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support from below
Tuesday, March 23 1999
I learned today that, for an hour or two, the insane firing wave at my company reached all the way up to the Director of Web Development himself. He would have been put on a 90 day furlough except for the fact that all the Director of Web Development's underlings (me included, though I was never consulted) thought this idea (hatched by the Grand Pooh Bah and his henchmen-like "team" of "coaches") was pure insanity. The story is that some two weeks back, a small group of Web Development "team members" were pulled aside and told that they were about to have added burdens and responsibilities and did they think they could handle it. When they learned that the Director of Web Development was, for all intents in purposes, about to get the ax over a "personality conflict," they raised up such a fuss that the Grand Pooh Bah and his sycophantic henchmen were forced to reconsider. This proves an important political fact: support comes from both above and below in a hierarchical business structure. The company depends on the good morale of the people at the bottom, and bosses can't piss them off but so much. Another sort of support of which I'm aware is the kind that develops horizontally between people of equal rank; this is the sort of support that I have actively cultivated throughout my short career with the firm. With my tools and robots, I have widespread support with a majority of my Web Development colleagues. More recently, even people in marketing have begun to use my tools.
Learning of the rough travails of the Director of Web Development has given me a warm feeling towards him. He's been a hard-driving but benevolent boss, allowing me wide latitude to work on projects that interest me. I'd hate to see him fired over a "personality conflict."
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