All about the Pentiums (Confessions pt 2)

All about the Pentiums (Confessions pt 2)

*Warning the following post involves a lot of Dilbert comics*

As you all know I have a weird sense of humor. It’s largely the result of these two influences:

Marx Brothers

Abbott & Costello

I could get into why I love them so much and why I find them so entertaining but that is a post for another time. However, I will say that I got my appreciation for them from my Papa. With my particular personality type (INTJ) I have tendency to retreat into my own mind pretty quickly. I also have a tendency to entertain myself with other people. Hence the following stories from when I worked at megabank.

Interviews:

So while working at Mega Bank we were purchased by  Even Larger Bank. I appreciated the irony since it happened less than 2 months after our CEO made a big show of going to all the major sites specifically to stress the point that the company was not for sale.

With the merger, even though there was an almost 100% likely hood our department would be eliminated, we got to double the size of our department via temps.

My boss, not being technically oriented, choose me to scan the resumes, conduct phone interviews, & on-site interviews and eventually send the precious few to her for a final decision. I enjoyed this since it gave me a break from the phones and presented a new challenge. What questions do I want to ask during an interview? 

There were the obvious relevant technical questions to see if they really knew what they were talking about.  Then there were questions about stress management & previous work experience and then came the hogwash questions.These are random questions I would ask with a straight face mainly for my own amusement. By the time I got to this part in the interview I had already made my decision to pass that person on to my boss or not.

What is your greatest  weakness? I would ask this mainly to watch people squirm. After all how do you answer that question in a way that makes your weakness a good thing? 

Why are manhole covers round? I got a different answer to this question every time.

What kind of animal would you be? Best Answer: Koala. Reasoning: They are cute, cuddly, and they like to wrestle. Note that this answer came from my friend Cody. I hired him.

My favorite question:

Who would win in a fight a hurricane or Chicago Bears football coach Mike Ditka? Ditka What if it was Hurricane Ditka? Best Answer:  That would be WW3.

Over the experience of interviewing and recommending people to be hired was very beneficial to see what it was like on the other end. I ended up with more hits than misses and the first 3 people hired were with us until the very end of their contracts and did an excellent job throughout.

Fierce Gaze

One of the first three that I hired was my friend Cody. I hired him because I knew he would show up on time, work very hard, and do as he was told. Cody is very laid back and jovial, a tremendous asset to the overall mood of the department.

As the team lead every morning I went to a turnover meeting. No, this was not a meeting with delicious pastries, which would have been awesome. This was a meeting with all the other IT departments where blame was shifted around about whose fault yesterday’s disaster was. It was about as fun as you might think.The first couple of times I went to this meeting I was woefully naïve & unprepared. Everything ended up being my departments fault. Lesson learned. So I finally created a report that covered all the bases for my department with print outs and started appearing at the meetings with this. After the third department tried to blame us for something and was refuted with printed out evidence they stopped trying to blame stuff on the helpdesk. 

When Cody was hired I trained him. This meant he went with me to these meetings. Even Larger Bank employees were popping up all over the place by this time and they were never introduced. They typically scowled a lot and their appearance meant layoffs. Before the first meeting I told Cody that would not introduce him to anyone and that I needed him to look very serious and occasionally frown at people as they were talking.  When two departments would start bickering over stuff I would have him lean in and whisper something in my ear or write furiously on his legal pad that he had for this specific purpose.

I would give him an Emmy for his performance in those meetings. The terrified looks people would get when he frowned/whispered/scribbled were priceless. This went on for days until one of the network engineers figured it out. He kept the secret but shortly after that the rest of them realized he was just a temp and not the grim reaper of layoffs. It was hilarious, or at least I thought so. 

- Glen