Alex Winter: "Operation Mindfuck"
The flow of time here at Bank of New England Securities (BoNES) has slowed to the most excruciating pace possible. The days are endless meetings, detailing processes, applications, systems and products in mind numbing minutiae the likes of which could rival Grey’s Anatomy. Because this bank’s back office systems are basically COBOL based Atari 2600’s cobbled together by electrical tape and coat hangers, my team and I need to obfuscate the systems’ massive shortcomings, dangerous security holes and laughable limitations by basically exaggerating the shit out of and / or inventing functionality. So I am being paid to lie, and I’m doing a fantastic job of it.
Luckily, we have a helper monkey on our team to do the grunt work and provide hours of entertainment to boot. His name is Davy and he is a management analyst on our team, fresh out of some overrated Ivy League college. Davy is (or rather, was) a smart, hardworking, cheerful helper monkey. I don’t know who he pissed off to get stuck with us, but over the long, terrible weeks we have mentally broken him. He is a hollow eyed, twitching shell of his former self and our mission on the human resources front has been accomplished.
Destroying Davy’s spirit and ego was purely for humanitarian reasons. You see, the boy has such potential we feel that he should in no way be wasting that in the financial services industry, especially as a boot licking toady consultant. He was too smart, had too much of a spark, an intellectual curiosity, a genuine love for life. So we have done our best to drive him to quit by making him relentlessly, mercilessly miserable. Unfortunately, looking at our crushed helper monkey now, pangs of regret burble up in my black shriveled heart and I fear we may have done our job too well. It has been, in the words of our fearless leaders squatting in our White House, "a catastrophic success." I will now recount the carefully planned steps we took to render this helper monkey more malleable:
Step 1 was to take him out during the onset of our project and force feed him hard liquor as often as possible (on the corporate credit card, of course). Being fresh out of college, young Davy made a near fatal miscalculation in assuming us a bunch of washed up old men unable to keep pace with a younger man when we are in fact chronic alcoholics with pate for livers. Night after night of heavy drinking (for Davy) quickly obliterated his mental defenses and earned him the nickname of “Pukey Davy” or “Sir Pukes A Lot,” especially after the late night stomach-pumping in Lennox Hill hospital (another story for another time perhaps).
Step 2 was to play version control tricks on him. As he believed himself to be the “editor” of our documentation with his fine Ivy League English degree, he was tasked to “purdy up the grammar-speak” in our numerous drafts. Of course we purposefully mis-numbered the drafts we sent to him, prompting cries of ‘wait I thought I already edited this’ and ‘I know I fixed this yesterday’ and ‘holy fuck I think I’m losing my mind because this is the same version as the one I saw last week’ and so forth. It was almost impossible not to burst into fits of mean spirited laughter when we overheard his doomed lamenting.
Step 3 was to invent crises. These fictitious crises usually stemmed from “the London Office” and involved last minute deliverables, changes to the documentation structure, renumbering headings, scope creep, renegotiating contracts or just about anything we could concoct, making Pukey Davy’s head spin as he desperately tried to keep track of it all. Other crises involved sending him to take notes in fake client meetings (or better yet, the wrong client meetings), sending documentation to the wrong stakeholders, misplacing his laptop when he was out running errands for us and other frustrating mindfucks.
Step 4 was to task him to complete complex diagrams or process narratives that he had no training for. An English major fresh out of school cannot cope with legacy hardware, complex trading / settlement functions by asset type or how SWIFT messaging tags are captured and processed by downstream applications. Several times I caught him sobbing quietly in the janitor closet next to our cubicles. I almost felt sorry for him when I saw him crying until I considered the big picture and what a favor we were really doing him. Then I would scream at him to wipe the tears from his face and get the fuck back to work.
Step 5 was to publicly slight, humiliate, berate and / or scream at him on a regular basis as the project progressed and we all became increasingly miserable from the queen of darkness needling the fuck out of us. It was an object lesson in the old adage “shit rolls down hill.” Pukey Davy learned his lesson well.
But the combination of these 5 steps, in retrospect, was too much for the poor boy. Davy has yet to resign. In fact, he now bellows “yes sir! No sir!” to our every request or admonition and has taken to quoting lines from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. His favorite: “The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.”
I am going to the Army / Navy store on Houston to pick up a kevlar vest this weekend.
Luckily, we have a helper monkey on our team to do the grunt work and provide hours of entertainment to boot. His name is Davy and he is a management analyst on our team, fresh out of some overrated Ivy League college. Davy is (or rather, was) a smart, hardworking, cheerful helper monkey. I don’t know who he pissed off to get stuck with us, but over the long, terrible weeks we have mentally broken him. He is a hollow eyed, twitching shell of his former self and our mission on the human resources front has been accomplished.
Destroying Davy’s spirit and ego was purely for humanitarian reasons. You see, the boy has such potential we feel that he should in no way be wasting that in the financial services industry, especially as a boot licking toady consultant. He was too smart, had too much of a spark, an intellectual curiosity, a genuine love for life. So we have done our best to drive him to quit by making him relentlessly, mercilessly miserable. Unfortunately, looking at our crushed helper monkey now, pangs of regret burble up in my black shriveled heart and I fear we may have done our job too well. It has been, in the words of our fearless leaders squatting in our White House, "a catastrophic success." I will now recount the carefully planned steps we took to render this helper monkey more malleable:
Step 1 was to take him out during the onset of our project and force feed him hard liquor as often as possible (on the corporate credit card, of course). Being fresh out of college, young Davy made a near fatal miscalculation in assuming us a bunch of washed up old men unable to keep pace with a younger man when we are in fact chronic alcoholics with pate for livers. Night after night of heavy drinking (for Davy) quickly obliterated his mental defenses and earned him the nickname of “Pukey Davy” or “Sir Pukes A Lot,” especially after the late night stomach-pumping in Lennox Hill hospital (another story for another time perhaps).
Step 2 was to play version control tricks on him. As he believed himself to be the “editor” of our documentation with his fine Ivy League English degree, he was tasked to “purdy up the grammar-speak” in our numerous drafts. Of course we purposefully mis-numbered the drafts we sent to him, prompting cries of ‘wait I thought I already edited this’ and ‘I know I fixed this yesterday’ and ‘holy fuck I think I’m losing my mind because this is the same version as the one I saw last week’ and so forth. It was almost impossible not to burst into fits of mean spirited laughter when we overheard his doomed lamenting.
Step 3 was to invent crises. These fictitious crises usually stemmed from “the London Office” and involved last minute deliverables, changes to the documentation structure, renumbering headings, scope creep, renegotiating contracts or just about anything we could concoct, making Pukey Davy’s head spin as he desperately tried to keep track of it all. Other crises involved sending him to take notes in fake client meetings (or better yet, the wrong client meetings), sending documentation to the wrong stakeholders, misplacing his laptop when he was out running errands for us and other frustrating mindfucks.
Step 4 was to task him to complete complex diagrams or process narratives that he had no training for. An English major fresh out of school cannot cope with legacy hardware, complex trading / settlement functions by asset type or how SWIFT messaging tags are captured and processed by downstream applications. Several times I caught him sobbing quietly in the janitor closet next to our cubicles. I almost felt sorry for him when I saw him crying until I considered the big picture and what a favor we were really doing him. Then I would scream at him to wipe the tears from his face and get the fuck back to work.
Step 5 was to publicly slight, humiliate, berate and / or scream at him on a regular basis as the project progressed and we all became increasingly miserable from the queen of darkness needling the fuck out of us. It was an object lesson in the old adage “shit rolls down hill.” Pukey Davy learned his lesson well.
But the combination of these 5 steps, in retrospect, was too much for the poor boy. Davy has yet to resign. In fact, he now bellows “yes sir! No sir!” to our every request or admonition and has taken to quoting lines from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. His favorite: “The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.”
I am going to the Army / Navy store on Houston to pick up a kevlar vest this weekend.