As described in my last post, I occasionally try to find some moment at work in which I can interject some subtle humor or sarcasm to break up the monotony. In my case, these efforts typically fall flat on their face due to my material or my delivery or both. But that doesn’t deter me from trying. Obviously, you can’t force it or overdo it or you end up looking lame, so timing is pretty critical.
Earlier this year, I thought I had a perfect opening and attempted to capitalize.
Back in 2006, there was a viral video unleashed that I thought was hilarious. ”Leeroy Jenkins” highlighted a play-by-play account of an online multi-player game of World of Warcraft where one of the players, Leroy, goes off the grid and does his own freelance thing - much to the chagrin of his teammates, who are painstakingly planning an elaborate attack.
(The video is fairly short but the rest of this post won’t make sense without this context, so please view it.)
This video should be placed in a cultural vault. There are a ton of quotable moments in the video. I tried to seize upon one in a sprint planning meeting we had at work.
Over the last few years, we have started adopting the Agile Software Development Methodology at work. For older developers like me, Agile, in many respects, feels like just the same old shit packaged in a new shiny box. But one can’t point out that the Emperor Has No Clothes, so I gladly will talk the talk and use Agile terminology. Hey, when in Rome….
In this particular meeting, we were attempting to calculate our historical velocity over the past couple of sprints for the purpose of defining a more realistic plan for an upcoming sprint. So my colleague Ann Marie was rattling off the story points of all the features we had delivered and the set of developers that had worked on them. Ann Marie then asked, to no one in particular, “What kind of velocity is that?” I now had an opening and jumped all over it.
Me: “Ann Marie, I am coming up with 8.33, repeating of course, story points per developer per sprint.”
I was thinking that my new boss, who I was pretty sure was a gamer, would be my safety net for me on this. But as soon as I blurted that, it occurred to me that this was pretty ballsy. I had only been working closely with these folks for 4 or 5 months at this point. If nobody got it, I was basically confirming (in fact celebrating) my dork-ness to my new team. Mission accomplished.
Next time I will threaten to throw my Intimidating Shout if nobody laughs at my lameness.
