Lameness

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of exchanging emails with former coworkers - people who made it incredibly easy to find humor in every minute of the workday. We used to laugh all day long. Even our emails to clients were laced with humor.

Laughing at these emails made me realize how incredibly lame I am now. My emails at work are all businessey and no fun at all. Nobody needs all that dryness. It's chapping. What a drag.

But this is what we get to work with: I supplied a requirements outline to project manager in another group so she could give us the details of her project. It's a basic excel spreadsheet of questions, designed to make it easy for folks who have never documented requirements to simply fill in the blanks.

What I got back was a spreadsheet full of one word answers:
No
Yes
June 30
No
No
Robert
Yes
No

We're all very excited about this project. From the requirements alone, it sounds amazing. Can't wait to see it go live. Seems the person who filled it out, instead of putting the answers in the column labeled "Description," replaced all the questions with their answers.

Then there was the time a month after I started when HR sent me an urgent email telling me I needed to supply proof of citizenship ASAP because they didn't have copies of my driver's license and SS card in my file.

I called them and asked what happened to the photocopies that were made the day I started. "Oh, we don't know, but we're sure nothing's happened to them." Seems the woman who hosted our orientation on my first day abruptly left the company and they couldn't find any trace of the photocopies she made that day. Of our driver's licenses. And social security cards.

A few months ago we decided we should ask Facilities to install blinds in the window of our usability testing lab as it's very distracting during testing to have people walking by, gawking at our test subjects. Facilities told me that room had not been approved for blinds.

Apparently there is a Blinds Czar and this person did not deem this small room worthy. I asked how we could obtain a favorable decision from His Lordship, but before I could press the Send button on the email, a large black bookcase was delivered and set up in front of the window, almost blocking the view, but not quite. Why bother installing blinds when you can just block the window with a bookcase?

In an effort to obtain a good ergonomic set up, a coworker wanted to bring in his Aeron chair from his home office. He emailed Facilities for information and instead of supplying, say, a form to fill out to document this chair as his own, they told him not to bother. They ordered a brand new Aeron chair for him.

Another coworker enrolled in the 401k program and set up automatic deposits into the account. Except the money isn't in the 401k account, nor is it still in her paycheck. Much like the photocopies of our driver's licenses & SS cards, HR is sure everything is fine. They don't know where the money is, but they're sure everything is fine. Not to worry.

There's more - much more - but if I told you everything, you'd start to think I was making this up.