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Aspiration, Inc. Part Two

April 14, 2002

The Silent Majority

Despite the general lack of paid work going on at Aspiration, Inc., morale amongst the majority of employees was surprisingly high.

The company was being kept afloat through a gradually shrinking pile of Venture Capital, and occasional business consultancy. In fact, the business consultancy was the busiest arm of the company, its main purpose being to convince the floorful of programmers and technical architects that they were the archetypal fifth wheel.

When the odd bit of development work turned up, it was invariably a piece of unpaid work, the latest desperate attempt to woo a customer into granting the company a real live project.

As work began on such a project, the hushed conspiratorial murmurs on the development floor would swiftly descend into an almost totally silent aura of concentration, brows furrowing as underused brains sucked up every last drop of available "work".

One of the project managers, Jimmy, would sometimes march into the quiet development floor after a particularly long lunch, and (having noticed that everyone was deep in quiet concentration) insist loudly that "it's way too quiet in here!" He would then start jumping around, waving his arms, clapping loudly and shouting: "Come on everybody, let's make some noise! Yeah!"

Frustrated programmers glared hatefully at the bounding, leering figure, just wanting to be left alone with the little dignity that the company's latest pseudo-project afforded them.

The Network Manager

This lack of dignity was not helped by the machinations of the company's tight-fisted network manager, Phil Mc. (He was too tight-fisted to even have a surname).

Phil Mc. absolutely refused to spend money unless it was squeezed out of him. For example, he grudgingly allocated laptops to the people that needed them. However, perish the thought that the same people should also have monitors or proper keyboards.

The result was that travelling salesmen, managers, UML architects, programmers, graphics artists and web designers all sat hunched over their tiny laptop screens, tapping daintilly into the tiny, impractical keyboards. Despite all this, the staff involved seemed totally happy with their lot, and no-one (except John) sought to complain about this ridiculous state of affairs.

His own "angle" was that the company was aspiring to be world-class in its consultancy and Systems Integration field, yet it was asking its staff to achieve this somewhat ambitious task with keyhole displays, tiny keyboards and little laptop "nipples" that were supposed to be just as good as a mouse. Controlling the mouse pointer was like teasing a cat.

His arguments fell on deaf ears of course. The one concession was that he was given a real mouse, albeit grudgingly due to the "unnecessary expense". He was also promised a keyboard, but that never turned up. It seemed that such a luxury was just a step too far for poor Phil.

The IP Phones

Phil's tight-fistedness also extended as far as the office telephones. Having spent thousands of company pounds on the telephone system, he decided that this was just too much to bear. His solution was to spend more money on a less expensive setup: an IP phone system that could utilise the existing LAN. Unfortunate users could simply plug Madonna-style headsets into their PCs, upon which resource-heavy software would be running permanently to provide "telephone-like" services.

The response to Phil's IP Phone initiative was universally negative. Based on this feedback, he decided to go ahead with a company-wide rollout of the controversial, and highly experimental, system.

The programmers complained that they often needed to reboot their PCs; due to the nature of their work, they needed to have complete control over their PC environment, without sudden random interruptions taking over their system. It seemed that the IP phone's standard way of announcing an incoming call was to throw up a Windows blue screen of death and hang the entire machine.

Phil's response was simply "these are special cases, programmers can deal with these events on an as-and-when basis".

The best thing about the real phone system is that it simply works. IP phones are just adding unnecessary complexity, and are bound to not work more often than real phones. Plus, there's no added value: they're just phone emulators in software - a pale copy of the real, tangible, corporeal thing.

The Wireless LAN

In addition to Phil's idea of replacing the phone system with a LAN-based phone emulator, the company was also toying with the idea of ripping out the [already installed and hugely
expensive] LAN, and installing a wireless network in its place.

Then, so the theory goes, everyone can move their laptops and desktop PCs around the building really easily, plus everyone's brains can be steadily microwaved throughout the day, and all the company's confidential data - accounts, payroll, trade secrets etc - can become public domain, broadcast over the microwaves to anyone within range who cares to listen in (even from outside the building).

The analyst in charge of investigating the wireless LAN refuted these crazy notions by stiffly retorting: "Well, I don't think security is a big enough problem yet for it to be an issue. Anyway, we can get around the eavesdropping thing by turning the LAN into a Virtual Private Network." (In other words, all local network traffic would have to be encrypted. Better let that "view directory" command run during your lunch hour...)

Apart from the obvious ludicrousness of the analyst's "solution" to the security problem, it typified the general approach of Aspiration, Inc: start with a "cool idea" that anyone with half a brain can see is flawed, then investigate the idea, get emotionally attached to the idea, even when the obvious flaws are made known, and then pile layer upon layer of complexity to try and make the idea somehow feasible.

More Aspiration, Inc. stories coming soon...

In the meantime, these Rumour Mill stories are also based on John's experiences at Aspiration:

Happy Employees Firmly Believe That as Long as They're Busy Then It's All Okay

Analysts Change Their Mind About Document

Business Analysts Invent New Word

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