Lost Opportunity

You may have heard about an unfortunate situation that fell upon Chad Ochosinco recently. The controversial Bengals’ receiver and reality TV star has a new cereal out - Ochosinco’s – Honey Nut Toasted Oats in an O-shape. Now I am not a big Ocho fan, but the proceeds from his cereal are funneled toward a really good cause - Feed The Children.

Unfortunately, on the cereal box, there is a misprint of the Feed The Children telephone number. Rather than directing consumers to the number where they can find out more information about the charity, the number is actually associated with a phone sex service. Talk about awkward.

(I have to admit that when I first heard this story, I briefly considered that maybe this was done intentionally. After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity for attention whores like Chad or TO. But even someone as jaded as me is going to give Chad the benefit of the doubt on this one.)

Ochosinco’s misfortune reminded me of a lighter episode that occurred at one of our defect meetings held at work in the spring of 2007.

A little background on the defect meeting. The defect backlog is the set of issues and bugs in the software that have yet to be fixed. The backlog ebbs and flows. Generally, the level of attention paid to the defect backlog varies based on the where the team is at in the software life cycle. More attention is paid as you get closer to product shipment. But, for a variety of reasons I don’t want to get into, our team seemed to be under a bit more scrutiny than our peer teams. So we were instructed to institute these weekly meetings fairly early in the release cycle. Hence the defect meetings where all the developers would meet to “go through the defects”.

The best thing about this meeting was that no managers attended – just developers and testers – so one could be as sarcastic or cynical about the project as one desired around one’s peers with no repercussions. The meeting flow was mind-numbingly consistent. We would go through a list of all the defects, ensuring that proper attention was being given to each based on its importance. Defects need to have owners (the person responsible for fixing) and target dates (the date by which the developer needs to provide the fix). Special attention was given to high-severity defects or test block defects which block major test scenarios.

While there was some technical discussion about how the defects might be fixed, this basically is just a weekly workload balancing exercise to make sure the defects are distributed across the engineers. Not the most exciting meeting. Though most of the defects get assigned to a team member based on their area of expertise, you really didn’t want to miss the defect meeting. Otherwise, you might get stuck owning some gnarly bugs that would be a pain to fix. So it was a good idea to be present at this meeting, if for no other reason, then to defend your turf, so to speak.

There is usually a 3-5 minute period before any meeting at work actually gets rolling. During this time:

• Everybody gets settled in and gets laptop power hooked up and wireless going. Sometimes the folks that are occupying the conference room before your meeting are late finishing up.
• The meeting owner usually hooks up their laptop to the projector in the conference room, even though 75% of the meeting participants will bring their laptops to the meeting.
• The meeting owner will set up a NetMeeting or Lotus Live Conference so the remote participants (our colleagues in Austin as well as those WFH that day) can join our fun and can “see the screen”
• The meeting owner will also have to dial into and activate the conference call number for the audio portion of the exciting session.

Our conference call numbers generally start with 800, 866, or 888. On this particular day, all of us were settling in and waiting for the meeting owner, Jennell, to dial into the conference call number. Jennell must have finger checked the number, because the first voice we heard on the other end of the speaker phone was unmistakably the sultry cadence of a female that was clearly employed by some sort of, how should I put this, Adult Entertainment Single’s Service. It most certainly wasn’t the intended conference call-in number.

You don’t hear that everyday at the Mother Ship.

The other eight or so of us engineers around the table were giggling while an embarrassed Jennell scrambled to kill that call and redial into the correct number. For a dork, I am fairly quick-witted and at that precise moment, I strongly considered and came really close to blurting out something totally juvenile and unprofessional such as:

Hi, My name is Joe. I am a 45 year old Java Programmer from Hillsborough, NC. If you are looking for some good code….and a good time, give me a call.

That is gold, isn’t it? Why didn’t I pull the trigger on that? Well, if I have learned nothing else in 26 years in this company, it is to 1) Never send an emotional email without sleeping on it and to 2) Never say anything even remotely controversial unless you really know your audience.

In this case, while I was really comfortable that the rest of my team would enjoy my cutup, we had a young engineer, Heather, that had just joined our team 3 or 4 months ago. I hadn’t really worked closely with her, but from the little interaction that I did have, she appeared to me to be wound really tight.

She also didn’t suffer fools gladly. When she was wasn’t happy about something, Heather had this look that she would inflict on you that was part “That was the stupidest thing I have ever heard anyone utter in my life!” and part “How did Human Resources not weed a loser like you out of the IBM gene pool?”. I termed this look The Ray after the stare that legendary Big Band Leader Benny Goodman would lay on his musicians if they screwed up.

It turned out that Heather ended up being totally cool and easy to work with, was bright as hell, and an incredibly hard worker. We worked together over the next 3 years before she left IBM and moved on to a different career.

But at that point, the last thing I was looking for was a self-inflicted dose of The Ray. As they say, discretion is the better part of valor in today’s politically correct corporate environment.