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.
Saying nothing in particular 
Oh, my, I’ve never worked in that sort of environment, but my Younger Daughter has. She would shudder whenever talk of a buy out or reorganization came up, always presented in a positive and saccharine way. (by a Linda type person) Then she (or many of her co-workers) would end up without a job. Teaching school is a little more secure because no one else wants to do it or can’t because they aren’t qualified in that subject.
I went through so many corporate mergers that by the last one I was happy to be in the first group laid off! It was a different song and dance each time but ultimately the same restructuring nightmare. But Linda was definitely in a class by herself.The kind of person you want to dislike but can’t because they’re just so sincere!
I had forgotten to include the term “restructuring” in my rant above! It’s another loaded term.
It’s generally another term for a layoff – or being put in such a bad position that you will quit!
I never would have made it in the corporate world.
The crew of the Milvia was a menagerie of creative types who figured out how to make programming (a new profession at the time) pay for their toys! They were definitely not comfortable on board the very corporate Wonderful!
It does sound like a stressful world to work in, but you wrote the story so creatively, Jan! In my career, I had my own challenges, but I don’t think I could have survived in a corporate world. I know what you mean by wanting to dislike a Linda type person, but they are just too sincere.
Thank you Brenda. There was a time when loyalty to a company was rewarded but I think those days are mostly over. It’s rare to find someone who’s worked for the same company for their entire career like Linda – especially in the computer programming field.
Unsure if you are up on the recent AI advances in software but, here now, we are all seeking out “billable” hours.
Every bit of developer knowhow is being actively encoded into skills, tools and agents. “Don’t just dive into the code to investigate a bug. Write a skill and then instruct an agent to do that analysis.” Seriously. And not just analyze, but.plan, code, test, approve and release the fix as well.
It’s game over for all coders. Having a “do” will be a full time activity, low/no budget types only, though.
It’s a whole different world now than it was when I knew just enough programming to be dangerous. It scares me to be honest. Systems have to be tested by humans … no IA will ever greb the issues and risks that come up.
But, that’s the thing. They will. They are. This time really is different. For creative purposes, LLMs are like the transistor. They’ll be the foundation for higher order constructs. And if not directly embedded, they will be the seed, the trigger, the genesis from which actual AI gets built.
The age of faxes now? Well, well, this ain’t makin’ us any younger… 😉
Yup – it’s a different world from the old corporate culture.!
I was sorting out old archives the other day, with a couple of almost faded out faxes… Soon, there will be no trace left.
This is an interesting and poignant piece.
Just a distant memory of a sweet person with an impossible job!
My parents and my uncles/aunts and my friends’ parents and just about everyone I knew back in the early/mid 80s retired with the same company where they started their career. Hard to imagine nowadays.
Don’t you just hate the whole corporate world of today?
(You nailed it, J.)
It was that way in many parts of this country as well. TRW was only interested in the company I worked for because of the credit card processing systems the programmers had developed but they failed to understand that in the “dot com” days “code slingers” were in high demand and used to a lot of autonomy. Yes, I am extremely glad to be out of the corporate world!
I bet you are.