Holoom

Inanimate objects can be part of the office fauna too. Rocks are individuals so stoic that no amount of crap will alter their state of cool. They make for excellent storm pilots, something I am particularly weak at if you consider that my first action during a crisis is usually to hide under the desk curled up in a ball and wait for everything to fix itself.

Rocks are almost never charismatic leaders. They are almost never going to throw a hoedown or tell jokes, but they will get you safely to the end line of the project. You can usually find them in management positions and yet they have probably taken longer to get there than outspoken charismatic (and maybe less talented) individuals, because they are not as noticeable to their bosses as the latter.

I worked with rocks in the past and we usually complemented very well.

I remember one time, minutes before delivering a crucial sales demo via webex to a Fortune 500 company our network crashed. Some misconfiguration on sub-networks or something. 5 minutes before the demo was supposed to start, we had to cancel it, which was pretty embarrassing.

My reaction was to decapitate an innocent chair with a swift kick and to start cursing. My technical partner for the presentation happened to be a rock. He looked at my antics but never moved. Once I had finished he simply looked at me and stated: “We should check out what went wrong, and make sure we test for that before we re-schedule the call, then test prior to the call”.

Excellent approach to things. I had to deal with my nerves and then with the network issue. My buddy there just had the one problem of fixing the network in his head. So much more efficient.

If I had a wish, I would wish for a rock in every project.

Ok, maybe I would wish for a lot of money and girls, but my second wish would be for a rock in every project.

Shuje

On my next post I will explain how to decapitate chairs using the Chuck Norris roundhouse kick. Comments? Do your thing below or write to shuje@holoom.com

This entry was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2010 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Office Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.