The BM

Dilbert

One day in teletubby land, El Jefe insisted that all of our bottlenecks would become unbottled If We Only Hired someone for the position we dubbed the “Build Messiah,” or BM for short. A committee of Dr. Jefe and Mister El met to craft the description of our throughput salvation. Interviews were quietly conducted. At the company meeting introducing The Chosen One, we found out why the technically favorable candidate lost out: El Jefe hired his buddy. As in, “El Jefe was the best man at my wedding seven years ago.”

Uh, oh.

Fast forward a few months. Build Messiah should be on top of things, but defects are being assigned to him at a rate greater than he can address them. During the Minivan Construction Project, over a third of the outstanding problems were his to resolve. That doesn’t include the class of defects known as the “it’ll take too long to explain to BM and he’ll fuck it up anyway, so I’ll do it myself.” Most are simple tasks like “pick up all of those shiny blue rocks over there, put them over here.” Sometimes they require higher cognitive skills like “Line the shiny red rocks up by size.”

BM wasn’t making visible progress, so I commented. His reaction was to cherry-pick, which would have been tolerable if he only chose the ones that are actually going to affect our delivering a product. Instead, he worked on the lowest-priority, “fix if you have nothing else to do” annoyances, things like “That blue rock has a scuff on its underside. Buff it out.”

When I said something, again, he stopped “fixing” the unimportant things, having worked up to blindly closing the “can you look into this and tell me if it’s fixable” with a “Nope, can’t do it.” These were always done in the evening.

One Friday, two of the engineers called him on this. As the discussion went back and forth, his inadequate communication skills revealed his incomplete, inaccurate grasp of the subject was derived from “two days of reading vendor manuals.”

Captain Sarcastic to become Captain Impatient. Very publicly, I pointed out that there’s this device. It’s called a telephone. You can pick it up, push numbers, and talk to someone. If you don’t get an answer, call someone else. In most cases, this would take a few minutes. I ended my mini tirade with “We are trying to deliver a product this year.”

No reaction from the BM, which just pissed me off even more. I’ve also taken this to El Jefe directly, though he’s not inclined to do anything about it. Yet, at least.

Cliff, our CEO, had apparently heard:

“I am very glad that you ‘lost your cool’ with [the BM] regarding the [particular area I lost my cool about]. More glad that you care so much about getting stuff done. We need more of that. Don’t hold back. The more you let out your real feelings, the more you will find that you actually don’t ‘lose your cool’. It seems we are poised for greatness; but have to really build the TEAM. I will be talking with [El Jefe] about this when he returns. Keep up the good work.“