Gopher-Man

The end of my days with Gopher-Man, et al

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Well, it’s official.  I’m leaving the world of Gopher-Man, Longback Guy, Barefoot Boss, and The Chinese Contingent.  Yep, I’ve got a new job.  I start in a couple of weeks.  I have high hopes that this gig will be a better fit for me than the last one was, though based on the many comments I have received about my Gopher-Man stories, I realize this may be something of a disappointment to many of you.  I’m sorry about that, but I hope to find new characters for you when I begin my next adventure in the world of software (this time I’ll be back in the world of Marketing again, too, which holds a lot of promise for ridiculous work related stories).  I will be commuting into the city again, which should translate into many fun-filled tales of crazy BART interactions or observations, but until then, I leave you with a couple entries from my Blog Spam folder for entertainment.

Comment #1:

“I expect that what you say is true, but which one of us can understand all these changes these days”

Comment #2:

“At the same time my two brothers prayed to Mary, cited saints and periodically wandered into very odd doctrines indeed.”

Enough said…

Gopher-man’s vacation adventures

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So, Gopher-Man just got back from vacation, and I never could have predicted what stories he’d come back with.  I generally try to avoid conversations with Gopher-Man, because he is so incredibly long-winded it’s painful to have to hear him out.  He pulled me aside yesterday, though, to express his concern that he is not the best resource to be assigned to do some work that he’s been asked to do.  A typical escape attempt on his part, but this one a bit more subtle than normal.  I listened and listened and listened, and then suggested that if he really thought he wasn’t the right guy for the work he was assigned to do, he should talk to his boss, which is not me.  I tried to give him this advice in the most compassionate way possible, considering I could’ve spit out the sentence after two of his, but had to listen to fifteen minutes of his introducing the concept to me instead.  When I finally had the opportunity to put in my two cents, he nodded his head seriously, and told me that he, too, realized, this was what he needed to do.  But he was so concerned about giving the wrong impression to his boss, he was afraid to have that conversation.  In an effort to motivate him, and make it not my problem, I offered to talk to his boss for him, knowing he would turn me down.

I then made a horrible mistake.  In an effort to make some polite small-talk after our heart-to-heart, which was clearly quite stressful for him, I asked about his injured finger.  His ring finger on his left hand was all wrapped up.  When I looked closely, I could see the stiff outline of a finger splint under the wrapping.  It wasn’t wrapped in just anything, though.  It was wrapped in what I am pretty sure was one of those awful plastic grocery bags.  The wrapping was pretty puffy and wrinkled, as though he’d circumnavigated his digit with plastic multiple times, then wound a rubber band around and around the base of his finger, criss-crossing it repeatedly to make it tight enough.  I couldn’t for the life of my understand the need for the plastic grocery bag on his hand – I had to find out more.

Turns out while Gopher-Man was on vacation, he slammed his finger in between two doors, breaking it and beginning a long-lasting blood-gushing ordeal, in which he ended up in a hospital in Thailand and got stitches.  What I just wrote in one sentence, though, took another ten minutes for him to explain.  He can’t leave the finger alone – he’s constantly squeezing it with his good hand, running his fingers up and down and over the curvy part of the metal splint, even trying to flex his broken finger despite the stiff metal holding it straight.  He’s like a six-year old that has to constantly peek under his band-aid.  I never did ask outright if he’d wrapped it in a garbage bag.  I don’t have guts enough to do that, but I swear, the Safeway logo was tucked away in there somewhere.

You may have noticed that Gopher-Man went to a hospital in Thailand.  I, too, was intrigued by this part of the story.  I’ve been to Thailand.  It’s a beautiful country, and I thought perhaps we could talk about something that maybe wouldn’t drive me so absolutely crazy as everything else I have to discuss with him.  So I asked him about it.  I asked if he’d been visiting friends, or just travelling alone, and I almost fell over when he told me he went there to “get engaged.”  I’m not sure if I’ve made clear that Gopher-Man is not a young man.  I’d put him in his fifties somewhere.  He is mostly bald, with just a few hairs on the top of his head that look really soft and wispy.  The only conclusion I could come to was that he ordered a bride from Thailand.  I am not sure if I am right, but so far, that is where the story goes in my head.  Next week, I will brave the conversation current in an effort to find out the gory details of his engagement, and don’t worry — I will share them with you.  I’m sure you can barely wait!

Happy New Year, and may you see many vegetable people in 2012

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I was just glancing through “Old Friend from Far Away,” thinking it’s been a while since I just wrote randomly from a writing prompt.  I stopped on a page titled “Radish.”  The first paragraph opens:

“This is a wish. When you are writing about a radish, that you and the radish meet face to face. That you stay specific, present, and direct and through your true intention the radish becomes RADISH. You instantaneously summon the particular and also give life to the essence of that buried root plucked up red and edible.”

It’s good advice, I think, as I’m typing it out now, but that’s not what came to mind when I began to read.  I got distracted by memories of vegetable people.  I went through an odd phase a long time ago, when I couldn’t help but compare people to vegetables.  Visually, I mean.  One night, I was sitting at IHOP with my roommate and best friend, and someone walked in and I said, “Doesn’t that woman look like broccoli?”  My friend worked hard not to spit out his coffee, but in the end, he agreed that she looked surprisingly like a stalk of broccoli.  I can’t picture her anymore or I’d describe it for you better.  You might think people don’t really look a lot like vegetables, and maybe you’re right.  But, I challenge you to give it some thought.  You may not always see a vegetable when you look at a person, but you will be surprised how often you do, if you just think about it.  Leave your mind open to the fact that people can resemble, or at the very least, remind you of, vegetables.  Or other foods, if you need a broader target.

In the next few days, you might find yourself noticing that someone with a mottled complexion makes you think of frozen mixed vegetables, or someone that stands stiffly brings to mind a carrot.  Perhaps a balding man reminds you of a peeled onion, or someone else with spiky hair makes you think of the root end of a green onion.  The point is, allowing yourself the extra space to think about random things like this might make you smile just a little more frequently, and we could all stand to do that.  My New Year’s resolution is to see more vegetable people this year.

I haven’t given it a lot of thought until this minute, but if I had to classify a few of the characters I’ve introduced you to here, I’d say this.  My partner most resembles a stalk of celery (she’ll probably want to smack me for this comparison, but I mean no harm).  Barefoot boss – he’s a fingerling potato.  Gopher-man, hmm, I’ll have to come back to him – a cabbage, maybe.  Long Back Guy, an unripened Fresno chili.  The Guatemalan, a pineapple.  Cat Power, a roma tomato. Grass-phobia girl, a crimini mushroom.  Me, I probably look sort of like an eggplant.  Happy New Year!

Gopher-man delivers

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So, last weekend, I had a huge software release pending and was waiting on gopher-man to get it ready to deploy.  Besides the fact that gopher-man works slowly, he is very pessimistic, and always acts as though there is no way he has enough time to do what he needs to do.  It’s a stressful job, but we all have stressful jobs in this industry, and he makes me want to just throw my hands up in the air and walk away.  The Thursday before the deployment, I stopped by to see how he was doing.

“Oh, it’s awful.  There are so many errors.  I’ve tried to run the build over and over and over and it’s taking forever,” he moaned.

I paused, took a deep breath.  “I’m sorry it’s such a pain.  That sounds frustrating.  Do you think you’ll be done by tomorrow?”

“Define done,” he says.

[Level of effort required to contain my frustration increasing steadily.]

“Um, done.  As in, finished.  Ready to hand off to China to deploy on Saturday.”

“Do we have a choice?”  His question is equal parts sarcasm and a misplaced glimmer of hope that I’ll tell him we might have a choice.

“No. We don’t.”

“What can I do then?  I have no choice.”

“Well, if you need some help, I’d rather know that now and see if I can’t find someone to assist instead of find out tomorrow that we can’t get this done.”

Defeated, he sulks, saying “There’s no one that can help.”

“Maybe [a senior guy who doesn’t normally do this, but can figure out just about anything] can help.  Let me see what I can do.” I try to reassure him, as I walk away biting my tongue.

I get gopher-man some help and let them work it out over the rest of that afternoon.  Friday, though, still no final product.  I do get a reassuring email from the person that normally do this work (excuse me – broken English almost slid past me) – does this work – and is away on family business to tell me that it is “all sorted, and we’ll be fine.”  He’s from New Zealand and a very reassuring type.  Sure enough, Saturday morning I wake up to the news that we’re ready to go.  Score one for gopher-man.

Not only does he finish, but that night, when I expect to work from 4pm til 8am the next morning monitoring the deployment happening in China, gopher-man’s work was so well done that we save hours, and I am actually done by 2:30 am instead.  Senior executives at the company and at our client say it is the least eventful and most on-time deployment they have ever had, even though it is also one of the largest, which is exactly as it should be.  Score one for the whole team.

Everything is riding on gopher-man

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And that’s got me really, really nervous…  I have a huge release going into production tonight – in fact, lucky me – I get to work from 5pm Saturday evening to 8am on Sunday.  That’s right – no sleep for me tonight.  The thing is, tonight only happens if gopher-man gets his work done.  Which was supposed to be done yesterday.  And I was supposed to hear from him last night.  And I am still waiting…

While I am waiting, I will share a few more office updates.  I have to admit that I think I found just the right name for gopher-man.  We have a development meeting every Wednesday, and every person involved with this particular client, who happens to be our biggest client, is required to be at this meeting.  Gopher-man is one of those people.  At the start of the meeting, he was not present.  So, barefoot boss asked someone sitting near the door of the conference room to go fetch gopher-man.

“K,” he said. “Will you please go get [gopher-man].  He is going to tell you he is too busy and cannot interrupt his work, but tell him he has to come anyway.”

K leaves the room, returns thirty seconds later, waits for the next break in conversation and says, “I told [gopher-man] to come, but he says he is too busy and can’t stop his work.”

Many of us sigh and roll our eyes.  The meeting continues.  Perhaps two minutes later, gopher-man appears.

“Ah, there you are,” says barefoot boss.

Again, the discussion continues and a few minutes later, a question is raised which gopher-man should answer.  Barefoot boss turns to look at gopher-man, who has disappeared into a hole.

“Where’s [gopherman]?  Darnit – he escaped again!”

So now I know I am not the only one that thinks gopher-man is sneaky and disappears into some invisible  hole none of the rest of us can see.

———————–

I wrote this post last Saturday, then forgot to publish it…  So, the unknown ending I began with is now known – but, you’ll have to wait to hear how it turned out…

Tales from the office

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I know you have all been dying to hear more about what’s going on with my co-workers.  You are probably especially interested in the small man that is cold all the time, so I will indulge you and share a few more tales.  Well, my impression of the little library mouse has changed.  I now see him as more of a little gopher.  I had to put some thought into that.  Well, I guess I didn’t put a ton of thought into it.  I admit I went to google to find the right term.  I googled “semi-intelligent ground digging animal” and “gopher” was the best match for how I see my freezing office-mate.  Gophers aren’t horrible, but they aren’t great, either.  Those of you that don’t work in software might not be aware of how demanding the industry is.  I’m sure plenty of other jobs have their demands, too, but when you write software for other people, it’s expected to be perfect all the time, and when it’s not, you have to do whatever it takes to make it perfect, day or night, no matter how much time it takes.  As the project manager of software projects, it is compounded somewhat by the fact that you have to do whatever it takes to get others to do whatever it takes – and my office gopher is very good at finding a little hole to dive into whenever it seems we might need him to do what it takes.

Last week, we needed some work done on a Sunday.  The guy that would normally do the work was not available because he had to leave Saturday to travel around the world to be with his ailing father.  Gopher-man wasn’t amenable to working on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, and as I thought about it, I decided that was reasonable, so I changed the deployment schedule for our system, which affected tons of other people, in order not to interrupt his Sunday.  On Wednesday, the three of us talked numerous times about this schedule and my decision to move our deployment to Monday.  This would give gopher-man all day Monday to do what we needed him to do in time for me to have the people in China finish the process.  On his way out of the office Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, he stopped by and said, “So, we’re on for Monday.” I said, “Yep.  Have a good weekend.  See you Monday.”  He took a few steps towards the exit, then dramatically remembered he had jury duty on Monday.  I wanted to shoot myself in the head.  I had to run into a meeting, though, and a few minutes into the meeting I saw him sneaking towards the exit.  Good thing we have glass walls to our conference room.  I almost tackled him on his way out.  In the end, though, I really could do nothing, so I let him leave.

When he first mentioned jury duty, I asked him if he knew he had to report on Monday.  He said, “Yes.  I’ve rescheduled it two times already.”  [Insert image of small balding man with large glasses that should come with a sign for his forehead that reads, ‘Objects behind glasses are smaller than they appear.’]   “They wooon’t let me oooout of-it.  It’s really upsetting because I-won’t-get paid, but they said I still had-to-go.”  [Splice in a rather whiny voice for a fifty-something guy that articulates his t’s as though they are ice-picks while also running words together randomly.]  It still seemed odd to me that he knew he had to actually report to jury duty that early.  Normally you call in the night before and listen for your group number, fingers crossed that your group doesn’t have to report.  After he was gone, I brainstormed with his boss about some other solutions to our resource problem, and we came up with only mediocre solutions that none of us thought would work well.  After I got home that night, it occurred to me that maybe gopher-guy didn’t realize he had to call in to check if he had to report for jury duty.  He is not of American origin, so perhaps he didn’t get how the system worked.  So, I called him.

When I got him on the phone, I explained to him that he might not actually have to go to jury duty on Monday.  He insisted over and over that he did.  I patiently asked him to get his jury summons and just look it over a little more closely.  He reluctantly agreed, then lightened up a bit, and I asked him to read it to me.  He mumbled in his accent that I can’t really place, and as he read, his diction became clearer, he read with more emotion, and by the time he got to the part that said, “Call in or check http://www.countycourt.com after 4:30 p.m. the night before your summons date to see if you have to report for duty,” you could even say he was passionate about what he was learning.  With utter surprise and gratitude in his voice, he said, “Oh, so maybe I don’t have to go after all!”

I should try to explain here how gopher-guy talks.  It’s difficult to characterize.  His accent is different than the typical accents I hear.  It’s not Indian, it’s not Asian, it’s not Hispanic – I really have no idea.  But, he cannot pronounce ‘in’ if it is part of a name or other word.  Someone named Dustin would be called Dus-teeeeen by gopher-man.  Heavy emphasis on the second syllable.  He speaks at a slow pace, not because he’s translating as he’s speaking – he speaks English quite well – he is just very deliberate about everything – nothing can make him rush, and he likes to talk a lot.  Sometimes it is all I can do to sit still long enough for him to get the point I knew he was trying to make five minutes earlier.  Anyway, back to the story.

Again, I began to explain this part of the American legal system – getting a jury summons doesn’t mean you actually have to do anything – and he just kept repeating that he had no idea, he’d never done this before, and it was good I made him read it or he would have just showed up on Monday.  At that point, I took a little leap of faith and said, “You know.  I bet the courts are closed for Thanksgiving and the day after.  And I bet that means that they’ve already posted which groups have to report on Monday.”

“Reeee-ally,” he said.  “Hmm….  I wonder if you’re right.” (Spoken with the wonder of a child realizing Santa is coming tonight)

“Why don’t you check,” I said. (Spoken patiently, matter-of-factly, only slightly encouragingly)

“Well, if you really want to wait, I guess I can check now.”

“Sure, I’ll wait.  It’s no problem at all.”

I waited for quite some time as he checked the website, read silently to himself, started reading bits of it aloud, mumbling.  “Just give me a minute….  I want to make sure I’m reading this right….”  More silence.  More mumbling.  More pausing and restarting.  “Group 116.  No, that’s not my group…  Oh, here.  Group 117!  No, that’s not my group, either…”  And so on, until, “There it is!  There’s my group number!  And I don’t have to go in on Monday!  Oh my God, I don’t believe it!  Wait, let me read it again to be sure.  Wow!  This is so wonderful!  I really don’t have to go!”

“Yes, it’s really great, isn’t it?  OK, well, I’ll see you Monday then.  Have a good weekend.”  With that, I finally got off the phone, failing to tell him he might just have to go Tuesday, and settled in to watch some TV and relax.

And that is the end of this gopher-man update.

The micro-climate of my office

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Not long after I started my new job, I wrote a post on a few other new guys that started soon after I did.  The techie-from-a-cave guy works from another city, so I haven’t seen him since that first week.  The small guy with strong glasses, though, works in my office and I see him every day – well, almost every day.  Sometimes it’s hard to find him because he moves around a lot.  It seems that every cubicle he’s tried has some climate issue associated with it. He gets cold very easily.  None of the rest of us has this problem.  It’s not to say we don’t notice the temperature fluctuations.  We do.  In fact, my office seems to be a tiny indoor representation of the Bay Area climate.  You need to dress in layers because it goes from warm to cool to too warm to a little too cool.  Layers don’t work for the small new guy with the strong, large glasses, though.  In addition to moving his location frequently, trying to find just the right cubicle that doesn’t come with a draft, he’s taken to climbing up onto desks and taping papers and manila folders over the air ducts in the ceiling near whichever cubicle he is trying out.  One day last week I realized he wasn’t in the office – not because I didn’t hear him or see him in a meeting, but because I never saw him climbing around taping things onto the ceiling.  I see him as a little library mouse gopher-man now.  He’s small, and he scurries around climbing on furniture, wearing his strong glasses that make his eyes look larger than they should.  One day I suggested he bring an extra sweatshirt or sweater to work to help when it gets a little chilly, and he continued past me, muttering under his breath that another shirt wouldn’t help because it’s his bald head that’s the problem – he loses all his heat from there.  I thought about suggesting a hat, but thought I might be crossing a line, so I just watched him wander away looking for the perfect place to sit.

New people

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So, at my new job, I’ve certainly met some interesting new characters people.  If I were the wuc, I could write amazing and hilarious things about my new coworkers.  In truth, I know I will never be so funny, but, here are a few anecdotes, anyway.

My new boss is a slightly quirky guy.  He sometimes digresses into a personal conversation with himself while he’s talking to someone else.  He does so mostly under his breath, and eventually says, “But, that’s neither here nor there.”  He also ends practically every conversation with, “Mmm Hmm,” even if there is absolutely nothing to affirm at the end of the discussion.  Last, he walks around barefoot a lot.  Well, not completely barefoot – he wears socks, but must not be so fond of shoes.

On Monday, two new tech guys started working with us.  I’m not positive what their titles are, but that’s besides the point.  One of them is clearly from the I-live-in-a-basement-or-some-other-such-tech-nerd-cave tribe.  In technical discussions, training sessions where he is being introduced to new things, even – he is eager to talk and talk, but if I picture him in a social setting, I imagine he says few words – at least without drawing puzzled stares from listeners.  He could stand to wash his hair.  He is a stocky guy, has a very round face with quite small glasses that don’t seem sufficiently big to cover his field of vision.

The other is a very small guy – short, petite, I’d almost say.  He has an accent I have yet to place, is less gregarious in meetings, but asks a lot of questions – probably a good thing when you’re trying to pick things up.  When the answers seem sort of obvious, he tends to try to make clear that is exactly what he assumed.  He, too, wears glasses, but his are really, really big glasses that seem almost as big as his small head, and they are strong.  When you look at him face on, they magnify his eyes in a buggish sort of way.

DISCLAIMER:  In the unlikely event that any of my coworkers ever discovers this blog, and then discovers that I write it, I share these descriptions with the utmost sense of professional affection and absolutely no intention of offending anyone.

Any characters you’d like to share?