Jefe deflects the question, “Her extra features add overhead to inspecting and paperwork.”
“But wait,” parries Captain Sarcastic, “your multiplier is 1.3, not 15. Where does your thousand hours come from?”
Crossed arms. “We barely made the release of Project Unicorn.”
Before I could take the gloves off:
(upper cut) Isn’t Grace helping Project Unicorn because your buddy has done bupkus?
(sucker punch) It’s a shame the person in charge didn’t catch this sooner. Oh, that’s you, Font Boy.
Cliff says “let’s move on.” Project Unicorn is summarized: no important issues to discuss. Its overage is hovering at 9%. Everyone looks at me to read my facial expression.
Onto Project Deep Space Nine. El Jefe’s shows projected costs increased 30% and the delivery date has extended two months. Before we can move on, he blames this on changing foremen. Right in front of the new foreman. The original foreman — El Jefe2 — was wasting his team’s time with stupid shit like:
- Creating manuals to document how the garage door goes up and down. (Hint: Nobody cares!)
- Adding “Warm” faucets because some customers might be afraid to cross the “Hot” and “Cold” water streams. (This is probably based on an episode El Jefe had in his shower last week.)
- Planning to frame houses out of balsa, bamboo, and white stinkwood. (Let’s prepare for expensive forays into new markets, before we finish designing something we know people will actually buy!)
The next day, Cliff stopped by to ask I was okay — I was so visibly wound up during the meeting. Grace is the one he should be worried about.
Footnotes
