An aggravating day

Mr. Hardy (not his real name, but about the right size) showed up at my desk fifteen minutes after I arrived. He was somewhat miffed.

"So," he says, "Mr. Laurel (again, not his real name, but he's a dead ringer for ol' Stan) tells me you've given him a mandate to document the build process."

"Yes," I reply, confident in the fact that I am, after all, in charge of this operation, and have every right to make assignments as I see fit.

"That wasn't quite what I had in mind for him to do, you know," he goes on. "I was wanting him to work on something else."

"Uh-huh." My face is dead-pan, my expression controlled. My words are non-committal. My anger is rising.

"In fact, we've already done this before. It would be a complete waste of time."

I stare blankly at him a moment. This is the person who was responsible for putting the builds together, before I was 'hired' in. It's too bad that the builds still don't work, at least for me. The assignment to do a build was given to the new guy in order to cross-check my findings, to make sure I wasn't just seeing things.

And Mr. Hardy is obviously feeling threatened that someone is intruding on his turf.

Unfortunately for him, I don't give a rip what he thinks. My instructions have been given, and they are to be followed.

"Gee, Oliver," I intone carefully, as one would to a child. "I followed your instructions to the letter, and couldn't get it to build. So I asked Stan to try the same thing, just to verify I was doing it right."

"Well, everyone else was able build without any problems."

"Oh, really? Or did they just do like I did, and figure out how to work around it?"

I pull out my logbook which lists all the problems I found. He frowns and folds his arms across his chest, perturbed.

"I've never seen that before," he comments, with a tone that indicates I must be some kind of idiot.

"Look, I'm just trying to get a sanity check, OK? Let's see how it goes for Stan, and then we'll decide what to do."

He goes away (eventually), but is still upset. Probably convinced I'm going to mess up his "system".

Thirty minutes later, Mr. Laurel emails in: "I had the same errors. Should I go ahead and fix them?"

Mr. Hardy erupts again (via email): "No! Don't touch the files! You'll only make it worse!"

I ignore Mr. Hardy and tell Mr. Laurel, "Just document what you find, fix your local copy of the files, and we'll get it fixed by Friday for the Release."

This is going to be such a fun job!