In a previous life I worked for a midwesterner named Linda who’d been assigned to help a group of programmers find billable hours before they were kicked off the good ship TR Wonderful where they were being held captive. You see, their ship (The Milvia) had been sunk by the larger and much more powerful Wonderful the year before and now the crew of the Wonderful was doing all it could to make them comfortable. However, the customs of the Milvia and the customs of the Wonderful could not have been more different if they tried.

Linda, bless her heart, had no idea what these programmers were capable of but she did have a copy of the TR Wonderful Jobs List updated weekly and faxed to various outposts around the planet from the HQ in Cleveland Ohio.

Its arrival (generally on a Tuesday morning) was always cause for joy. “Jan,” Linda would say to me, “I brought cookies. Tell the gang we’re having a do! The list is here … on time and on schedule.” Of course, one would expect no less from the HQ of TR Wonderful!

In case you’re wondering, in Linda Lingo a “do” was an informal get-together generally in the coffee room and lasting no more than 15 minutes. There would be an announcement, light refreshments and then everyone would return to work. Fifteen minutes a day of unbillable time was all you were allowed. Every other minute had to be charged to a project, duly noted on a paper timesheet and approved by a manager before being sent on to payroll. If the project you’d been assigned to ended, your name was added to the Availability List. Thereafter you had two weeks to find and be accepted on another project. Otherwise … you walked the plank.

Thus, you can understand why the arrival of the Jobs List was cause for a “do.”

Poor dear Linda really was a sweetheart. I can see her now … a petite blonde of maybe fifty, always clad in a conservative pastel pantsuit with matching shoes and accessories, trying to convince a life long resident of Berkeley California that he would just love Oshkosh Wisconsin. It was, after all, the birthplace of the “dungarees” he practically lived in.

Poor dear Linda. She really was a sweetheart. But it was inevitable what happened.

“Why do they insist on calling it a Layoff List?” She’d ask me almost in tears. “At TR Wonderful we don’t lay people off. We give them every opportunity to remain on board and enjoy all the benefits of a good health care and retirement package. They might have to move far from home but they would remain a part of the TR Wonderful family and what could be more wonderful than that!

I never knew how to respond. In retrospect, companies which encourage their employees to stay aboard with good health benefits and pensions are a dying breed. But, to those of us used to a pirate ship, their corporate ethos felt suffocating. And so I just shrugged my shoulders like a dummy.

“And why are they having all those bashes? Every Friday night — another bash!”

A bash was like a “do” … an impromptu get-together but bashes were held at some nearby “joint” that served alcohol (TR Wonderful did not allow alcohol to be served on site … unless in the boardrooms for executives, of course). We invited her to the bashes, of course, but she never came.

I often think of her on Fridays, sitting alone in her office as we all left to help our friends celebrate their escape from TR Wonderful and the horrors of pleading for billable hours. Poor dear Linda.

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