Reply to post: Bah!

Bah!

I was getting no respect. I had finally transferred into an SA department - my dream job - but the two managers in charge rubber-roomed me. One day, one of them told a story from twenty years before in which I had refused to let him and the other manager use my laser printer. I looked puzzled and told him that I had never, in any of the many different departments I had worked for had a personal laser printer assigned to me. I had a think and remembered that there *was* a large laserjet in my general area, but it was owned by a different set of Unix SAs and they wouldn't share with *anyone*. I began to see why I was getting no respect. So I got mad, then even.

We were all called into a vendor meeting a week later when the vendor re-staffed. I usually responded to the "round-the-table intro" with "I'm Stevie, I work for Barney." Not this time. I gave them the unabridged history of Stevie in that enterprise, starting with my recruitment by Grumman Data Systems ("the same guys who did the telemetry on the moon shots") as a DBA consultant, my head-hunting by government organization A two years in, my brief move into bleeding edge internet start-up territory five years after that when I got bored and they tried to demote me in a "restructuring", my re-recruitment by well-known and well-loved by all colleague ("what would it take to get you to come back"), my subsequent consultant work in mainframe O/S configuration and maintenance, and my transference to government organization B. I finished up by saying that the original reason for my being there was to build out the infrastructure that got us the annual Federal monies we needed to continue operations, and that in a very real sense, everyone round that table owed the bread they put on their kitchen tables each day to code I wrote in 1984 that was still powering the business model 35 years on.

You should have seen the bugged-out eyeballs and gaping mouths.

And the next day there was a palpable change in attitude from my snotty young co-workers and the two "printer story" managers. Shortly after I went to the director (who was also in the room the day before) and asked for a transfer, and got one.