Non-IT WTFs: how not to run a party



  • So, the same week I joined the company, several other people did. So we all went through the company induction process together. I'm sure you've all been on them, where you learn how the founders were insane geniuses that built the company out of wooden nickels and a cardboard box and that everything is lovely rainbows and unicorns pooping rainbows as well, not to mention the usual rounds of health and safety, not to mention the non-harassment rules and stuff. That, interestingly, isn't the WTF.

    One of the people that joined that week was a new team leader in a business critical department, answering to the head of department and Ops director on a regular basis.

    And a couple of weeks after he started, he had a party at his swanky pad in Brighton. I wasn't in his department and other than saying 'hi' in recognition of mutual suffering of induction, we never interacted anyway, so I didn't get an invite. As it happens, that was probably for the best.

    The Friday night was the night of the party. He mysteriously didn't show up on Monday. Or Tuesday. Or any day after that.

    You see, he had invited all his co-workers including his boss to the party and they'd all turned up. I have it on good authority that while at this party, he was sat on the sofa, snorting coke (the powdered kind not the sugary kind).

    Snorting coke might be a fun evening's entertainment for some. Doing it with co-workers - especially your subordinates - around might be risky. Doing it with your boss in the room is just WTF, because his boss really didn't appreciate that kind of thing and repaid the invite to the party with an invite to the job centre come Monday morning.



  • What kind of drugs do you have to be on to do something that stup..........oh.



  • Anecdotal reports indicate he genuinely did not understand the problem.



  • Context...was this in the 80s?



  • No. This was 2003.



  • So, is the UK 20 years behind the US then?



  • Oh no. I'm sure this was going on back in the 1980s here too. This wasn't in some swanky London office, though, this was a fair-to-middling company in a fair-to-middling town. 1 year lag for every 2 miles out of London perhaps.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Arantor said:

    1 year lag for every 2 miles out of London perhaps.

    So @PJH is centuries away from it?



  • Time and space dilation is a complex beast.

    I be nowt but a c'untry bumpkin.



  • Ah...Sometimes the good senses gene skips a generation. Others have it but it might not be pronounced enough to matter. But, being new and doing coke around your coworkers you only barely have grown accostumed to is perverse.

    What type of company did these insane founders create?



  • Sub prime mortgage lender. I forget exactly which department this guy was supposed to be in charge of but it wasn't any near mine.



  • That would explain the cocain. Sub-prime is back. I heard that this time it is running rampant in auto-financing.



  • Sub prime was a WTF the first time around. I started just before my 20th birthday, and was still way too naive to realise the WTFery inherent in the system. I left aged 25, very much less naive and in hindsight it should have been obvious that it's a house of cards. In fact, it's a house of cards in a suspiciously pyramid shape if you stop to think about it.



  • You understand leverage pretty well.

    We will, at some point, pay back those glorious stock market gains. The higher we go the more risk gets compounded. People say we are in a bubble. I don't know, but here is a market quote I like.

    (Paraphrasing)...

    Market crashes: You need to decide, do you want to look like a fool before the crash, or after?

    Filed under: Thermo-nuclear subPrime explosions are fun!



  • @Arantor said:

    I left aged 25, very much less naive and in hindsight it should have been obvious that it's a house of cards. In fact, it's a house of cards in a suspiciously pyramid shape if you stop to think about it.

    Yeah, but so is our entire economy, and no one stops to think about that, so I suppose you can be forgiven.



  • Oh, not exactly, at least not directly in our case.

    A large amount of the initial investment funding was straight up nearly-LIBOR loans from another bank. After that it was largely about securitising the loans already made, i.e. selling them off in batches to other people willing to accept the risk. Which is fine all the time there's someone else to keep buying the debt.

    I remember early on being told that "our current default rate is 19% and that's good for our industry"... considering some of the loans that I saw being approved... I'm amazed it was only 19%.

    To a point our economy can work on the concept of shared IOU notes, it's only when you start trading on the future value of IOU notes that things start to be murky.

    When the dominoes started to fall and I got made redundant with a reasonable package, I took it and ran as fast as I could.


  • Banned

    @chubertdev said:

    What kind of drugs do you have to be on to do something that stup.

    quaaludes


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @chubertdev said:

    Context...was this in the 80s?

    70s would have made more sense.



  • @Arantor said:

    ... dominoes started to fall...

    It's our own fault for not ordering enough pizza.



  • It usually was, actually. They had a habit of buying pizza for workers who stayed late except despite that it was 'for dinner' it usually ended up as one slice per person.



  • @Arantor said:

    ... despite that it was 'for dinner' it usually ended up as one slice per person.

    That's just a lie. I thought it was standard practise to have a pizza per person as a light dinner before the actual dinner.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Shoreline said:

    That's just a lie. I thought it was standard practise to have a pizza per person as a light dinner before the actual dinner.

    Depends on the size, doesn't it?


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