Nice Threads

El Jefe wants to have a class for everyone in his organization. Right now… And at the expense of delaying commitments we’ve made for mid-December. When he pitched this “brainstorm” to me on Friday, my response was “If you think my team is going to work over Christmas, you can go fuck yourself.” But with his selective listening skills, he heard “My team is going to work over Christmas.”

During mid-morning, I received an email thread. Working from the bottom up was this nugget:

El Jefe: Captain Sarcastic and I have discussed slipping the handover to production to the Thursday before Christmas, but preserve the original ‘release date’ [of this year].

The Directoress of Production was diplomatic in her response. I have taken the liberty of inferring unwritten undertones as depicted in bold font:

Directoress: While this sounds simple [to a fucking moron like yourself], it is the holidays and we can’t just keep eating up the lead time [because you can't schedule your way out of a paper bag]. Other companies are like us, lots of people take time off at the holidays or they close down altogether between Christmas and New Years. To do what you propose means we effectively will not ship until January.”

She carbon copies the other executives. My boss affirms that we will not change the release date. (If my boss was not as good as El Jefe is bad, I’d have been outta here a long time ago.)

Thinking this is just opening bargaining, El Jefe completely ignores this and sends her and me mail directly:

El Jefe: Let’s say for a moment that we slip handover to the 20th, can your group make an on-time release work?

Since my name was invoked in vain, I was obligated to respond. Before doing so, I walked over to Directoress’ office to clarify that while “discussed slipping the handover” was technically true, he omitted my most candid assessment of the “discussion.”

She knew, of course, because I had spoken to her last week about my concerns about El Jefe’s leadershit. Like: completely ignoring input from anyone except Cliff. After we had our laugh, I responded to everyone on the Cc list, but remain somewhat diplomatic:

Captain Sarcastic: No. This would mean my team has to work over the Christmas holiday. Their first response: ‘why doesn’t [El Jefe's] team work over Thanksgiving, instead?’

I’d recommend you schedule your class during the week of December 17th. None of your team has a vacation blocked out on the corporate calendar [your team is updating the corporate calendar, right?]. It also gives them incentive to finish [their work].

He didn’t talk with me all day. Finally, late afternoon, he responds and copies all of the management.

El Jefe: Captain Sarcastic, I like your idea [... lots of discussion with his team on how this would make more sense]