Be Careful What You Ask For!
When I’m being interviewed, I’m always asked what I’m looking for in a company. In my in-side-the-head voice say: “I want to make a butt load of money due to my genius, work about 3 hours a day and have my teams adore and worship me for my knowledge and guts.” But what generally comes out is: “I want to work with nice people…..”
What is bothering you? The nice people.
Isn’t that what you wanted? Yes
So what’s the problem? You have nice people, just like you asked. Wait! Maybe we should define ‘nice’! (Ah-ha, the $3.50 I spent on the coffee while reading a USA Today introspective on proto-analysis is now paying big dividends!)
What is nice? Let’s make a list of nice attributes, after all we’re project managers and lists are our life!
Nice is:
People not being deliberate pains-in-the-ass
People who smile appropriately
People to offer help and suggestions rather than demand help
People who can stop working long enough to engage in occasional social banter.
So, are the people ‘nice’?
Yep, they certainly are!
Then what is the problem?
Wait; is there such a thing as being too nice? Ahhhhh-haaaa…
Yes, they smile way too much! No one is that happy! Have they missed scheduled medications or just waiting for an opportune time to cook off some crystalline devils dandruff? Crap, these folks wouldn’t say shit if they had a burning bag of it on their desks! What kind of games are they playing? Do they have something so hideous in their pasts that they can’t stop smiling as the reoccurring memories are just too delicious?
How does this effect the day’s progress?
One nice guy hijacks all conversations within ear shot. No matter what the focus of the discussion. This nice person will jumps in commandeer the conversation and wander off in the weirdest direction! Seriously, he smiles and injects: “yeah, but, you know what if…” And continues to describe or construct a straw-man or a contention that is so full of crap, you wonder how he could pile it that high and it not slump over due to gravity. Then, the other nice folks, blindly follow the course and respond in a children-of-the-corn type monotone: “no, I never thought that…’. And off we go!
By then I just want to shove hot burning spikes deep into my ears and block it all out…
Silence is it really golden?
Yes – I will be talking to another PM (prairie-dog cubes; no privacy) about an unresolved issue when a nice person turns around in their chair and offers unsolicited, unwanted, untimely, uninformed advice on how they would handle the situation. The nice person never understands the reality that if you wanted their input, you would have come to them in the first place...
How many pleasant conversations can you have about the lovely freakin’ weather? I think I’m working with Stepford-Children-Of-The-Corn people, except these clones are just comical looking out of shape real people.
I am too the point of standing up on my desk, dropping my pants and while the cold hard winds of truth blow though my nether regions; burst out with a melody of coarse expletives that would make a longshoreman blush! Just to bring a bit of worldly grit into play!
