The stories of..... SWEG!!!

Unspeakably Stupid

Story #24:

Rocket Science

(Names have been changed for the usual reasons.)

Just when I thought I'd seen it all in regards to weird jobs, along came this assignment. It was a "3 to 6 month temp position" with Lockheed Martin. Yes, the same Lockheed Martin that is widely known as a defense contractor, created when aircraft manufacturer Lockheed bought Martin Marietta, the company whose ineptness caused the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

These days, in addition to designing space shuttle prototypes that don't work, Lockheed has a division called Integrated Business Solutions. They provide information services to large corporations all over the world. The particular "data center" I worked at had but one customer, sports apparel manufacturer Nike. Two hundred people work for Lockheed just providing support for Nike's Intranet, which is known as "Zero."

This job included an absolutely horrible commute, over an hour in each direction. But it paid more than any other job I'd ever had at that time. My title at Lockheed was "Web Support Analyst." My main task was to provide support for the boneheads at Nike who were responsible for their Intranet. Someone at Nike would call our help desk and, depending on the nature of the problem, a "trouble ticket" would be routed to our group, known as IAS, which stood for Infrastructure Application Support.

My supervisor, whom we'll call "Will", was the manager of IAS. He supervised about 8 of us, mostly temps. A 20-year-old shithead we'll call Snotty Eddie and I were responsible for trouble tickets having to do with Zero. A typical call would work like this: Some idiot over at Nike would be having trouble with the counter on his web page within the Nike Intranet. He'd call the help desk, the ticket would be routed to Eddie or myself, and we would call up the moron, figure out the nature of the problem, and fix his stupid counter, usually by resetting the permissions in Front Page. For this, Nike paid something like $55 per call.

Now, you would probably presume that we dealt with hundreds of calls per week. After all, there were two of us just to work these tickets. Well, you'd presume wrong. In my entire time there, the average was maybe two tickets per day. You'd rarely spend more than a half hour on any ticket, and some were as simple as calling the "customer" and letting them know the change or fix they requested had already been done.

Snotty Eddie, in the cubicle next to mine, was responsible for training me. This was rather difficult as there was almost no work to do, so there was little opportunity for training.

Now, Snotty Eddie was a typical young computer geek. His dad had owned a local information company that employed over 1000 people, which he had recently sold. Puzzlingly, he wouldn't pay for Eddie's college. Eddie's dad had been in the military most of his life, so maybe he was some sort of hard-core military asshole with a crew cut and a shitty attitude toward young people, even his own dipshit offspring. Eddie was living with his parents, a long way away from Lockheed, giving him a commute of perhaps 90 minutes each way in a trashed Volkswagen with no air conditioning. He was here to earn money to go back to the local university, where he had been attending but had to drop out due to lack of money.

Poor Snotty Eddie had no social skills, no girlfriend, and no life outside the building, and was incredibly moody. He grew tired of "training" me after a week or so, and began refusing to answer questions or respond to my e-mails.

My co-workers were all hard-core coders, with the usual social problems among geeks. A fat jerk with a sloppy beard named Lemon (damn close to his real name), who was not a temp but a full time employee, fancied himself to be the den mother of the group, and was Will's personal cocksucker. I remember at one point, he threw a fit because I apparently asked him one question too many via e-mail. He came over to my cubicle and put on his little act, which basically consisted of "me full-time, you temp." Lemon was the poster child for passive-aggressive behavior. Like most of the IAS people, he had it made here at Lockheed, but if he ever lost his job, his pretty Brazilian girlfriend would undoubtedly dump his fat ass like a hot potato.