Thoughts 21 Mar 2008 10:24 am
The only important person in the organization
I work with a self described Genius, who is the only person who does anything. –Every shop has at least one.
It wouldn’t be bad except he makes it a point to tell anybody dumb enough to listen, how much work he does and how nothing would ever get done if he didn’t do it.
If you work with one of these you are aware of their little tricks. If not. Pay attention….
Yesterday he handed me a small firewall that needed to be reconfigured. —So far so good.
He had it reset to the factory defaults, so all that was necessary was to install 2 ips. –Yeppers two IPS, 10 minutes total. One for access from our main server and one for the security video.
OKaaay. What’s wrong so far?
Well, if all it needed was a couple of IPs, why did he bring it all the way down from the other office?
Why did he hand it to me?
Why didn’t he tell me he planned on installing it today. —-Control Freak.
According to him, he is important. —The rest of us are peasants.
He also changes things in the network at will and doesn’t bother telling anyone. Much less discuss it. Not that it would do any good. —He’s right and the rest of us are idiots.
He tells everybody on the outside that he’s the system administrator and that I work for him.—- I dare this fool to give me a direct order.
Although, in a way he’s right. He has everything either configured in a way that nobody else could possibly make sense of, or he hides stuff. This applies to both hardware and software.
The configuration of some of our software is convoluted to begin with, and then he comes along and changes the install point and whatever else he feels like f***ing with.
He is also a button pusher. He will keep pushing buttons, until even he doesn’t know how he got it to work.
And the list goes on.
He is always right, and if he’s wrong, it’s somebody else’s fault or that’s not what he said.
He acts like he owns this company and gives orders about things that do not concern him.
He treats people as if they’re stupid and says so behind their backs.
His version of any incident depends entirely oh how he feels about that person.
He never documents anything.
He tells everyone to call him and only him.
Then he expects you to jump whenever he comes up with a useless job that allows him to feel like the boss…. And on and on.
With someone like this all you can do is develop a thick skin and simply consider the source.
These people find a way to make themselves indispensable to the company. —Replacing them would be expensive because of the time required for their replacement to figure out WTF they did and where they hid things.
They also make considerably less money than someone who really is as good as they delude themselves into believing they are.
Never trust these people, they are loyal only to themselves and they’ll throw you to the wolves in a heartbeat.
So laugh at their jokes, tell them thank you a lot, tell them how smart they are, and try to say nice things about them to your co-workers. (anything you say will get back to them) —Then maybe they’ll turn on someone else… Loyalty is not their strong suit.