Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-10-28 03:07 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-10-28 03:07 am
Cast of characters: more co-workers
My team:
The department that I consider "mine" at Virtual Hammer is all the people gathered under my grandmanager.
The Randomizer: My grandmanager, a vigorous little surfer-duuuuude about my mom's age. He is amazingly enthusiastic about everything, not unlike a really cheerful black lab with a frisbee, and whenever he says something which does not make sense, we should check with a grown-up such as my manager, who in addition to her other duties keeps the metaphorical x-pen up. (Previously Grandmanager Miles.)
The Stage Manager: One of my two uncle-managers. He is tall, skinny, cynical, wears all black with black cowboy boots like a theatre person (thus the name), and I love him to pieces. He's constantly raiding my candy dish and telling me that I'm evil (for keeping him in candy). Recently he refilled my candy dish with candy corn, upon which point I told him that he was evil.
Non-Boring Manager: The second of my two uncle-managers. He has a fabulous moustache which I try to draw during tedious parts of team meetings. He is slightly infamous for putting people on the spot, so if you know him and he's done that, it's not just you.
Aunt-Manager: Her team is off in another building, and she is off on maternity leave. I think I've interacted with her the least, but my impression is that she's very sweet, if somewhat exhausted and overworked.
My manager: Outwardly, often the picture of calm, with delightfully geek-casual clothes and an interesting scarf. The calm is supported by quite a bit of paddling under the water, and interrupted by whatever the Randomizer has randomized lately. Also by whatever fuckery IT has seen to implement upon us. Sometimes "Bosslady", never "Overlady".
Under my manager, in order of arrival:
My Overlady, organizationally an elder sister, so I report dotted-line to her. Not my manager.
Me (of course)
Researcher Carmageddon: Shortly after I joined, he was my Junior Researcher. Various attrition puts him after my Overlady in terms of seniority. He displays great enthusiasm about cars and booze (though, we are to hope, not at the same time).
Researcher Sweatervest: In contrast to the Silicon Valley informality of the company, it's rare to see him out of a button-down shirt. In colder months he wears a tidy argyle sweatervest, though one particularly terribly hot meeting did apparently convince him that it was in fact warm enough that he could dispense with it for the season. He sits in another building post-move.
The Polka-Dot Researcher: She really, really likes polka dots. She joined post-move and sits in another building, so I haven't had as much chance to interact with her as some other people.
The Hipster Researcher: Physically, he is very tall with blond hair and a beard like a haystack. He brought in beer for the beer fridge in the office next to Researcher Carmageddon's. The beer had a double-sided page of documentation in what looked like 8-point font. He's got some rough edges still; time alone will tell whether life on the team will render those smoother, or sharpen them jagged.
There are apparently some people under my manager who aren't research. I'm not entirely sure who they are without resorting to the actual org chart.
Beyond Researcher Carmageddon's office, there's the office of a newer team member who doesn't have a nickname yet. This is the office with the beer fridge. The cheesecake-baking, singing former intern used to share this office, but she left.
The next two offices are also former interns. I haven't been tracking nicknames for them.
The next office is Rocky, who may be the seniormost person on the team. He is generally good-natured, passionate, geeky, and can talk your ear off. I suspect that I would not want to be on his professional bad side.
The Randomizer and my manager share a corner office.
Designer Sparkles feels a certain amount of kinship with Robin Sparkles due to being from Canada (and also, to my biased eye, very pretty). She was the chair of the conference last year. The Stage Manager has said that she does not get to do that this year.
Next is the visual design office of two people without formal nicknames. One of them is the guy with all the muscles and the Hulk fists somewhere in his office.
The Stage Manager and the Non-Boring Manager share an office.
My Overlady and the Hipster Researcher share an office.
Madam Standards tries to fishmum me and likes dark chocolate. She documents the standards for the stuff that our department works with. Every now and then I acquaint someone new in external departments that there are in fact standards for these things, and that they are documented.
The Norseman shares an office with Madam Standards. He is very soft-spoken, to the point that I have trouble hearing him speak. He has a delightfully wry sense of humor.
The Corgisitter/Dogesitter visual designer is in the cube near Rocky and Designer Sparkles. She has a lovely acerbic sense of humor.
There's another visual designer who is super into comics and stuff, to judge from his cube. He's next over from the Dogesitter, near the visual design office and my Overlady's office.
Up a ways, near Madam Standards and the Norseman's office, is a really fun sarcastic guy whose cube swag declares his alma mater and that he likes Star Trek: TOS.
The empty cube between us is sometimes occupied by one of the off-again-on-again contractors, or whichever random person has found a temporary seat there lately.
I'm on the outer corner, right where everyone in that wing walks more or less past.
In one of the cubes behind me is the newly moved designer.
The empty cubes used to have interns. It's fall now, and the interns have gone home.
There are a few people around the corner the other way.
The Monkey House: There are up to three young design-y dudes sitting in a large office. They are the spiritual heirs of the interns-and-others crammed into the erstwhile Hive. The new office has a sign on the door warning the team against feeding the monkeys. Every now and then I top up their stock of multicolored post-its. I say up to three: one of the three has just moved into one of the cubes behind me, nearer to Researcher Carmageddon and the office with the beer fridge. The remaining two designers in there are the tall thin blond white boy with the beard and the short medium-thin blond white boy with the beard.
The final office has the lady with the two tiny, possibly vicious, dustmop dogs, and the dev with the Hawaiian shirts.
At some point I should go through various people on my team sitting in the other building and remotely, but tonight I'm fairly well zonked, and the process probably requires reference to an org chart and a map.
Email: The company is off That Damn Program and back on Exchange/Outlook/Outlook Web Access/any damn thing we can use to avoid OWA. I very much miss having access to responsive devs who will fix bugs that I find. On the other hand, I don't find all that many bugs in Outlook.
Infrastructure IT: Unsure whose circus these monkeys escaped from.
Helpdesk: They try to be helpful. Sometimes they are very trying.
Helldesk Software: They moved us off a slightly creaky Bugzilla instance and onto some SaaS which, in theory, works, when implemented properly. There is no sign that ours was implemented properly.
Chip: He used to be the newer of our team's local desktop support guys in our old building. To our eternal delight, he has been moved to our new building.
High-Priv McMansplain: There's a guy who is routinely very wrong on not!Facebook about the things which regular users can do with the new helldesk software. This has come to the attention of a few people.
The Buck-Passer-in-Chief: In charge of the helldesk software. Now. Not when it was incompetently implemented. Let's just put the past behind us and move forward, okay? Occasionally known as Too Much Eyeliner Lady.
The Nervous Dev: works on internal-facing software, including my thrice-cursed CRM database. Sometimes seems overwhelmed by the experience of having a nitpicky QA type as a user, but she's getting better about that. She was part of the same entering group as Mr. Zune.
#cupcake: the internal IRC channel devoted to baked goods, baked-goods-based complaints about IT infrastructure, other complaints, geekery, and general good times. Founded during the Cupcake Crisis of '12.
Purple, Keeper of the One True Shade of Purple: my concert buddy, my lunch buddy, my occasional dinner buddy, my walking-out-into-the-parking-lot-late-at-night buddy, member of #cupcake, member of #adventuresofstnono, all-around righteous dude and good friend. May or may not be drift-compatible, but our brains definitely go the same terrible places on occasion. We are hugging friends, not kissing friends. Formerly The Renaissance Man, his current nickname originates from one fine laundry day when I wore a screaming magenta blouse into work and claimed that it was a certain software-related shade of purple. He disagreed. "I am an engineer at Virtual Hammer! I am the keeper of the one true shade of purple!" I stood corrected.
lb: member of #cupcake, leader of #adventuresofstnono, member of the unofficial tiger team that's yelling about the new helldesk software. Friend. Enjoys programming word games, cooking, and plotting terrible troll foods like improbable jellybeans and sun-dried mayo doughnuts.
R: workaholic, member of #cupcake, dev, and with a finger in many too many women-in-computing pies to count. Friend.
phone: member of #cupcake, short intense ranty bald Aussie, musician, dev. Friend.
radius: member of #cupcake, tall long-haired chill Aussie, dev. Ranter-at-helldesk. Newest recruit to #cupcake. I suspect we'll get along well. Organizer of the page with OWA-related fuckery. Sometimes called the Desert Islander due to that Far Side cartoon he cites, where the person on the desert island has spelled out the word "HELF" and doesn't get rescued.
Mr. Zune: member of #cupcake, previously an intern who knew![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
xlerb. Wearer of the Brass Rat. G&S aficionado and power tool wielding theatre person. Friend. His girlfriend attends various #cupcake-and-partners events; I've bonded happily with her in our shared horror of That Damn Email System (Kipper/Llama).
Ranters-at-Helldesk tiger team:
lb, radius, me.
The Angry Tattooed Man: teammate of lb, ranter-at-helldesk.
Beldorion: teammate(?) of lb, ranter-at-helldesk, has a reputation for being a pedantic dick and a bit of a bulldog. Also tends to expect telepathy.
Gramp: in Mr. Zune's department, very busy with random things, ranter-at-helldesk. Physically reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut.
There are also a couple people from the department of my old gaming buddy.
Various randoms:
The [Ancestral] Fellow: A very highly ranked dev-type. He prefers to not pull rank unless absolutely necessary. Helldesk made it necessary that one time.
Mr. Moose: A fellow on the security team.
Not Mr. Rainbow: Works near phone and radius, and according to lb, looks like a wizard, with a neatly-groomed grizzled triangular beard and a headband. There is a Mr. Rainbow somewhere in the company, but this guy isn't him. Occasionally joins in the helldesk software yelling, but not formally.
Mr. Netflix works near Not Mr. Rainbow and lb, and is part of that lunch table. He might go more places if more of them had Netflix.
The Dean: Greendale Community College has Dean Pelton, who is a tiny bald man with a ton of energy, not a ton of self-awareness, very camp. Ours is not quite as skinny, somewhat less camp, and quite a bit more self-aware. He dresses up for every occasion and oversees the duck pond, along with any number of random little things that make life at work lovely. I adore him.
Mr. Sub-tle: Subtlety: not actually his strong suit. A member of the QUILTBAG club. He runs a lot of the random events, and thus gets to introduce them. I like him, but occasionally he's wrong onthe intranet not!Facebook.
The A-Team/QUILTBAG club crossover is non-zero; there are two dark-haired white guys in this crossover. One is my friend who used to be a barista and occasionally comes over to raid my syrups; one is my friend who was on the other end of the not-entirely-friendly research lab takeover attempt (in his defense, nobody knew who the lab belonged to). The ex-barista sits one building over across the quad, and the other dude sits one building over in a different direction, in the fifth wheel quad building.
The Other Guy: Named confusingly similarly to Purple, but spelled slightly differently. Friend to #cupcake, but doesn't do IRC. Close buddies with R, a dev in a nearby department/office in my building. Shows for various #cupcake-in-person events.
Purple's Lunch Crew: mostly members of his old team, including Lennon Glasses Guy and Purple's Work Boyfriend. Purple sends a lunch ping to the members of this group. Sometimes it's later than other times.
Lennon Glasses Guy: dev, wears cute little round glasses, generally eats grilled chicken for lunch, which results in a lot of unwelcome attention from our little striped friends the yellowjackets.
Purple's Work Boyfriend, Mr. Long Distance: The bromance is strong with these two. He's very cute. Also very married to a woman (for a while long-distance married), and not actually romantically involved with Purple.
Mr. Bananas: Purple's once-and-current officemate, who he knew at a previous company before they both wound up at Virtual Hammer.
Mr. With-all-due-respect-bite-me: The failure mode of "funny" is "asshole". This guy has a history of doing that on [off-topic] and other places.
Racist McMansplain: There was an incident. A teammate of Mr. With-all-due-respect-bite-me.
The department that I consider "mine" at Virtual Hammer is all the people gathered under my grandmanager.
The Randomizer: My grandmanager, a vigorous little surfer-duuuuude about my mom's age. He is amazingly enthusiastic about everything, not unlike a really cheerful black lab with a frisbee, and whenever he says something which does not make sense, we should check with a grown-up such as my manager, who in addition to her other duties keeps the metaphorical x-pen up. (Previously Grandmanager Miles.)
The Stage Manager: One of my two uncle-managers. He is tall, skinny, cynical, wears all black with black cowboy boots like a theatre person (thus the name), and I love him to pieces. He's constantly raiding my candy dish and telling me that I'm evil (for keeping him in candy). Recently he refilled my candy dish with candy corn, upon which point I told him that he was evil.
Non-Boring Manager: The second of my two uncle-managers. He has a fabulous moustache which I try to draw during tedious parts of team meetings. He is slightly infamous for putting people on the spot, so if you know him and he's done that, it's not just you.
Aunt-Manager: Her team is off in another building, and she is off on maternity leave. I think I've interacted with her the least, but my impression is that she's very sweet, if somewhat exhausted and overworked.
My manager: Outwardly, often the picture of calm, with delightfully geek-casual clothes and an interesting scarf. The calm is supported by quite a bit of paddling under the water, and interrupted by whatever the Randomizer has randomized lately. Also by whatever fuckery IT has seen to implement upon us. Sometimes "Bosslady", never "Overlady".
Under my manager, in order of arrival:
My Overlady, organizationally an elder sister, so I report dotted-line to her. Not my manager.
Me (of course)
Researcher Carmageddon: Shortly after I joined, he was my Junior Researcher. Various attrition puts him after my Overlady in terms of seniority. He displays great enthusiasm about cars and booze (though, we are to hope, not at the same time).
Researcher Sweatervest: In contrast to the Silicon Valley informality of the company, it's rare to see him out of a button-down shirt. In colder months he wears a tidy argyle sweatervest, though one particularly terribly hot meeting did apparently convince him that it was in fact warm enough that he could dispense with it for the season. He sits in another building post-move.
The Polka-Dot Researcher: She really, really likes polka dots. She joined post-move and sits in another building, so I haven't had as much chance to interact with her as some other people.
The Hipster Researcher: Physically, he is very tall with blond hair and a beard like a haystack. He brought in beer for the beer fridge in the office next to Researcher Carmageddon's. The beer had a double-sided page of documentation in what looked like 8-point font. He's got some rough edges still; time alone will tell whether life on the team will render those smoother, or sharpen them jagged.
There are apparently some people under my manager who aren't research. I'm not entirely sure who they are without resorting to the actual org chart.
Beyond Researcher Carmageddon's office, there's the office of a newer team member who doesn't have a nickname yet. This is the office with the beer fridge. The cheesecake-baking, singing former intern used to share this office, but she left.
The next two offices are also former interns. I haven't been tracking nicknames for them.
The next office is Rocky, who may be the seniormost person on the team. He is generally good-natured, passionate, geeky, and can talk your ear off. I suspect that I would not want to be on his professional bad side.
The Randomizer and my manager share a corner office.
Designer Sparkles feels a certain amount of kinship with Robin Sparkles due to being from Canada (and also, to my biased eye, very pretty). She was the chair of the conference last year. The Stage Manager has said that she does not get to do that this year.
Next is the visual design office of two people without formal nicknames. One of them is the guy with all the muscles and the Hulk fists somewhere in his office.
The Stage Manager and the Non-Boring Manager share an office.
My Overlady and the Hipster Researcher share an office.
Madam Standards tries to fishmum me and likes dark chocolate. She documents the standards for the stuff that our department works with. Every now and then I acquaint someone new in external departments that there are in fact standards for these things, and that they are documented.
The Norseman shares an office with Madam Standards. He is very soft-spoken, to the point that I have trouble hearing him speak. He has a delightfully wry sense of humor.
The Corgisitter/Dogesitter visual designer is in the cube near Rocky and Designer Sparkles. She has a lovely acerbic sense of humor.
There's another visual designer who is super into comics and stuff, to judge from his cube. He's next over from the Dogesitter, near the visual design office and my Overlady's office.
Up a ways, near Madam Standards and the Norseman's office, is a really fun sarcastic guy whose cube swag declares his alma mater and that he likes Star Trek: TOS.
The empty cube between us is sometimes occupied by one of the off-again-on-again contractors, or whichever random person has found a temporary seat there lately.
I'm on the outer corner, right where everyone in that wing walks more or less past.
In one of the cubes behind me is the newly moved designer.
The empty cubes used to have interns. It's fall now, and the interns have gone home.
There are a few people around the corner the other way.
The Monkey House: There are up to three young design-y dudes sitting in a large office. They are the spiritual heirs of the interns-and-others crammed into the erstwhile Hive. The new office has a sign on the door warning the team against feeding the monkeys. Every now and then I top up their stock of multicolored post-its. I say up to three: one of the three has just moved into one of the cubes behind me, nearer to Researcher Carmageddon and the office with the beer fridge. The remaining two designers in there are the tall thin blond white boy with the beard and the short medium-thin blond white boy with the beard.
The final office has the lady with the two tiny, possibly vicious, dustmop dogs, and the dev with the Hawaiian shirts.
At some point I should go through various people on my team sitting in the other building and remotely, but tonight I'm fairly well zonked, and the process probably requires reference to an org chart and a map.
Email: The company is off That Damn Program and back on Exchange/Outlook/Outlook Web Access/any damn thing we can use to avoid OWA. I very much miss having access to responsive devs who will fix bugs that I find. On the other hand, I don't find all that many bugs in Outlook.
Infrastructure IT: Unsure whose circus these monkeys escaped from.
Helpdesk: They try to be helpful. Sometimes they are very trying.
Helldesk Software: They moved us off a slightly creaky Bugzilla instance and onto some SaaS which, in theory, works, when implemented properly. There is no sign that ours was implemented properly.
Chip: He used to be the newer of our team's local desktop support guys in our old building. To our eternal delight, he has been moved to our new building.
High-Priv McMansplain: There's a guy who is routinely very wrong on not!Facebook about the things which regular users can do with the new helldesk software. This has come to the attention of a few people.
The Buck-Passer-in-Chief: In charge of the helldesk software. Now. Not when it was incompetently implemented. Let's just put the past behind us and move forward, okay? Occasionally known as Too Much Eyeliner Lady.
The Nervous Dev: works on internal-facing software, including my thrice-cursed CRM database. Sometimes seems overwhelmed by the experience of having a nitpicky QA type as a user, but she's getting better about that. She was part of the same entering group as Mr. Zune.
#cupcake: the internal IRC channel devoted to baked goods, baked-goods-based complaints about IT infrastructure, other complaints, geekery, and general good times. Founded during the Cupcake Crisis of '12.
Purple, Keeper of the One True Shade of Purple: my concert buddy, my lunch buddy, my occasional dinner buddy, my walking-out-into-the-parking-lot-late-at-night buddy, member of #cupcake, member of #adventuresofstnono, all-around righteous dude and good friend. May or may not be drift-compatible, but our brains definitely go the same terrible places on occasion. We are hugging friends, not kissing friends. Formerly The Renaissance Man, his current nickname originates from one fine laundry day when I wore a screaming magenta blouse into work and claimed that it was a certain software-related shade of purple. He disagreed. "I am an engineer at Virtual Hammer! I am the keeper of the one true shade of purple!" I stood corrected.
lb: member of #cupcake, leader of #adventuresofstnono, member of the unofficial tiger team that's yelling about the new helldesk software. Friend. Enjoys programming word games, cooking, and plotting terrible troll foods like improbable jellybeans and sun-dried mayo doughnuts.
R: workaholic, member of #cupcake, dev, and with a finger in many too many women-in-computing pies to count. Friend.
phone: member of #cupcake, short intense ranty bald Aussie, musician, dev. Friend.
radius: member of #cupcake, tall long-haired chill Aussie, dev. Ranter-at-helldesk. Newest recruit to #cupcake. I suspect we'll get along well. Organizer of the page with OWA-related fuckery. Sometimes called the Desert Islander due to that Far Side cartoon he cites, where the person on the desert island has spelled out the word "HELF" and doesn't get rescued.
Mr. Zune: member of #cupcake, previously an intern who knew
Ranters-at-Helldesk tiger team:
lb, radius, me.
The Angry Tattooed Man: teammate of lb, ranter-at-helldesk.
Beldorion: teammate(?) of lb, ranter-at-helldesk, has a reputation for being a pedantic dick and a bit of a bulldog. Also tends to expect telepathy.
Gramp: in Mr. Zune's department, very busy with random things, ranter-at-helldesk. Physically reminds me a bit of Kurt Vonnegut.
There are also a couple people from the department of my old gaming buddy.
Various randoms:
The [Ancestral] Fellow: A very highly ranked dev-type. He prefers to not pull rank unless absolutely necessary. Helldesk made it necessary that one time.
Mr. Moose: A fellow on the security team.
Not Mr. Rainbow: Works near phone and radius, and according to lb, looks like a wizard, with a neatly-groomed grizzled triangular beard and a headband. There is a Mr. Rainbow somewhere in the company, but this guy isn't him. Occasionally joins in the helldesk software yelling, but not formally.
Mr. Netflix works near Not Mr. Rainbow and lb, and is part of that lunch table. He might go more places if more of them had Netflix.
The Dean: Greendale Community College has Dean Pelton, who is a tiny bald man with a ton of energy, not a ton of self-awareness, very camp. Ours is not quite as skinny, somewhat less camp, and quite a bit more self-aware. He dresses up for every occasion and oversees the duck pond, along with any number of random little things that make life at work lovely. I adore him.
Mr. Sub-tle: Subtlety: not actually his strong suit. A member of the QUILTBAG club. He runs a lot of the random events, and thus gets to introduce them. I like him, but occasionally he's wrong on
The A-Team/QUILTBAG club crossover is non-zero; there are two dark-haired white guys in this crossover. One is my friend who used to be a barista and occasionally comes over to raid my syrups; one is my friend who was on the other end of the not-entirely-friendly research lab takeover attempt (in his defense, nobody knew who the lab belonged to). The ex-barista sits one building over across the quad, and the other dude sits one building over in a different direction, in the fifth wheel quad building.
The Other Guy: Named confusingly similarly to Purple, but spelled slightly differently. Friend to #cupcake, but doesn't do IRC. Close buddies with R, a dev in a nearby department/office in my building. Shows for various #cupcake-in-person events.
Purple's Lunch Crew: mostly members of his old team, including Lennon Glasses Guy and Purple's Work Boyfriend. Purple sends a lunch ping to the members of this group. Sometimes it's later than other times.
Lennon Glasses Guy: dev, wears cute little round glasses, generally eats grilled chicken for lunch, which results in a lot of unwelcome attention from our little striped friends the yellowjackets.
Purple's Work Boyfriend, Mr. Long Distance: The bromance is strong with these two. He's very cute. Also very married to a woman (for a while long-distance married), and not actually romantically involved with Purple.
Mr. Bananas: Purple's once-and-current officemate, who he knew at a previous company before they both wound up at Virtual Hammer.
Mr. With-all-due-respect-bite-me: The failure mode of "funny" is "asshole". This guy has a history of doing that on [off-topic] and other places.
Racist McMansplain: There was an incident. A teammate of Mr. With-all-due-respect-bite-me.
no subject
no subject
My friend who used to be a barista went to Facebook. The other A-Team/QUILTBAG club dark-haired white guy went to some startup with his exec.
Curmudgeon City: they're not jerks per se, but their group uses IRC to communicate and they've been known to have a Microsoft Comic Chat client up displaying their team chat.
Scruffy Brit: a new #cupcake-er, invited by lb.