Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Fligh high and stay away from Trouble

So we had a contractor on my current project, just one, and I forgot what a truly quirky bunch they can be. I was once a contractor myself, at two different firms, and at the later I "staff managed" about ten other consultants for several years, taking them to lunches, doing annual reviews, working with them on their career paths - so I have direct experience with a wide variety of them and all their foibles. This recent one was good at what he did, but his personal quirk was telling stories that didn't seem appropriate to a work setting, or even appropriate at an after work client-consultant setting over dinner and beer. For example, there was the story about how he hit a kid in the head with a log when he was younger, and the next day the kid stepped in front of a bus and died - he was unsure if the two were related, but who knew how the kid's attention span was doing after the log. Note that this story had been preceded simply with the words, "I once killed someone." And then there was the story about his friend who was having an affair with his own brother, but who decided that was immoral (not to mention illegal, although the reasoning was that it was a homosexual affair, not that it was his own brother), so he ran off and married his sister instead. It's certainly one of those stories where you don't feel inspired to reply, "That reminds me..." And today, in the readme.txt file for our project install instructions, I find this advice, "7. Fligh high and stay away from Trouble". I'm sure our install group will find a way to ensure that's the step that fails during deploy.

1 comment:

Steve Eck said...

Starting the story about the log with 'I once killed someone' cracks me up.

I worked with a contractor myself who liked to tell bizzare stories. The strangest things was that he was very soft-spoken, almost to the point of whispering. So when he would wander into a cube and launch into one of these stories it sort of seemed like he was telling you a secret. But then it would just be some random story likely unrelated to whatever he actually needed to talk to you about.