Todd Stadler's blog

Burantcracy (a tirade about work)

Ah, how many times at work today did I ponder shoving my computer keyboard through my monitor with glee and exclaiming "I quit!" to anyone I happened to pass on my way out of the building? Suffice it to say that I think things could be better.

It started with how they set up the campuses at work. Unlike the monolithic Microsoft Quarter in Redmond, WA, where all of their buildings are lumped together, Intel has seen fit to spread its campuses all over the suburban Portland metro area. You might think this nicely avoids the appearance of an engineering ghetto, but you also probably don't take public transportation to work.

See, when I first started my job out here, I worked at this one campus called Ronler Acres.

I should explain - all Intel campuses have ill-fitting agrarian names, apparently to remind us that the unremarkable soulless office buildings where we spend the bulk of our days occupy land once worked by farmers, who made honest livings without once assigning "ARs" (actions required) or uttering the phrase "operational excellence". But of course, the campuses are usually referred to by their two-letter abbreviation and building number. I refer here to RA2.

Anyhow, when I moved into RA2, my project had just moved there from JF3. I'm not sure why, but I assume it had something to do with where there was available space. A year or so later, the project moved back to JF, this time in JF4, which had just been built. Maybe because of space again, maybe to deal with the ever-changing corporate hierarchy.

A note on corporate hierarchy: to my knowledge, the umbrella groups my project has fallen under since I've worked at Intel include MD6, MPG, DPG, IAG, and maybe something called IACG. Not that it makes a whit of difference - all I get is some e-mail telling me to refer to the new acronym and that some überboss of mine is now reporting to someone different.

Anyhow, in spite of the fact that the new campus was fifteen minutes farther from my home (a 25% increase, for you statisticians) by train, I grew to like it. We soon had a nice new cafeteria where the food was actually decent, and there had apparently been great advances in corporate architectural psychology since my days at RA2, as the walls were brighter, and the conference room chairs more comfortable.

But that wouldn't inspire such an acerbic journal entry, of course, so naturally it was deemed that my project would move back to RA2. Well, sort of. Some people on the project worked in RA2. Some remained in JF4. Depending on whom I needed to talk to, I would go to one building or the other. And if I had to talk to people in both, well, I'd have to take the shuttle between the two. Clearly this was the result of some good efficiency planning.

So I had to set up my new office over at RA2 for the times I would be there. Unfortunately, owing to the economic situation of the day, or perhaps just more stellar planning, Intel scraped the bottom of the barrel to supply my cube. No dual processor Win2K machine for me. In fact, nothing running on an Intel processor at all, but a clunky IBM 3600. But at least it's ugly, and comes with a really crappy keyboard. And a monitor that struggled to outshine the overhead lights. And a mouse which I had to disassemble just to remove years of dust and gunk from, so it would, you know, move both horizontally and vertically.

Not content to simply make the computer annoy me, they gave me a desk set at a height for a much shorter person and told me ergonomic adjustments weren't allowed. I had to steal a whiteboard from a different office. And the phone in my office was completely dead.

I tried calling the "Action Line" on a phone in a neighboring cube to get a new phone. I was greeted with a phone menu that had been "recently reorganized for efficiency". Which meant I had only to press 1 "for problems with [my] phone or electrical system", then press 1 "to replace [my] phone or to order a new one", and then press 1 "to order a new one" in order to reach someone who thought she could help me. I explained the situation.

With any tool I could use to do work dead or annoying, I decided to go back to JF4, where things worked and at least the walls weren't so depressing. While there, I got a call from a technician who at first couldn't find my cube over in RA2. After I gave him directions, he called back to confirm, much to my surprise, that I had a dead phone in my other office. Huh.

He told me I needed to file an ESR. Unfortunately, he was new at his job, and so didn't know what an ESR was or how I could go about filing one. But he promised that his boss would send me an e-mail telling me how to do so. Why he couldn't file this ESR for me was not made clear.

I decided to try and get some actual work done, but there was a knock on my cube wall. "You're having problems with your phone?" asked a man I'd never seen before.

"Uh, at the other building, yes."

"Oh, okay, that makes sense now," he replied, some dilemma apparently resolved in his head. Now freed of that issue, he asked if there was anything he could help me with.

"Well, I apparently need to file an ESR."

"Good, then you already know about that!" he cheerfully replied.

I explained that I had no clue what it was. At that point, the promised e-mail showed up in my inbox, so I and this as-yet unintroduced man read it together. He looked at the URL listed therein and expressed concern that it might be incorrect.

So I'm moving to Montana to herd sheep or something.