CrapScape

Three years was a long time to work at one company, especially a place like BodgeCo. Luckily John only stayed at CrapScape for ten months. He started his new position just too late for their Christmas party, but later heard that he had not missed very much: it had been a "non-contributary" affair (i.e. the employees were expected to pay for their own meals, drinks, transport, accomodation etc.), and less than ten of the company's forty employees had bothered to turn up at the chosen venue (a nearby pub). This very much set the tone for John's time at CrapScape. It was a company of very little.

John joined CrapScape as a senior programmer. His boss, Ginger, was a strange character. He seemed extremely closed to suggestions for improvements to the company's main product, "Dodoware". Dodoware was a surprisingly small product, its main function being to provide a bridge between one set of products and another set of products. It didn't really do anything itself that a good "import/export" routine in either set of products could not have provided. Therefore, its main sales drive was the ignorance of its users. They just did not realise that they were buying something which they already possessed.

With Dodoware's limited functionality, it seemed surprising to John that the product should sell many thousands of copies, especially with its limited market size. Eventually, the market had to reach saturation point: there could only be so many gullible bankers out there. Surely then, the company must be working hard to break new ground in new markets, or to add functionality to Dodoware and maybe even turn it into a real product. Alas, no. CrapScape was content merely to sit back and let the seemingly endless flow of cash roll in and wash all over them. The staff turnover in their support department was phenomenal, as the employees swiftly became bored with having to deal with the same old issues for the same non-product day in, day out. In fact, staff turnover for the near-year that John was there was exactly a hundred percent. Exactly the same number of people that had been hired actually left the company. Morale was lower than BodgeCo, simply because everyone at CrapScape was so mind-numbingly bored for so much of the time.

John's job consisted mainly of making tinkering little changes to the Dodoware inner workings. As some governing body or other made changes to their requirements, so the Dodoware "in" or "out" functions would need to change. Unfortunately - and especially amazing for such a small product - the 'C' code was virtually unmaintainable. The code had originally been written in Cobol, and had been converted to 'C' using an automatic code converter. The converter used was not a very good one, and the resultant source code was a spaghetti-like mish-mash of "goto" statements. As far as John could see, "goto" was the only control statement used throughout the entire product. In addition, every single statement was preceded by a mandatory comment which took up three lines. For example:

The main module in Dodoware consisted of a ten-thousand line program, mostly crammed into the same function.

For one particular amendment, John's strange boss Ginger insisted that John test the product using the "brute force" approach - i.e. test every possible permutation of everything (no matter that in reality this would take 2.23E+24 years, or therabouts, to complete). John attempted to produce the test scripts for this strange request, but soon realised the futility of this, and refused to continue. At this point Ginger mumbled something about having a better car than John's, and stomped out of the room. Later, John read a book about QA and software testing, and was horrified to realise that there are real, tried and tested methods of software testing which actually work. He was horrified because, a) three years at BodgeCo had possibly taught him nothing if he had only just learned this, and b) Dodoware, a product which deals with people's money, had evidently been produced without any such formal testing. Ginger had been with CrapScape from day one - therefore acceptance testing for Dodoware must have taken the form: "set out to test as much as we possibly can, realise this is impossible, give up, hope the software works, release it."




Ginger's Database

Ginger had written his own database engine, of which he was extremely proud. The trouble was, the database just wasn't very good. It didn't cut it: each table-file could only have one index attached. The index had to be string-based: numeric indexes were "allowed", but simply didn't work. There was no way of setting up relationships between tables: this was about as basic a database as it is possible to have. As for querying the table with SQL statements - forget it!

In itself, this was not really so bad: John had to congratulate Ginger for being technically able enough to write his own database engine. It was still crap though. And to top it all, Ginger was so, so proud of his database, and insisted that all programs must make use of it. When the company uncharacteristically began development on a new product (a Windows clone of Dodoware), Ginger made sure that the product made "full use" of his DOS-based database. To this end, John had to write a Windows API to connect Visual Basic function calls to the DOS engine. He did this massively under protest, and several times almost came to blows with Ginger as he presented an almost endless list of possible solutions which either did not involve Ginger's database, or which put a decent wrapper around the database so it could be queried using SQL. All to no avail, of course.




Clash of the Titans: Stinky Stan vs Foisty Fred

One important revelation which soon hit John was that every company has at least one Stinky Stan. CrapScape was no exception. Foisty Fred, like Stan, was a junior programmer. Fred's (lack of) hygeine, however, made Stan seem like a Glade air freshener. Fred used to (in fact probably still does) ride to work on a bycicle, and would arrive in the office dripping with perspiration. There were no showering facilities at the office, so he would grab the same old work shirt from its same old storage area - stuffed unceremoniously into his desk drawer from the day before - then he would disappear into the toilet for five minutes, and (apparently) "towel himself down" and get changed. Somehow he managed to render the toilets unusable for the rest of the morning: the stench was truly intolerable. John soon began to suspect that Foisty Fred never bathed, or even cleaned his teeth. The numerous bits of food and tobacco weed lodged between his blackened teeth were a testimony to his values of hygiene and cleanliness.

Tanya, an ex-employee of CrapScape, left the company in disgust after being positioned next to Fred for over six months. Following a series of extremely non-subtle hints, she became desperate and surrounded his desk with air fresheners. She also bought some dental floss, toothpaste and a toothbrush which she gift-wrapped and placed on his desk ready for his stinky arrival that morning. It was his birthday, after all. Somehow, she had to make him understand the overwhelming power of his magical aura.

Her last desperate attempt barely made a dent in Fred's fudge-like armour. He apparently took his shirt home to be washed that evening - but predictably enough, he soon returned to his wicked ways. Tanya complained regularly to management, but was made to feel like a troublemaker for her pains. So, when she realised that she was trapped in a nightmare world of foisty armpits and weak managers, she went to work for a less backbone-challenged company - and CrapScape lost yet another valuable employee.

When John came to CrapScape, about three months later, Fred had apparently cleaned up his act somewhat. He found this difficult to believe, however, as Fred's smell was still overwhelming. Fred regularly talked about how he could "hold his own with squaddies". Innuendos aside, John soon understood what had driven Tanya to leave. He was only glad that his desk was on the opposite side of the room to Foisty Fred's.


Fred's Pay Review

Interestingly, Ginger handled Fred's pay review by taking Fred into the conference room and saying, "Sorry Fred, your code is always full of bugs so you're not going to get a pay rise." (He was only earning £12K anyway). Fred responded by storming out of the conference room, throwing a fantasy book across the room (for some reason he had carried a Stephen Donaldson fantasy book into his pay review), shouting "Bastard!" at the top of his voice, and storming out of the office. He returned an hour later, somewhat meekly, to grab his cycling gear, then paused to get changed in the toilet, and stomped out again. He returned the next morning as if nothing had happened.

He later confided to John: "Well, I suppose Ginger does have a point. I'm a crap programmer. I don't really feel worth more than twelve thousand."

"Why don't you leave?" asked John, perhaps not altogether selflessly. "You shouldn't let CrapScape mess you around. Remember that Ginger did promise that you were going to get a pay rise. He just tells you what you want to hear, until it's time to deliver, then the truth comes out."

"Well, perhaps," Fred replied. "But I feel safe here. The people here seem to like me."



The Web Page

John made friends with CrapScape's marketing manager, Folly. Folly was convinced that the company needed a web page, if she could only convince the company's fragile managing director, Terence Fromage-Perkins. Terence would not hear of it, however. Folly suspected that this was because it had not been his idea. She was deeply frustrated, as she had a very clear picture of how an on-line presence could benefit the company.

After discussing with Folly what the web site should contain, John put together a "proof-of-usefulness" example site in his spare time (he did not have a girlfriend at the time). He was keen to learn more about web publishing for himself, so this seemed like a fairly harmless way to do it. Once the site had been given the "o.k.", he could then write the proper, fully functioning site in company time as a bona fide project.

When the prototype site was complete, Folly went to Terence to arrange a meeting so she and John could present the web site and demonstrate what it could do for the company. Terence's response was to lose his temper and scream at her about how this was his company, he was the one who made the decisions. Folly rose to his anger, and the resultant near-physical argument could be heard throughout the office. Employees cowered behind their desks while World War Three raged inside Terence's plush, leather-clad office.

The furious argument culminated in the swift departure of Folly. Terence sent a company-wide e-mail announcing that on no account was anyone to allow Folly back into the building.

Oops, thought John. Oh, well: at least he had learned about CGI programming. It was round about this time that he started looking for another job.

He later spoke to Folly, and discovered that she had very quickly found a job as the marketing manager for a multi-national company, on almost twice the salary.



The E-Mails

During his time at CrapScape, John kept in contact with Malcolm (the thankfully experienced software developer from BodgeCo) via e-mail. These e-mails capture the spirit of CrapScape quite well - so here they are, in all their (highly edited) gory detail...

>>>The CrapScape E-Mails
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