Don't make me repeat myself.

I was at work last Wednesday and just outside the wall of cubes I sit in was the General Manager of our company. She was talking to a potential customer. We have 2 products that can be used together, one of which is the product I work on. She had just come out of the server room with this guy, who I didn't get a chance to see and she was telling him about the people who do use our product.

'I know you are looking to go a different route, but if you ever do consider it, it [our product] works well with [the other product]. Some of our clients are going for a custom solution, and some are going with another approach which doesn't do as much as [our product], but we think our approach, being configurable, is something that really gives the best of both, and that's something you might think about, if you were to consider getting this type of solution. I know you aren't thinking that now, but, if you get to a point where you do consider it.'

The guy she was talking to didn't say anything as she repeated herself at least three times.

I thought her delivery/pitch was pretty smooth overall, but it seemed rambling. This business of saying the same thing over and over again in the same conversation seems weird. The Director of IT does this a lot too. I don't know why they do this. Are they used to being ignored? Is there something the other person should say to convey the message, 'Yes. I understand. Please move on to something else or shut up.' ? I know the feeling though, where you are trying to convey something, but you aren't sure if you put it right, or if the other person is listening, or appreciates the importance of the matter as much as you want them too.

Still, if people aren't going to listen it doesn't matter how many times you say it. Where I work, it's common for people to be working at their computer when someone comes up to talk to them, and they won't turn around to look the person in the eye while the other guy tells them something. Kind of rude actually. I turn around myself.

Also, it really is hard to tell if people are listening and remembering anyway. What can you do, give them a quiz later?

Sometimes I think it's a miracle we communicate at all.

Nice night.

I went out for a walk/jog around 5 this afternoon. It was cool and the sun had just set. There is a park about half a mile away from where I live and circumnavigating it is about a mile so the whole shebang is roughly two miles. It was really relaxing. The whole route was empty, which it wouldnt' have been if it wasn't dark so early now and somebody was burning some firewood and it was quite the soothing scene.

Perks

For my companies 20th birthday, they bought all 1000 of us iPod shuffles a couple of weeks ago. Very nice. Then, we had a 'health fair' and there were free massages, flu shots, lectures on nutrition and a plethora of schwag such as pedometers and bags of trail mix. (I got a flu shot and some raisins and nuts and skipped the massage bit, not my thing.)

Perks are always nice. We still haven't gotten t-shirts, though I am wearing a company baseball hat right now.

One killed, 7 wounded in LoDo shooting

Guess there was a shooting in Lodo last Sunday morning, after the bars closed at 2. Sounds like a couple of groups of guys got into some drunken dissing match in a bar, one of the groups got kicked out then waited for the other group came out when the place closed. And one of the gang pulled out a gun and started shooting. Nice. Drunken people talking shit and one of them happens to have a gun. Wonder if he bought it for self defense? Actually, I wonder how it went down exactly? What exactly precipitated the shooting? Where there punches thrown prior to this?

Candidate.

The Director of IT came by our cube area last Friday and was talking to the one guy left on the other team. He had done a couple of interviews. One of them was with a guy who wanted 'more money than I'm making!' This guy had apparently got less than half the technical questions right. 'These were simple questions! I haven't been programming for years!' the Director said, then laughed loudly, shocked by the incompetence of the applicant.

He's a pretty loud guy in general. When he's talking I get the impression that he's anxious to make sure that everyone is agreeing with him. I'd guess the theme for this discussion was - Look at how much smarter I am than everyone else.

'I asked him how a bubble sort works and he couldn't answer it', he said, as if that was a particularly germane question. Even if it was, when the Director tried to explain it to us, he got it wrong, confusing it with quicksort.

He took time, as usual, to criticize the contracting company that did most of the early work on our project, even though doing our new 're-architecture' has been worse than what we replaced and which still isn't done.

The conversation consisted of the Director standing, declaiming, gesticulating in between the rows of cubes as a couple of the other developers listened and asked questions. At one point he said he'd send us a copy of the questions he uses for interviews. I'm sure that won't happen. I have heard this several times over the past couple of years and we've never got them.

I tried to look busy and kept my eyes on my computer screen. I didn't see the point of the conversation, don't believe what he says, and, you know, I doubt if my input would be heard anyway, so I try my best to ignore this stuff. I imagine if I questioned the relevance or correctness of anything, no matter how right I was, it'd just piss him off, and really, what do I care? I just don't like listening to the guy bloviate, but, all in all, he's not, by a long shot, the worst boss I ever had.