Geeky Bob

A friend of mine recently sent me the following video from Weird Al Yankovic, who is one of my favorite geek heroes.

As someone who has worked in the business world for the past few decades, I have to admit: the corporate-speak in that video is much pretty spot-on for some division-level meetings that I've attended.

That being said, Weird Al's song reminds me of my days in a cross-site technical support team that I helped create at Microsoft, which was supposed to be an amalgamation of two commonly-used technical support roles of beta engineers and escalation engineers. However, the role of that team quickly spiraled out of control into something that was totally unrecognizable from what I had proposed. Our team was renamed by a corporate president as "Delta Force," and despite the fact that everyone hated the name, we were stuck with it - because it came from a corporate president.

Getting back to the original point, I knew this team was screwed when Microsoft flew all of the team members to Redmond for a week when we were first starting out. The goals for the week were supposed to be creating the hierarchy and infrastructure that were required to organize and manage a large cross-site team, but we were bogged down for the first 1.5 days creating - seriously - our Mission Statement. It didn't matter how many times I pointed out that we could be using our time and Microsoft's resources considerably more efficiently if we tabled that discussion; I kept getting shot down by management, who continuously emphasized just how important a Mission Statement really is.

At some point during that week I marched into my new boss's office and told him (in no uncertain terms) that I wanted off that team as soon as possible. (Although he begged me to stay, and I did - for 1.5 years. And I hated almost every minute of it.)

With that in mind, the video from Weird Al was a fun [sic] reminder of that time.