Friday, November 11, 2005

This Week's Quiz: Government or Mega-Corporation Job?

Each item below describes something I observed either while working for the Government or while working for an extremely large corporation. Answers will appear in a future posting.



  1. A guy I worked with fell asleep in his cubicle at least a couple of times a month. It eventually became a game for the rest of us to try to get pictures of him sleeping. Nobody tipped off management, because the game was kind of fun.

  2. A type-A engineer rumored to have a massive home porno collection often worked weekends and usually put in 10 hour days (at least).

  3. Software projects were tracked by a bloated monstrosity of VB crapware that some sheisty consulting company put together for about a billion dollars.

  4. The organizational structure had 23 levels. People in the middle 21 levels mainly forwarded emails coming from higher levels down, and did their best to prevent their underlings from communicating with people at higher levels.

  5. There were eerily smart people working there who knew how to change software in strange and wonderful ways by twiddling just the right bytes.

  6. We were provided beepers which people actually sometimes used to try to contact us.

  7. The language of the organization consisted mostly of Acronyms. Any one person knew what 10% of the acronyms meant, maybe, if they had been there for ten years.

  8. A guy wore a necklace he made out of paperclips. (The number of paperclips) = (The number of days 'till retirement)

  9. A guy volunteered for the daily task of 'getting supplies for people'. Getting supplies usually killed a whole morning, until a manager got wise and gave the job to a summer student flunky.

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