The Bathtime Manager (part 3 of 4)
Part 3: Fisherman's Careless Arm Drags His Self Down
Chapter 9
Fisherman enters the boardroom first. He searches his email a bit for the phone number of the other team, finding nothing. When White and Bobbyballs come in, White immediately says hello to the other team, and again scolds Fisherman for failing to phone them in. “What’s their number?” asks Fisherman, but White ignores him while he dials, checking each number on his phone before pressing it on the speakerphonething.
“Hello? We’ve been waiting,” says someone on the speakerphone.
“Who’s that?” says Bobbyballs with a half smile. “Is that Stephen?”
“Howdy”
“Stephen!” says Bobbyballs and White. “How’s it today?” says White.
“Oh, not bad. There’s an issue with the braidacathconvertor the whole team has been sidetracked with. Fun stuff.”
“Oh boy, I bet. So, who’s up? Fishermin?”
“Hi, sure. So, you folks saw my email?”
“It was missing its attachment,” says Bobbyballs.
“Oh, I attached it after you replied.”
“Ah, good. No, I haven’t had a chance to look yet.” White agrees, “Yeah, I noticed it was missing its attachment and I wanted to wait and read it when the attachment was available.”
“Ah, well, I sent it. Anyone on your end Stephen?”
“Who’s this? I didn’t notice an email. I get lots. Did anyone see an email?” There’s a negative-sounding murmuring from the speakerphonething. “Oh? Oh jeez. Uh, sorry, who’s this? Someone mentioned they looked at the attachment and you had made all kinds of changes to the consterplexion spreadsheet— is that true?”
“Uh, yeah, it’s me, Glen Fisherman. Yes, I made some changes to help express the issues, just to help us come together around potential solutions, especially before we bother devs with it.”
“You really shouldn’t make changes to the spreadsheet— we put a lot of work into it. Do you think you could revert those changes so we can see what you mean?”
“I have a backup of the original sheet, but it’ll be a challenge using its old format to express the new ideas.”
“Well, that’s why they pay you the big bucks, right? Can we move on?”
“Yes,” says White, “Let’s move on; we’ll come back to this when you have something useful to show us. Better yet, just forward your revisions directly to Glen and he can decide whether the devs even need to see it. Stephen, why don’t you continue.”
As Stephen gives a lengthy description of the braidacathconvertor in order to say that the team is working on it, Fisherman ices his mind’s simmering awareness with soothing bathtime thoughts. It may be that his initial email had too much information in it, which probably led people to avoid reading; he should have given more of an executive summary; management of knowledge work these days has moved beyond the difficult scope of reading; managers need pictures and charts; he should have taken a screenshot of the chart. He should have remembered the attachment initially; when he did send it, he should have waited an appropriate period so that nobody would have ended up confused by the sudden flurry of email dings. With so many distractions in the modern workplace, it’s unrealistic to expect people to put much attention on their inboxes. He might have made a video presentation of his findings, however video is possibly even more difficult to consume, because you cannot casually scan across a video. Yes, the visualization itself, directly in the email with a short caption, would have been best. Though, the information’s nuances could never have been communicated that way.
Later, once Fisherman gets back to his desk, he resurrects the original consterplexion spreadsheet and adds a new sheet to the end of it where he recreates the carnation diagram. He takes a screenshot and sends a simple email to the team:
To: team@bathtime.one
From: glen.fisherman@bathtime.one
Subject: re: consterplexion issues
Team, as promised, here’s the reverted consterplexion sheet. Please see, below, the diagram, which you can also find on the last sheet of const-ssys-sheets, which includes the data I was trying to describe. For more information, please see the sheet I added. Looking forward to hearing what you think Glen!
He sends the email and relaxes into his chair. He opens his lunch bag and pulls out a sandwich and a cola. He feels grumpy, so he finds a comic series he likes on his laptop and begins to eat and read.
Not halfway through the sandwich, he gets a ding from his email:
To: team@bathtime.one
From: bill.wihte@bathtime.one
Subject: re: re: consterplexion issues
I thought we agreed not to change the spreadsheet?
And then another ding:
To: team@bathtime.one
From: glen.bobbyballs@bathtime.one
Subject: re: re: re: consterplexion issues
No attachment.
And then another ding:
To: team@bathtime.one
From: stephen@bathtime.one
Subject: re: re: re: re: consterplexion issues
The attachment is there (this time). Glen, please adjust this chart to a normal donut chart so we can read it properly. I think you’ll find that a traditional chart more clearly expresses your ideas, which I’m not following. Do you have any additional information about this chart anywhere? I could show you how to make a good donut chart. Also, please avoid changing the consterplexion spreadsheet; I thought we had covered that. Try to remember to give a little description and background so the team can grasp what you’re going for.
And then his phone rings; it’s White. Frustration and insecurity still lodged somewhere in the amygdala, he answers. “Hello?”
“Fishermin, it’s Bob with Glen here.” Bobbyballs adds, “Hey Fishman.” White continues, “Listen, I need to talk to you about the, uh, the,” aside, “what is it,” then Bobbyballs adds, “that spreadsheet,” and White continues, “right, the spreadsheet emails you’ve been sending for the last several days. Listen, I know you’ve just been bumped up to, uh,” Bobbyballs again, “Manager,” then back to White, “right, manager. So, keep in mind that the team has their own things to work on, and we don’t want them to feel overly pressured with competing agendas. I’ve received feedback that you adjusted the spreadsheet, and now they’re sidetracked having to learn a new spreadsheet, and it’s messing up all their schedules. Would you mind, um— could you put the sheet back the way it was so they can carry on with their work? Their schedules are getting delayed by the new formatting you’ve applied, not to mention they’re having a hard time replying to all your emails.”
Fisherman tries to consider what White (and Bobbyballs) has told him, but his mind interjects that none of it rings particularly true. The few replies he’s received have been oblivious of any content he’s sent out. Plus, he’s been under the impression the team doesn’t necessarily use or read the spreadsheet, but merely sends it around as a reference, more as a deterrence to working on the company’s deep consterplexion issues. He wants to argue these points, but he’s worked with White long enough to know he faces a tough opponent, one skilled in leveraging the myriad problems of an employee network that communicates only upward, and never around and between each other.
Fisherman considers his options. He could go back to the start, that impossible slide deck about the multiplexicator bandwidth, that set him onto this task in the first place, and try a more nuanced approach. The slides presented a whole world of complexity, but he knows the work that needs to be done must at least have a starting point, and if he can find it then the team will be able to make a slight improvement. But, then again, as he had anticipated, there’s no appetite for any work touching on consterplexion issues, which is what led him toward breaking down the issues, to help the team understand the reality more directly. As it stands, they only manage to think of it all as one big blob of stressful problems.
The team’s appetite for problem solving seems to have fallen so low that they throw their hands up immediately at any quiet thought in the neighbourhood of consterplexion. It’s real trouble, because working on problems that are only symptoms of consterplexion issues won’t solve anything; such an approach will only move the problem further and further from the multiplexicator, which is precisely why they’re in the predicament they’re in today.
Maybe there’s a way he could back the team into it. Starting with the far away problems, he could push the team backwards, closer and closer to the multiplexicator, so that soon enough there’ll be nowhere to go but consterplexion. He could perhaps fashion the work plan in such a way that they don’t even realize they’re working on consterplexion.
It’s so complicated, this soup of individuals, all of them fearfully working against each other, working in little sheds walled with terminology and recommendations. They live in a fantasy world. The team’s bandwidth is precisely like the multiplexicator’s bandwidth, strangled by an entrenched network of tangled cultural problems, grown into a tight weave, like consterplexion. The various teams and squads in the company grow into sheaths around a rotten nectary, central, which is White. The individuals form a flower’s whorl around him. Fisherman visualizes it, and sees just how perfectly the carnation chart perfectly illustrates the company’s style of work and communication, with the unseen force of culture benevolently and misguidedly growing a pattern by which they all perform duties, stealthily designing their technical systems to express the culture, and then the culture amplifying those designs into a boundless weave, a closed knot with no tails or fringes.
It’s all too challenging; Fisherman could try to pick at the issues, but he’d be risking his job security, which, in this market, is tantamount to risking his life, and for what? He ought to just fall into the slot his cog was designed to fit in and try to be happy there.
“Uh, Fishermin?” prompts White.
“Sorry, right, I see what you’re saying. What do you think I should do? Or, Glen, you’re my manager; how would you like me to proceed?”
With surprise, Bobbyballs says, “Erm, proceed? Well, hmmm. I’ll need to check with the devs, or . . . Well, what do you think Bill?“
“Fishermin, this is your role. We need you to be on top of your duties. We didn’t semi-promote you so that we’d have to manage all your interactions for you. You’re a manager now, so manage.”
“Ok, ok, I see what you’re saying. So, what’s currently on my plate is this topic of consterplexion. I’m running into some difficulty because the team is too scared to read or look at anything to do with the matter. Has anyone already been working on it?”
“Who told you to work on consterplexion?”
“Well, on my first day, Glen sent me the consterplexion slides and asked me to chair a meeting about it, to figure out what to do next.”
“Ah, ok, I see the problem. You’re trying to find out what to do next, but what we really need is for you to decide what to do next, like a manager. We need you to take care of our team, to shield them from extra work— not only the devs, but all of us. Analyze and recommend. Don’t rush it. Get up to speed. If you need to, chat with Stephen; run some ideas his way to see if you’re on the right track. Eventually the team will come around to what you’re doing, when they’re available. In the meantime, they’ll be quite busy working on the problem of multiplexicator bandwidth.”
“I see. You know, the multiplexicator bandwidth issues are caused by our consterplexion issues, so they’re technically already working on consterplexion, just in a roundabout way that will only move the problems around to other teams. If we get the teams more focussed on consterplexion, they can finish with it and get back to doing what we all love, making high-end bathtubs for managers.”
“But, Fishermin, that doesn’t make sense. You want to totally disrupt what they’re doing, because you think it will finish their work for them? The issues are the issues; there’s no root cause for these things. It’s a complex system, all teams have assured me that no one solution exists. We took a scramble approach a few years ago, and we need to see it through, or else, the devs say, we’ll need to simply throw our hands in the air and rebuild all systems. I don’t want to have to bring that to upper management unless there’s no other option.”
Fisherman, who’d felt the promising sense of progress while digging into the sour pit of consterplexion, realizes he’s lost in an onion of unknown layer count; as he edges further inward, his anxiety places him still hovering at the outer layer. The onion keeps growing, pushing more layers from its centre, growing larger, more unwieldy. He imagines upper management at some inner layer, with further inner layers built of higher-up management groups tightened around a rotten pit where — who knows — maybe it’s a lone enigmatic player from some far-off country who merely collects companies for puzzling, who himself has no goal but to go on casually avoiding the alarm of shareholders with vague reassurances. The shareholders only consider the price trends and the number of shares they have. Fisherman feels lost, still in a layer very near the surface, a surface that has grown to wrap the Earth like crisp ice across all oceans, all details now abstracted away, abstractions of abstractions long-divorced from humanity’s reality, a core no longer even a part of the onion species.
A tear wells up in Fisherman’s eye, and his nose drops to his desk. Gasping, he snaps it up in his free hand, and the momentum of the grabbing motion sends his whole arm flying across his desk. He gasps again.
“Fishman, are you ok?”
“Uhrm, yish shir. Schmir. Ham on a hjekond.” He places the phone on his desk so he can mute it, but his now-detached ear blocks the touchscreen. Both his eyes fall to the desk, so that his vision splits and rolls around the table dizzyingly. He falls off his chair, his penis detaching and wobbling slowly down his pant leg. He hits the floor and his body falls into a million pieces.
Chapter 10
Fisherman awakens. “Bwaah! Brrrrrrrrrr!” He flails a bit to raise above the water’s surface, retching water from his lungs and sinuses. He’s terrified and freezing cold lying in bathtime. He has no clue for how long he’s been laying there, but, he guesses, it musta been a while given the ice-cold water.
My body! he thinks. He looks all over himself, frantic. Hmm. Seems intact.
“Everything ok in there?” shouts Lila from the living room.
“Huh? Oh! Uuuh . . . yup— erm, yes.”
“ . . . You sure?”
Fisherman looks around the room. The laptop shelf is half stowed and his laptop sits, 25 degrees opened, carelessly on the bathroom floor with drips of water all over it. “Yep!”
He unplugs the tub for thirty seconds, re-plugs it, blasts the hot faucet for ten seconds, closes it, opens the laptop shelf, grabs his laptop from the floor, places it on its shelf, and adjusts his lumbar support, settling with a deep breath before putting his passcode.
Rather than blinking to life with his web browser as always, the laptop shows a little spinner, then a slow-filling progress bar. Fisherman waits. When the progress bar finishes, a blank desktop opens and flickers a few system windows of scrolling monospace text. Finally a little alert pops up, saying, “Your computer encountered error: 4.” His options are “Ok” and “Cancel.”
“Hmmm.” He presses “ok.” The screen goes blank. He taps at a few keys. He taps the trackpad. Nothing. He presses the power button. Nothing. He holds the power button. Still nothing. He closes the screen and puts the laptop back on the floor, then reaches for his pants and grabs his phone from the pocket.
His phone is working fine. There’s a new email from Bobbyballs.
To: glen.fisherman@bathtime.one
From: glen.bobbyballs@bathtime.one
Subject: (no subject)
Hey Glen,
Bit of a tough first week for you as Lead Manager, I’d say. You seem like you’re scrambling to find yourself, and I’d say it’s really not working for anyone around you.
Listen, I think you oughta try a little exercise. The next time you’re going to shower, take a bath instead. But before you hop in (don’t forget to test the water, haha) grab a little boat; you can find them at the supermarket in the babies aisle, or just let me know and I can bring one for you tmrw. Grab some poker chips too.
Now, when you’re in the bath, play around putting your chips into the boat. Try to put all of them in the boat at one time, and see how it rocks that sucker, maybe even sinks it! Try just putting one or two chips in there; works better. Try dropping the chips from very high up, and see how it rocks the boat; maybe it even knocks some of those chips back into the water.
The thing is, when you’re a manager like you, one of these guys always thinking up crazy ideas and whatever, you gotta put a little attention into how rocky you make the boat. We managers need to spend pretty much all our effort settling the waters. The worker people in the boat need to feel secure. There are even workers under the boat, swimming all around in the sea trying to gather clams and tie strings, or idunno what they’re all trying to do down there. The point is, if we throw chips at them, they’re going to fire back.
Let’s you give it another shot tmrw with fewer chips and more careful placement.
Gnight!
Glen
Reading the message, Fisherman’s face goes from annoyed, to incredulous, to enraged. He throws his phone, splashes his arms at his sides, and kicks his feet.
“Everything ok in there?” shouts Lila from the living room over the TV speakers.
“It’s FINE,” says Glen. He grabs his rubber ducky and floats it on the surface of the water. “Hey there Ducky! Are you just treading water there? Just needlessly sitting on the surface of the water? How’s that going for you? Hungry? What’s that? You don’t feel hunger? You don’t feel anything? Oh, you’re just floating? For no reason? Wow!” Glen throws his poker chips at Ducky, first a deftly aimed shot straight at poor Ducky’s eye, then a couple more, more carelessly hucked, and then a whole handful hammered down from directly above.
“Ducky! Are you still floating? Are you oblivious?” He grabs his shark and lurks it up under Ducky, then hammers it against Ducky’s belly, knocking Ducky way out of the bath. “Ooooh noooooo! Ducky! You’re dead!” He pulls the plug and stands, grabbing a towel from the door. He dries himself angrily.
“Ah, fuck,” he says, noticing his penis has fallen away somewhere. “Christ, where did it go?” He looks under his feet, in the tub, behind the door. “Come on.” He checks the crevice between the laptop screen and keyboard. He looks all around.
“Ah,” he says, finding it just behind the toilet on the floor, and places it back on his crotch. He gets himself dressed.