I stopped by the Round Robin Bar on Friday evening after work, as I often do, and found Clemson slumped over this third drink.
“How’s that song go?” Clemson mused as he contemplated his glass of lager, “’Hey, bartender, one scotch, one bourbon and one beer?’ Yeah, I think that’s it.”
“Ah yes,” I responded as I took a seat next to him, a Hendrick’s Gin version of my namesake mixed drink in hand, “the inestimable Rudy Toombs. He certainly lived the life he sang about, right down to getting murdered during a robbery in Harlem. I think the John Lee Hooker version is the best, despite the fact that Amos Milburn recorded it first on a seventy-eight for Aladdin Records back in 1953 and most people have only heard the 1977 George Thorogood cover.”
“Ah yes,” he mocked as he quaffed another gulp of suds, “Tom Collins, as usual, the unquenchable fountain of knowledge. Tell me – do you manage to pick up very many women with that routine?”
“You seem rather… upset,” I ventured, ignoring his jibe. “What’s the problem?”
“Well,” he ruefully muttered, “as you know, I’m the Chief Information Officer at the International Brotherhood of Fudge Packers, AFL-CIO, at their headquarters here in Washington DC. In June, after months of jawboning top management about it, I finally managed to get their permission to port our entire IT infrastructure to Microsoft Cloud Services. Two weeks ago, we went live with Office 365 supporting our organizational infrastructure, configured in an enterprise architecture integrated with Dynamics CRM Online in a client-facing mode with separate portals for our members, vendors, partners, labor, businesses and the public. By last Tuesday, we had completed conversion to Corporate Hotmail, performed a total transfer of all our PC hard drive contents to SkyDrive accounts and uploaded the union’s entire vital records database to the Microsoft Cloud. Then, on Thursday…”
“The whole thing crashed,” I interjected, “everywhere in the world, making you and every other CIO who converted their organizations to Microsoft Cloud Services look like an incompetent, ill-informed, ignorant idiot.”
“Probably,” he conceded as he downed another gulp of beer.
“Like a bumbling, fumbling, stumbling buffoon,” I volunteered.
“Uh-huh,” he grudgingly agreed.
“Like a clumsy, cone-headed, cataleptic clown,” I continued.
“Yeah,” he slowly nodded, staring at his rapidly emptying glass.
“Like a grit-eatin’, nail-bitin’, glue-sniffin’, scab-pickin’, butt-scratchin’…
“Okay!” Clemson interrupted, a bit too loudly.
“… egg-hatchin’ pencil-neck geek.”
“Right,” he shot back acidly. “And pardon me for saying so, but I think maybe you’re enjoying this part of our conversation a bit too much!”
“Just getting the facts straight, that’s all,” I assured him.
“Facts?” Clemson snapped. “Okay, how about these facts? The entire outage lasted about three hours. Microsoft guarantees 99.9 percent availability. For the outage to have violated that guarantee, it would have had to have lasted eight hours and forty-six minutes!”
“Which, while it is not likely to be a show-stopper for your union,” I pointed out, “is more than enough time to put an accounting firm, engineering practice or medical clinic right out of business. Let’s face it, if your data in the Cloud is as vulnerable to a power failure as your data stored in your own server room…”
“Ah-hah!” Clemson jumped in. “There we go! Facts! The fact is, the outage wasn’t caused by a power failure! It was caused by a DNS crash!”
“Interesting,” I remarked, “given that, while everybody can understand the concept of a power failure, practically nobody but people like us know what a DNS crash is. How convenient, then, for Microsoft – and people such as yourself, I might add – to have a nice piece of technical mumbo-jumbo to toss around in front of the rubes. That way, when people like you have to explain the outage to your top management and board of directors, you can wave your arms around and talk about ‘DNS routers,’ ‘DNS nodes,’ and ‘DNS IP address management,’ all of which sounds really fearsome and complicated – not like coming home at night to a pile of spoiled wet vegetables because you forgot to plug in the crock pot before you left in the morning, which, after all, is the level of bone-headed stupidity implied by the phrase ‘power failure.’”
“But you have to admit,” Clemson challenged, “that you can’t prove it wasn’t a DNS problem!”
“No,” I concurred, “I can’t. And I can’t prove it wasn’t caused by squirrels nesting in the wiring closets and chewing on the fiber optic cables, either. Nor can I prove that some earwax-eating network goober at Microsoft was so distracted by playing Farmville on Facebook, he ran the wrong update script; nor, for that matter, can I prove the whole Microsoft Cloud collapsed like the end of an ineptly played Super Stacker game because it, like every software product suite Microsoft has ever offered to the public, is nothing but a poorly interfaced collection of substandard modules cobbled together from components that are badly constructed imitations of the real thing.”
“Hey, look,” Clemson requested as he gazed around the bar looking for anyone who might have overheard me, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d lay off the Microsoft bigot routine, okay? It just so happens, the union pension fund owns a huge chunk of Microsoft stock.”
“They could sell it,” I suggested. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about being seen in public with someone who thinks Microsoft is nothing but a gang of screw-ups, sycophants, lackeys, toadies and crooks.”
“Shhh! Keep it down, will you?” Clemson beseeched in an anxious whisper. “The union bought Microsoft back in October of 2007 – at thirty-six! Do you have any idea how bad that investment would look if the pension fund sold off its stake in Microsoft now?”
“But how,” I gently chided, “do you suppose it’s going to look when the much vaunted, highly touted and widely advertised Microsoft Cloud Services crash again – harder and longer than they did on Thursday?”
“That’s… that’s… impossible!” Clemson insisted. “What happened on Thursday was a complete fluke… a statistical anomaly… an utterly improbable aberration! It couldn’t happen again, not in a million years! I mean, look at Microsoft – look at all the people who work there, all the hardware they own; look at all the money they have! How could Microsoft possibly be wrong about anything?”
“Windows ME?,” I recited, “Microsoft TV? The Zune? The KIN? Windows Phone 7? Pen Computing? The SPOT watch? The Microsoft Tablet? The MSN Media Network? MS Live Meeting? Vista? Bing? Seriously, Clemson, can you tell me the name of one single, solitary Microsoft product – besides the Windows operating system, which in the beginning was at least half-decent because most of it was stolen from Apple – that the company actually charged money for when it was released, and isn’t a woofing, flea-bitten, toothless, mangy dog that doesn’t totally suck?”
Clemson killed his beer, summoned the waiter, ordered a Jager Bomb, flinched with irritation when told that there was no Red Bull, switched the order to a Jagermeister boilermaker, considered the waiter’s suggestion of Knob Creek instead of Jagermeister, took it, sat there thinking until his order was delivered, drank off an inch of beer, dropped in the shot glass of bourbon, drank another inch off that and finally spoke. “Microsoft Office.”
“Excuse me,” I reminded him, “but I specifically said, and I quote, a product that ‘isn’t a woofing, flea-bitten, toothless, mangy dog that doesn’t totally suck.’ Have you ever successfully compiled a Word document that exceeds one hundred pages and includes tables, digital images, formulas, format changes, section breaks and embedded graphics without having at least one major incident where the product locked up and quit functioning? Have you ever completed an Excel workbook with more than ten pages exceeding one hundred rows with references between pages that didn’t require you to send at least one automated error report to Microsoft and then reboot? Is it the case that you have never constructed a data model in Access that is too big for the report writer to handle, or even print out the relationship diagram? Are you saying you have never lost your work on a PowerPoint presentation?”
“No, no, no, and no,” he sighed. “I’m the CIO. I never have to write long, complicated documents in Word. I never have to prepare huge interlocked Excel workbooks. I never have to construct data models, much less produce reports on them, and I have my secretary prepare all the PowerPoint presentations I give.”
“Understood,” I replied. “In that case, has anyone who works for you ever complained about how lame Microsoft Office is?”
“As CIO,” Clemson explained, “I have a very strict policy about bad news, which is that I don’t want to hear any.”
“You’re a manager who doesn’t want to hear any bad news?” I sought, incredulously, to ascertain. “You mean you… sanction… your subordinates for telling you things you don’t want to hear?”
“Yeah,” he confirmed, “so they don’t, if they know what’s good for them. Look, Collins, I went to Yale, okay? And these people that work for me, frankly, they’re all state university maggots, and I don’t want to hear about problems from maggots. I want to hear about solutions. I don’t want to hear about issues from maggots, either. I want to hear about issue resolutions. And I don’t want to hear about obstacles, ethics or regulations from maggots, for that matter; I want to hear about how great I am and how good I look, because those are the things that matter to my boss. Because that’s what my staff are there for – to serve me. Ask any manager who graduated from an Ivy League school, and he’ll tell you the same thing.”
“Then why,” I innocently inquired, “are you here at the Round Robin Bar getting snockered?”
“Because… uh… um… well, obviously, because my staff let me down,” he groused, “and I’m really, really, [expletive] at them!”
“Why?” I asked, half suspecting the answer.
“Because,” he snorted derisively, “not one of them had the guts to talk me out of adopting Microsoft Cloud Services; and then just look at what happened! Damn it, I think on Monday, I’m going to have to fire somebody!”
“You know,” I observed, “regardless of that, right now, I’d say, somebody like you ought to apply for a position at Microsoft.”
Clemson’s eyes brightened considerably at the suggestion. “[Expletive]! You really think so?”
“Absolutely,” I assured him.
“How come?” Clemson wondered, a bit nonplussed.
“Because,” I declared, “it seems to me, you have exactly the type of management style that would take you right to the top at Microsoft.”
“But,” he fretted, “are there any openings at the moment?”
“Something tells me,” I speculated, “that there are going to be several management positions opening very soon at Microsoft Cloud Services.”
“Okay,” Clemson agreed, slurring his words slightly, “good thinking. First thing Monday, I’ll arrange an interview with Microsoft. Then, I’ll find somebody to blame the Cloud Services migration on – and fire them.”
“You mean,” I gasped, “you’re going to lead your top management team and your organization’s board of directors to believe that one of your staff was behind a failed policy that you, yourself sponsored and thereby sacrifice that innocent person on the altar of your ambition as an undeserving scapegoat for your own shortcomings?”
“Of course,” he grinned. “That’s about the very first thing I learned at Yale – when to do that and how. It’s called management theory.”
“Clemson, my friend,” I assured him, “something tells me that Steve Ballmer going to absolutely love you.”