I hope I don't have to talk to HR

Because, you know, all fortunes end "in bed."  Although Patheos suggests ending them with "in the biblical sense."  It's such a well-known trope that it's the first thing mentioned in the Snopes article on whether fortune cookies are Chinese in origin.  Which sort of implies you'd never expect to hear it uttered from a manager or project manager because it could misconstrued as sexual or potentially racist (along the lines of Chinese walls) but, you'd be wrong.

Snarky:  I want a fortune cookie ending to the project.
Title:  I hope I don't have to talk to HR.

Unique Minnesota CEO Miscommunication Issues

A week off of Snarky!  What gives?  I can't really blame MLK for last week.  I can blame annual reviews.  In the past our reviews have moved to a new format almost annually.  A recent incarnation allowed no more than about 200 or so words per "goal" area.  So if you used any metalanguage, you were done with a section in moments and the whole thing in under 30 minutes.  Unless you really ground it down iteratively to get the tightest bulleted list possible, and that was mostly busy work.  You were better off passing it along verbally.

This year was a first year on a system that had virtually unlimited space to write.  The end result was 15-30 minutes of reading feedback.  1.5-2 hours of review writing.  And 30-60 minutes of review plus process (clicking buttons and such).  So what took about 5 hours last year took about 12.5 hours this year, and day-to-day work didn't change, so it all ended up being sort of after hours.  Made for a rough week.  Particularly when the process part meant a different manager/coach had to run feedback and review reports and send me the PDFs because, while I could write someone's review, I couldn't print it or see feedback.  Brilliant.

I like this Snarky.  Maybe just because I get to use meatspace.

"The abbreviation "RL" stands for "real life" and "IRL" for "in real life." For example, one can speak of "meeting IRL" (LMIRL) someone whom one has met online. It may also be used to express an inability to use the Internet for a time due to "RL problems." Some Internet users use the idioms "face time", "meatspace" or "meat world", which contrast with the term "cyberspace".[3][4] "Meatspace" has appeared in the Financial Times[5] and in science fiction literature.[6] Some early uses of the term include a post to the Usenet newsgroup austin.public-net in 1993[7] and an article in the Seattle Times about John Perry Barlow in 1995.[8] The term entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2000.[9] The terms "meatspace" and "meat world" are apparently derived originally from the science fiction novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, published in 1984, which also coined the term "cyberspace." - Wikipedia

Snarky: What do you mean meatspace? Like where you hold a meat raffle?
Title: Unique Minnesota CEO Miscommunication Issues

Remind me again how many software projects you've overseen?

It's probably wrong to judge one's ability to do their job based on how they pronounce a particular word, but I'd like to believe there exists a line at which one's inability to 'talk-the-talk'  should be enough of a red flag to prevent its being crossed. Unfortunately, we tend not to even see the line until it's too late.


Title: Remind me again how many software projects you've overseen?
Snarky: How many is a "jiggabyte"?