(cue spine-tingling scream and sound of zombies scraping at the door)

After working for several other companies, John would like to look back on BodgeCo with fond memories, just as one looks back on those lazy hot summers of childhood. But he can't - his time there was just too surreal, his experiences too crazy. Those childhood summers were never that hot, and BodgeCo wasn't up to much either.

Take, for example, John's special birthday weekend. One super-hot August (almost as hot as the summers of his childhood), he realised that his birthday was approaching. Time to celebrate, he decided: the previous year he had not bothered to cheerily drink to the fact that he was one year closer to old age and a failing memory. So, he dutifully informed his boss Stimpy that on the weekend of the fifteenth of August, he would be having a dinner party (a murder mystery). Therefore, he absolutely could not be expected to work that weekend.

"Could you at least take the mobile phone and do customer support over the weekend?" prompted Stimpy, surprised at John's rebellious demand that he "have the weekend off".

"Sorry no," John replied. "Anyway, I'm giving you over two weeks' notice so I'm sure you can prepare in advance."

So John began preparing for his dinner party. His then-girlfriend had volunteered to do all the cooking, so all that was left was to invite the guests and look forward to the big day.

He decided to invite a couple of friends from BodgeCo: Randy Bill (an easy-going fellow who would spend literally hours on the phone to each client, as he did not like to offend them by being the one to end the conversation), and Tory Girl (the cheerfully neurotic support manager who never dressed in anything but Conservative Blue). He made it especially clear to both of them that as this was a murder mystery, each person had a specific character and therefore their presence was vital to the success of the whole evening.

"Yes John, we understand, no problem," they said in unison. Grrr.

On the Friday of his birthday weekend, John got a call from Stimpy. Stimpy was calling from his mobile phone in a hotel room in Frankfurt.

"John," Stimpy explained breathlessly, "I need you in this weekend. Our clients have said that they won't buy our system unless we add some new functions... hold on..." (pause, crackle, followed by the sound of Stimpy opening a suitcase and pulling out a sheaf of papers) "... okay... we need.... a new e-mail system so the managers can send memos to the floor staff, a new report to show monthly sales in a different format to the existing monthly report - same info basically, they just want the columns in a different order - and... they want a screen-saver. You'll need to write a text-based screensaver - you know, bouncing blocks or something. And they're desperate to get all this for Monday morning."

"Stimpy," John began, "I don't really know where to begin. Basically, no. Sorry, I can't. You know I'm busy this weekend, and this isn't exactly early notice. It's seven o'clock on Friday evening, for Christ's sake!"

"You don't seem to understand," Stimpy exploded furiously, "I'm flogging my guts out to keep my Dad's business surviving out here. Don't you understand I'm scared? They won't buy the system unless we make these changes by Monday. Now stop giving me that silly talk, and get this stuff written by Monday."

John paused. He began to realise that his job would probably be over soon. "Stimpy," he said, choosing his words carefully, "I cannot work this weekend. You already knew that. The changes you mentioned don't sound particularly earth-shattering. The clients will survive if they don't have a new screen-saver by Monday. Besides, they'll be running Windows with a DOS window, so they can just switch on one of the Windows screen-savers. What sort of e-mail system did they want?"

"I don't know," Stimpy growled, "they just want an e-mail system. The details don't matter."

"They'll matter on Monday. This always happens. I'll write your stupid program, then the clients will see it and decide they want it to behave differently. Then I'll have to re-write it. It's the last time, Stimpy. From now on nothing gets written without a functional spec."

"I recognise that dangerous talk. You've been talking to Malcolm again, haven't you. He always goes on about this functional specification crap. It just slows us down, John. Don't talk to Malcolm any more: we can do without him. So, are you with me this weekend?" He hesitated. "I'll need you to man the support phones as well, as Sharon had to go to a wedding or something."

"Stimpy, really, I can't. I've already made long-standing arrangements. This has all been arranged for ages. Bloody hell, I knew this would happen."

There was a dangerous pause. "So," Stimpy snarled, his voice sounding gravelly over the crackling mobile phone signal, "I'm on my own then. It's come to this. Time was when I could trust you, John. Not any more, evidently." He hung up, leaving John to wonder if he still had a job. He also wondered if he really cared any more.

He recalled an earlier conversation he had had with Stimpy - the last time he had tried to book a weekend to himself. "These are lean times, John, " Stimpy had explained patiently. "You have to pull your weight around here; I could replace you with a click of my fingers." (He clicked his fingers to illustrate his point, of course). "The job market is very, very poor with this recession. Nobody wants programmers any more: not with all these 4GLs around nowadays."

The following evening, both Randy Bill and Tory Girl failed to turn up at John's murder mystery. He made frantic calls to track them down, and discovered that they had both been hauled into BodgeCo's office to work late. Randy Bill was busy hacking a report program in an attempt to get it modified ready for Monday (it would receive no testing, of course: it would just go straight out on-site, and Randy Bill would pray that it would work and that his name would not be mud). Tory Girl was manning (womanising?) the support phones, so that Sharon (another support person) could attend her friend's sister's wedding.

Stimpy's Wild Bender

The nature of BodgeCo's business was that a large proportion of the clients could be said to be "batting for the other team". They were putting from the rough; old man lobster was playing with his crabs again. Not that there is anything politically-correctly wrong with that: but what surprised John was Stimpy's hypocritical way of sucking up to his gay clients in an extremely "gay wannabe, I'll do anything to get a sniff of your wad" manner.

Rage, the permanently stressed human resources director, had decided to "bring aboard" her best friend, Wilbur Crevice (a failed opera singer and failed male model). Due to Wilbur's association with Rage, he was brought in as a manager - first as manager of development. He was swiftly and violently rejected by all the developers (even the youngest and weakest), as he had not the faintest idea what development was about. So, Rage persuaded Stimpy and Mr Griffiths to let Wilbur be the Sales and Marketing Manager. This he was a lot better at, as the clientele took to him like a swarm of kids around an open marmite jar.

The open campness of Wilbur Crevice soon began to make sense to the bemused staff of BodgeCo - or rather, it began to make sense why the BodgeCo directors had thought Wilbur would be a suitable marketeer. Wilbur made a popular mark on BodgeCo's small but potentially affluent client base. He would often pull Stimpy (who took surprisingly little persuasion) to join his new client-friends on their wild drinking nights. Stimpy joined in with gay abandon. On one particularly wild, fruitful night of "corporate entertainment", Stimpy found that his thousandth daily curry in a row had disagreed with him violently that evening. He rushed out of the nightclub where he had been dancing, found a side alley, and dropped his trousers just in time to give the road a new layer of molten asphalt. The next day he told this story to the BodgeCo programmers with unnatural enthusiasm.

On a client-pulling trip to Amsterdam one week, Wilbur persuaded Stimpy to join him and the client-friends in a club which had a so-called "blue room". In this pitch-dark room, you could grab or be grabbed by any male member, who would proceed to "have his way" with you. Recounting the story later (again with marked enthusiasm), Stimpy insisted that he had "chickened out" and had not gone in, there being apparently a limit to the extent he would go to please his clients and therefore earn their money. We all still wonder whether he really did back out that evening.

Meet the Team

The first installment of this epic was intended to highlight bad management practices. The intention was not to poke fun at any of the individuals involved: this latest installment is different, as you have probably noticed already. The vein of "raw talent" at BodgeCo is just too rich to be ignored. So, guys and gals of BodgeCo: this is nothing personal, I just want to have some fun at your expense. Cruel, ooh, I know!

Let us resume this tale of cruel but honest openness with a mention of BodgeCo's longest-running employee, Albert. Poor old Albert, the original scared family man, should have spent his life working at IBM, or perhaps EDS, or any other monolith of nine-to-five job security and forgotten, Dilbert-esque cubicles. Instead he came to work at BodgeCo, having been poached by Mr Griffiths to be the "star programmer" in his new start-up.

Albert was already paupered by an on-going mortgage and a coven of expensive, surprisingly ugly children. So scared was harmless old Albert of losing his job, that the BodgeCo directors felt safe in their ability to take great advantage of his fear, and work him to the bone every day and night, and at weekends. They would have invented extra days in the week if it meant they could keep Albert there for longer.

John never got to see Albert's wife, but frequently heard him apologising to her over the phone (every evening, in fact) when the stern director of BodgeCo, Mr Griffiths, coerced Albert into working late yet again.

Obviously the angry wife (plus a swarm of starving kids) would be waiting at home for their man to eventually return, late each evening. It was a tragic picture, and Albert must never have received the loving he deserved when he returned home, exhausted from a long day of being scared. He seemed happy enough, though, to bridge this emotional gulf with a mirror and a stash of Internet porn which he kept "hidden" on his work PC. The mirror formed part of an ingenious plan to spy on the stream of female temps who would be seated at the desk behind him. As each temp innocently went about her daily business, Albert would be coyly adjusting his mirror to get the best view. When confronted about his indiscretion, his most common response would be to giggle and claim that he just used the mirror as an early warning system in case Mr Griffiths was approaching his desk.

One rainy Thursday, suddenly, without warning, the product which Albert was working on (a surprisingly buggy medical system) was sold to a company which was based on the other side of London. Albert was sold along with the product - he had no choice but to obey, after all - and was suddenly faced with a two-hour commute to East London every morning. To the best of John's knowledge, Albert is still there, more scared than ever as his new manager turned out to be a bigger tyrant than Mr Griffiths ever was.

Another victim of the BodgeCo tyranny - but also very much a victim of himself - was Bunny, a thirty-year old mummys-boy who gained his first programming job at BodgeCo, the poor lamb. He lasted for a surprisingly lengthy four months, during which he churned out at least one whole program, which later needed to be re-written. His only defender was Albert, who would take Bunny under his proverbial raincoat and insist, with steadily decreasing conviction, that somewhere within Bunny there was a real worker just waiting for the right moment to come bounding to the surface.

Perhaps Albert's stubbornness was because he was the one who had interviewed Bunny, and recommended to the company that they employ him. Bunny never really hit it off with the other staff - not due to anything he could consciously avoid; he just tended to say the wrong things, bringing his penny-pinching nature to the fore. For example, he once asked John where the cheap shoe shops are, causing John to look down at his feet and wonder if his own shoes really looked that cheap. The next day, Bunny came into work sporting a brand new pair of "Shoe Warehouse" PVC kickers.

On another occassion, Bunny asked Richard Barking (the eminently loud and over-worked technical support consultant who would often work through the night, grabbing a couple of hours' sleep on the office floor) if he had change for a ten pound note. Richard counted out his loose change, and found that he had in total seven pounds and fifty pence.

"That's okay," said Bunny, "I'll just make do with that, and you can pay me back the two pounds fifty tomorrow." The next day, he collared Richard as soon as he walked into the office, and demanded his two pounds fifty back.

"I don't have it right now," Richard said apologetically, "I'll have to go to the cash-point for you at lunchtime."

"Not good enough," Bunny growled, hopping from foot to foot. "I want my money back now."

Eventually, just to get some peace, Richard went out to the nearest cashpoint, and returned twenty minutes later with Bunny's two pounds fifty (having found change for a pound from someone in the street).

The promised "worker from inside" never emerged, of course, and Mr Griffiths gleefully allocated himself the task of firing poor Bunny. He summoned the budding worker-in-waiting to the shadowy conference room, and explained to Bunny that as he had barely lifted a finger in the last four months, the company had no option but to let him go. Bunny proceeded to burst into tears, and, between wracking sobs, complained: "Please don't fire me. If I'd known you were going to give me the push, I would have made much more effort!"

The Nightmare Continues

For two years that concluded John's "Crap Managers" story. Now, shockingly, a new story has popped into existence...

>>>Next Chapter: BodgeCo Part Three
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