Quite a few years ago now, in the late 1990s and very early on in my career, I used to work for a enterprise that helped customers of certain retail stores manage their finances. My role was as a sort-of compliance officer, ensuring that the staff who dealt with customers were following the rules.
If they messed it up, it was a big problem, and could potentially impact the customer's borrowing score, result in them defaulting on payments, and even end up in court. I took my job pretty seriously.
The enterprise was not particularly well-run from a management perspective. They'd made a lot of money very quickly, and had grown from a handful of people in a garage to a four-storey office building in the CBD within the space of a year and a half.
There wasn't a great deal in the way of policy or process framework, so I had to develop a lot of the tools to do my job myself. This involved some programming – a basic system to track what I was doing, link to the (extensive) rule-set, and automate some of the more tedious reporting. It would also track how long I was spending on each task, so that I could see about which elements I could streamline.
Now, I was quite proud of this system, and called it Hendrix (as I am a massive Jimi Hendrix fan), and it used to play about 5 seconds of the instrumental version of Little Wing when it started up. As I had my own little room (cupboard), this never used to annoy anyone. I can geek out about that type of stuff.
At this point – before corporate IT became rather more rigid – I used to write a lot of my own tools. I was the only person who was using Hendrix, and it was a tool just for me. My manager – the archetypal middle manager – decided that because it allowed you to quickly reference which rules applied to which situation, it should be rolled out to all staff.
Now, I had previously considered this, but I argued that I couldn't guarantee that it would be fit for task, because I'd designed it for my own use… and I'd need to make some changes first… but he rolled it out anyway without me even getting a chance to tweak it.
He got a Team Player of the Week award for introducing a tool to make life easier for front-line staff. In his acceptance speech (this was a big rah-rah thing each week for the enterprise) he thanked his manager. I didn't even get a mention.
Then, a two weeks later, he realised that I'd been recording how long I had been working on certain tasks within the program.
Now, I'd realised fairly quickly that this part of the program was a little too detailed, and I didn't really care too much about every single task within each incident… so I just used it to record how long I spent on the entire incident, rather than each part of the incident.
My manager invited me to a meeting about Hendrix, no details given, and I attended thinking it was going to be a list of requested features… only to find out that the head of HR was there, and I was being given a written warning for "falsifying timekeeping".
Because each customer interaction was a certain length, my manager had decided that THIS was what I should be recording… and not how long I was spending listening to, analysing, checking, and reporting on the interaction.
Remember, this is a tool that I had designed for my own use, and it was not being used to calculate how much I was being paid, or whether I was doing enough work during the day or not. (There was nothing in place for that at all.) – I had not made the records public – he'd found them in a file on the server that only he and I had access to. Nobody else was supposed to even have this tool.
I argued this, and was told that it wasn't up to me, and I was getting a warning regardless. It got really quite heated and unpleasant, though I got the impression that the head of HR was a little embarrassed about the whole thing.
They said, however, that if I wanted to consult a lawyer, I was quite within my rights to do so. It was at this point that I was rather smugly able to state that I could get two lawyers there within the hour… as both my parents were practicing, and my mother was – in point of fact – an employment lawyer. I realise that this is a bit of a deus ex machina, but it only has partial bearing on the story.
Suddenly there was a completely different attitude from my manager. There was an attempt to roll-back the issue and turn it into a suggestion "that perhaps I should be a bit more careful with my time-keeping in future", but I was pretty angry at this point.
I pointed out that my software had been rolled out to all staff against my wishes. I was told that this wasn't up to me, as it was enterprise Intellectual Property… until I advised them that:
- I'd written it in my own time, at home on my own computer
- It was plugging into the official government rule-set, and not the corporate intranet one
- I had not confirmed it 'fit for general release' at all
- I had received special dispensation from IT to install it on a single work computer … mine
- and I would require them to pay a license fee for anything beyond this.
To be fair, this would have been tied up in court for a long time, and I've got no idea whether I'd have been successful, so in the end I relented. If they wanted to use Hendrix… well, I guess they could. I just made sure that Little Wing would play for one second longer on start-up for every week the software was in use.
Then I quit the following Monday, and was working for another enterprise by the Monday after that.
Three or four months later I got a contact number call from my former manager asking to come 'fix the problems with my software'. He hung up when I quoted him my consultant fees. I don't know why IT weren't able to figure it out (it was just a setting in a text file. Not at all hard to find.)
A friend who remained in the enterprise tells me they continued to use Hendrix for a whole year. The mornings in the call-centre were apparently horrifying, with Little Wing playing for around a minute every time someone started a new shift.Sometimes it would play on 20 computers at once, few seconds apart – on tinny PC speakers that they were unable (due to IT) to mute.