Remembering El Jefe

(By Grace)

I don’t miss El Jefe – things are SO much more pleasant without him.  Work gets done, the stress level is way down, and meetings are finished in their allotted time.

However, I DO miss the blogs about him.  So I thought I’d stroll down memory lane, just to remind myself about his unique ways of wasting our time.

After nearly two years on the job, EJ could barely find the ON button, much less explain or do a demo of our products.  But early in his tenure, I didn’t know he was so hopeless. He attended a presentation of the latest version of a product that I was in charge of.  I hoped it would give him some understanding and appreciation of what we were all about.

The presentation focused on some cool new features.  The sales people were drooling over them, asking if they could also be incorporated into some of our other products.  There were some significant performance improvements and some sexy bells and whistles.  In short, the WOW factor was high.

El Jefe raises his hand, and offers this observation:   “I’m not comfortable with that abbreviation”. 

One of the displays includes a graph of cumulative values.  In the label, cumulative is abbreviated “cum”. 

There’s the first clue about how his mind works. 

Back then, I was naïve.  I thought that if I explained that the label content actually originated from our customers was common usage in the industry that this product was aimed at, he would accept that.  When that didn’t work, I showed him multiple examples of its usage in manuals and other products used by our target customers.  Still not good enough.  I pointed out that the customer could change it if they liked, but to no avail.

Finally, I got smart.  I just told him that I would take care of it.  So I did – I asked the product manager if he wanted me to change it, and he said no.  Problem solved. 

El Jefe never noticed.  By then, he was busy designing fonts for the release notes.

Grace