I rarely blog about work. Work sucks, that's life, but its what you have to do so you do not have to live in your moms basement, even if the little pizza rolls she makes you for a snack are delicious.
Any how, a while back my company decided they wanted to expand the e-commerce department. We were going through some major web site renovations, and I needed the help. So they hire some dude. I had no problem with him at first, he seemed to know his stuff and seemed pleasant enough. A simple google search of his name (Something our HR department cant seem to do) showed that he was a big 'legalize marijuana' activist. I did not think much about that at the time, stoner web developers are a dime a dozen.
We then needed to hire a few more people for some simple data-input positions. No real skills needed, just cut and paste. Somehow this guy convinced the owners to hire a 'good' friend of his, as he put it. This turned out to be a youngish one-armed girl who possessed simply the deepest southern trailer-park accent I have ever encountered. I like some southern accents; they can be charming, however the accent on this girl simply screamed 'my parents were cousins'.
Her other curious feature was that she had one arm. Well, one and a half, the other arm ended just about at the end of her elbow except for a small little nub that could flex back and fourth. I rather thought that having one arm would not be the best idea for a data entry position, but I guess equal opportunities for all. I never had the nerve to ask what happened to her other arm. I often imagined it was like something out of 'Requiem for a Dream' where they had to cut off the guys arm due to the infected heroin injection hole. She was not at all shy about her stump, she would even use it to point at you.
After a month or two I started to suspect that these two were not stoners but meth-heads. The guy would show up in the morning ten minutes late, his hair disheveled and his eyes bloodshot and wearing the rumpled clothes he had on the day before. He would wander up to my desk, eyes wide and excited with his hand up and his fingers wiggling around his head like he was casting a spell and then he would exclaim 'I have so many ideas I think my head is going to….explode!'.
He would then start on half a dozen projects that he never seemed to get around to finishing. I guess around three or four the buzz of whatever he took that morning was wearing off and he hand his one armed girlfriend would just end up sort of rocking back and fourth and lightly scratching themselves.
The guy reminded me so much of a King of the Hill episode where Hank hired a drug user. At one point in the show the guy Hank hired came in to work in the morning high on something and shouted out 'Wooo! Lets sell some GAS!'. He then had a big idea for the file system and pulled all the files out of the file cabinets for some organizing. A few hours later he was horrified of the mess he made and crawled into a corner for a nap. This is the guy I worked with.
The one armed girl followed him everywhere and always found the need to inject something into the conversation even if it was completely meaningless. She once followed us into a meeting with the managers and owners. We were discussing some upcoming projects and one of the managers said 'One of the things we need to do is to is to organize our projects and set priorities on them'. A this point the one armed girl raised her one arm and drawled out in that horrid fried-chicken country accent 'Well, I dunno about y'all, but I have been havin' a problem oragnize'n and a-prioritiz'n'.
There was then a brief embarrassed silence before the meeting continued.
I was also growing annoyed because the guy would decide to 'fix' something to 'make it better' and then just make a mess of it. At one point I had created a number of scripts that did something that needed to be done. They were nothing fancy but they worked. Then one day we were having a meeting with the company owner and he pulled up one of my scripts and instead of it completing its function it instead spat out a big error. The owner looked at me and said 'I thought you completed this?' and all I could do was lamely say 'I did'. Later on I went and opened up the code and saw code that was not mine. I asked the other dude about it and he said 'Oh yeah, I was working on it…I was going to make it better!'.
One day the guy showed up limping and bruised and hauling him self along with a stick he was using as a crutch. Any question as to what had happened only brought a vague response and a change of subject. He hobbled around like this for the next day or so. I have no proof, but I have a feeling he had a drug deal go bad.
Amazingly, the guy somehow managed to convince them to hire yet a third friend of this guy. I swear the trailer park must have been empty. At this point there was hardly any work getting done. They would chat at each other all day and the guy would not complete any projects given to him, he would instead work on his own 'big idea' projects to 'make things better' that never came into fruition. I was growing increasingly annoyed because every time they screwed something up, the people in the company would come to me asking about it, simply because I was the tech guy the were familure with.
Finally one day in the middle of the day the guy and the girl announced that they had an 'important errand' and took off. They did not tell any managers or anyone else. I guess they just assumed they thought it was OK to wander off in the middle of the workday. I did not wonder as to what the 'important' errand was. They had been particularly twitchy the day before, so I guess they were out of the stuff that gave him so many ideas his head might explode. Late in the afternoon one of the managers came by and asked where they went. I responded with a dry 'how should I know?'.
I guess the managers had enough, because they went and fired all three of them.
The next day the owner came in and said 'Looks like your work load is going to double!' and then gave a little laugh and walked out.
Sigh.
2026 Update
Dialing the machine to September 2007, where Ed's exciting new colleague believes his head may explode from ideas before breaking the file system.
Ah, 2007: a time when a Google search was a revolutionary HR tool and Ed's company apparently hired people based on the enthusiasm of the current alleged meth-head. The whole post is a museum piece. E-commerce departments were still held together with duct tape and personal scripts; data entry was a job you could get with one arm and zero demonstrated typing skills. Now the data-entry jobs have been replaced by AI chatbots, which are somehow less entertaining. Nobody 'wanders off for an important errand' anymore because your badge logs every bathroom break, and the only one-armed thing pointing at you is a warehouse robot. The chaotic web developer would today be a 'growth hacker' with a Substack about manifestation, still breaking production at 2 a.m. There was no code review, no CI pipeline, no vendor to blame—just Ed, staring at someone else's code and saying 'I did.' I almost miss a world where incompetent colleagues were fired in a single afternoon instead of slowly promoted to middle management. Also, pizza rolls are still delicious, but now you order them from an app while your employer tracks your keystrokes.
“2007 Ed, when the one-armed girl raised her stump in that meeting with the owners, did you ever think about raising your hand to say 'maybe we should prioritize the hiring process'? And why did you wait until all three were fired before telling anyone the code you 'did' finish had been 'fixed' by the guy whose head was about to explode?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you ask a fair question, and fair questions make me itchy. Did I think about raising my hand? Hell yes, about forty times a day. But in that meeting I was mostly trying not to laugh and also trying to figure out what part of “organize and prioritize” she thought included pointing at the ceiling with that nub. I kept my mouth shut because I'm the guy who fixes things, not the guy who makes hiring decisions, and honestly, I figured the owners would notice the trailer park emptying out eventually.
As for the code, well, that's on me. I told the manager right after the meeting that the script broke, but I said it was “probably some environment thing” because I didn't want to be the one accusing anyone of being a meth-head without proof. I should have just opened the file and showed them. Hindsight's a bitch. Have a donut.
