Human Inertia

This is when I worked for Galactic Invertebrates, which was an innovator in the field of bending over to a**holes with money. As I once wrote regarding GI,

The very name of the company heralds its commitment to going to unprecedented lengths to seek out new life forms and bend over for them. You remember when scientists found water on Mars and there was a buzz about how Mars might once have supported life? Well, GI immediately put together an expedition which traveled to Mars, went back in time ten million years, scoured the surface of the planet until they found a small patch of primitive lichens, and bent over for them. That's how good they are.

Human Inertia was paid six figures to prevent anything upsetting from happening at Galactic Invertebrates, such as "work" or "productivity." His motto was that if you haven't done anything, then you haven't done anything wrong. Human Inertia was a WMD (Well Meaning Dufus) who, like George W. Bush, had an MBA. (That should be good for a few Google searches).

Human Inertia was my direct supervisor, which meant that I spent a lot of time explaining my job to him and walking around him. Every week we would have a team meeting at which I would tell him what he had failed to prevent me from doing over the course of the previous week. He would throw some additional obstacles at me, which I would ridicule or ignore, depending on my mood. One time he told me that I wasn't really allowed to work from home two days a week, to which I responded, "Okay, but I'm going to keep doing it." I smiled to indicate that it had been a good talk.

At the end of the meeting we'd review the Action Items that had been assigned. Occasionally Human Inertia would take an Action Item, just for laughs, like that time I pretended to be lifting an 80' tall bronze statue of a horse.

If productivity was measured in PowerPoint presentations, Human Inertia would have single-handedly skewed the GDP. He had slides for every possible made-up statistic or unlikely hypothetical situation. There was virtually no correlation between anything on the slides and anything that actually existed. There were slides for profitability, customer satisfaction, gnomes, unicorns.... Eventually the presentation would devolve into a impenetrable Mobius strip of self-reference: "Here's a graph showing the ratio of time I spend doing PowerPoint Presentations to time time spent doing actual work; here's one showing the percentage of graphs in this presentation containing pure fabricated nonsense; here's a graph showing the alarming escalation of the the pointlessness of these graphs...."

At one point there was a plan under discussion that involved getting approval from Human Inertia before starting any projects. I was astounded that they would consider such a plan, because it would essentially prevent any work from ever being done. Every proposal would languish in limbo forever, collecting dust on Human Inertia's desk. I was all ready to raise a big fuss about this new process being completely unworkable when I remembered a crucial fact: Before it could be enacted, the approval process itself would have to be approved by Human Inertia. Needless to say, that was another horse that didn't get lifted. This would not be the last time that I would be spared by the H.I.P. (Human Inertia Paradox), in which the prevention of work is prevented by the prevention of work.

The only thing that really worried me about Human Inertia was that he was technically in charge of the company's finances. I tried not to think about it, but every once in a while he'd say something so dumb that I'd have to immediately run to the bank and cash my paycheck, just to make sure they had real money in their account.

He was the kind of guy who used to repeat idiotic urban legends like the one about how the average person swallows four spiders a year in their sleep. I can't fathom what, if anything, is going on in the head of someone who repeats something like that. Did he imagine that there was a university somewhere that had greenlit a study in which people were observed for 8 hours every night to find out how many spiders they swallowed? I tried to envision what the log book for that study would look like:

Day 1: No spiders

Day 2: No spiders

Day 3: No spiders

Day 4: No spiders

Day 5: No spiders

Day 6: No spiders

Day 7: No spiders

Day 8: No spiders

Day 9: No spiders

Day 10: No spiders

Day 11: No spiders

Day 12: No spiders

Day 13: No spiders

Day 14: No spiders

Day 15: No spiders

Day 16: No spiders

Day 17: SPIDER!!!!

Day 18: No spiders

Day 19: No spiders

Day 20: No spiders

...

What would the interpersonal dynamics of such a study be? Would the observer tell the subject if they swallowed a spider on a given night?

"So, how'd you sleep last night, Bob?"

"Umm, pretty good. Why?"

"Oh, no reason. No reason." (Stifles laughter)

"Did I... I swallowed a spider last night, didn't I?!"

"Nooooo.... I mean, I'm not really supposed to say either way, but no, you didn't."

"Really?"

"Really. No spiders. None. I haven't even seen any spiders, to be honest."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

"Okay, good. But you would tell me if I did, right?"

"Well, I'm not supposed to, but yeah, I would."

"Good, thanks. Whew. I feel better."

"Hey, that's what I'm here for. So... any weird dreams last night? Like maybe about something crawling into your mouth?"

It was bad enough when Human Inertia would blather on about swallowed spiders or string theory, but what really worried me was when he would pontificate on something business-related. For example, he once predicted, a few days before its release, that The DaVinci Code was going to be the top grossing movie of all time. Now I don't pretend to be a business expert or a movie expert (ok, sometimes I pretend to be a movie expert), but I could give you about 28 reasons off the top of my head why The DaVinci Code wasn't going to even going to outgross Forrest Gump, let alone Titanic. First, it's not a "family-friendly movie." Second, it got lousy reviews. Third, a lot of people planned on boycotting it because of its subject matter. Fourth, people want to see Tom Hanks playing a retard, not playing a smart guy with retarded hair. I could go on.

Human Inertia ranks only third on my list of Worst Bosses Ever because once you got used to him, he was pretty manageable. He had almost no attention span. I used to send him long, boring emails with some crucial information that I didn't want him to know buried in the third paragraph. He'd find out about whatever it was too late to stop it, and I would just shrug and say, "I sent you an email...."

If you really wanted him to know something, you had to break it into three bullet points, each no longer than this sentence. He could, on a good day, digest up to five bullet points, or 1 2/3 emails. He would copy and paste these bullet points onto a slide, which he would then present at the next quarterly meeting, along with a graph indicating that he fully understood roughly 14% of the bullet points he had been sent that quarter. I once joked that I was going to draw a cartoon of him as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. He would be saying to God, "This is great, but can you boil it down to three bullet points?"

He left Galactic Invertebrates shortly after I retired. I hear he's working for a big Silicon Valley company now. I won't tell you the name, but according to my thesaurus, it's a synonym for ignoramus and buffoon.

I hope they like PowerPoint presentations.