Mockery As A Business Practice

On Tuesday of this week, we had a web server go wiggy on us. It took quite a long time to track down the source of the problem (this was the reason Tuesday's post was relatively late). Without going into all the gnarly details, the basic story is this: Wonder Boy did something silly. The web site shouldn't have wigged out over it. He didn't actually strictly do anything *wrong*. Even so, the fact remains... he did the thing, and the server went wiggy. And my Tuesday was largely spent tracking down the problem.

Late in the workday Tuesday, I went up to Wonder Boy's office and started making fun of him for killing the website. He protested, which just made it more fun. Before long, his whole department was in on the discussion. It was a very interesting (and occasionally outright disgusting) conversation.

Wednesday, I got called into a meeting with my boss and others. One of the topics of discussion was the server outage from the day before.

Running through my mind even now are several ways that the silliness of Tuesday can be prevented or fixed. All of them take time. We are in the early stages of a major website redesign, and one of the things that will change will also prevent the silliness from happening again. So, we have no time to fix the short-term problem, and if we can just limp on for the next several months, the problem will go away.

My boss asked, "How can we make sure this doesn't happen again?". I replied, "Open mockery." I got blank stares from around the room. "See, what I did was I went up to their office, and I made fun of Wonder Boy mercilessly. The whole office joined in. Now, if any of them are about to do the same thing, they'll think to themselves, 'If I kill the website, Jeff will come up here and make fun of me.'"

There was much laughter. In fact, one guy was almost in tears. And my boss said, "Well, since all we need is a short-term solution, I think that'll work."

That's right... mockery is now an acceptable business practice where I work. I feel so at home here. :)