Brown Nosers

Been a while since I last complained

Ok, so for this one, I am not going to mention any time frame, people will easily figure out who I am talking about otherwise. The kind of "attention" that I really don't need.

I think it’s a good enough "hint" if I tell you this is when I am a QA team leader, which is probably a good chunk of my career.

So at THAT time, there are four other parallel teams that work with me. So, as most logical human would've guessed, yes, there were four other team leaders on the team. We each handle different products, and USUALLY there aren't any conflicts with the work we do. I said "USUALLY" because there is still a very rare, but possible chance that our work MAY collide with each other, but even that is something I would consider as "Niche".

One of the team leader (lets just call him Andrew) always think that he is a senior lead, of course he is, I mean, we have 5 leads, the one that have been with the organization the longest have about 6 months, I have about 3 months, and he is more senior than the other 2 lead by a week and a half. So yeah, he is senior alright... at least, he thinks he is.

He is the reason why I believe that if you lookup words like "Low Self Esteem" or "Male Ego" online, you will see a picture of him. To him, he is handling the biggest project of all and he is always the most important person at work. The fun part is that he lives his own delusion. How did we know this? Andrew is not someone that is shy to be vocal over these things. He TELLS us how busy he is. His favorite line is always "Yea, my project manager doesn't do anything; I have to do everything for them". I wonder if his PM knows that he said that. He does also look very very busy absolutely all the time. He stay late, usually as late as the boss, but then, that’s something that I would expect, since he is always just walking around, I could only imagine how productive he could be while he was away from his desk 6/7 hours he stayed here. Oh, and that hour he was at his desk.. LUNCH... He is really good at putting the other leads (including me) down to make him sound important. Things like "Your project is not half as busy as mine" or "That’s easy, I do that all the time" are not foreign around him.

Anyways, so Andrew is actually an artist in deception. If he was born in feudal Japan, he would've replaced Hattori Hanzo to honor the title of "Top Ninja". He is just THAT good. I mean, he made it just so the whole world does THINK that he is that busy, and he does work that hard. Darn, maybe I do need a lesson or two from him.

About seven years ago, I read a book from decently famous motivational speaker, interestingly he talk about the art to deceive your boss. One of the item that was mention was "Messy desk mean you are busy", "Personal items mean you have great moral". I am almost positive that Andrew must have read this book. You won't see any desk on his desk.. It’s all covered with paper and junk. His cabinet is full of personal items, items that make people think "Wow this guy is really prepared to camp here tonight", not only that, his cabinet got this aura of a horrid stick from old grocery bags and probably lunch from centuries ago.

All that didn't really trigger us off or anything. Until one day, he ran out of ways to show his dedication, or he ran out of things to put down people, he decide to run to the boss and sell us out. Two of my other colleagues/friend, Jessica and Geoff (again, aliases only) are extremely quiet, they are the non competitive type of anything. Jessica didn't have too much trouble with Andrew, except his momentary "almost harassing" behavior. Andrew also seems to get along with Geoff (or me for the matters). So the day comes, when our manager start to delegate different managerial task to us. Andrew's task is to track a few items from all the lead, and is the person supposes to be working with the rest of us to get these items from us. Geoff was under extreme pressure due to a project that was poorly managed, and was not able to provide Andrew with what he was looking for. Guess what, instead of helping or asking Geoff to "Pick up the pace buddy", he ran right to the manager and ratted him out. And that’s not the end of it, he told (and teach) the manager that he should pressure Geoff to get it done.

Talking of screwing your friends over!

Its interesting to see how skill-less people are so skilled at brown nosing.. Of course, they can't do anything else otherwise.....