I've worked with a lot of people over the years, some really good, some really, really bad, and a bunch somewhere in the middle. At one point Rvan had a list of all the people who had worked on and subsequently left the project and it was over one hundred when I lost track. Even given the name, I can't come up with a face for many of those people.
So you know someone must be pretty spectacular (in a negative fashion) to be really memorable. And it's really not a good sign if someone has a nickname.
(This doesn't apply to Rvan, of course, whom I knew as Rvan long before I was ever introduced to him and learned his real first name.)
- The name "40 Grit" was Jeff's creation, which is only fitting since Jeff had to work with him. You know how really fine sandpaper smooths a surface, but as the number of the paper goes down the surface stays rougher? Well forty grit is about the point where you're just irritating any smooth surface. That explains the name pretty well.
- "Eustace" was named after a character in a R.D. Wingfield book. In the book, "Useless Eustace" was a particularly inept bank robber. Our Eustace wasn't a bank robber as far as I know, but other than that he lived up to the name. For months when asked about the task he was working on he proclaimed that he would be done in "two weeks" while never showing signs of getting any closer. In fact, he was causing negative progress because at least once or twice a day he would lock up his window manager and have to get someone else to log into his machine and kill off the process. It's not like the cause of the problem was any big secret -- every time we had to stop and take care of his problem we suggested that he stop trying to set a breakpoint in the middle of a button click handler, but he never got the hint. Finally I got tired of dealing with him, so I came in over the weekend and wrote the project he was working on from scratch, so we were able to finally get rid of him. Now he lives on only as a test user in my database.
Anyhow, mean? Probably. Funny? Definitely at the time. Even now it makes me laugh, which is good since otherwise...
2 comments:
The funny thing is that '40 grit' would lock up his system once a week by putting a breakpoint in a gui callback.
Oh well,'40 grit' wasn't really in the same league as Eustace. I capitalized his name since he has entered into legend. The greeks had heroes and gods, we have, um, spectacular, albeit entertaining, failures.
I didn't even think it was possible to do that anymore. I guess for the truly spectacular, anything is possible.
Maybe we should change our interview questions to just one: How many times in the last year have you locked up your computer from within the debugger.
It would be a faster process that way, and possibly just as effective.
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