John worked for BodgeCo a total of 3 years. He started at the tender age of 20, with no commercial programming experience, and no formal training to speak of. He was a junior programmer. The world was his oyster: or rather, he was BodgeCo's oyster. He was a blank piece of paper, the job was his crayon, and BodgeCo was the big kid holding the crayon. I think you get the picture.

The problem John had, in those hazy first days, was that he had no idea how to write a professional piece of software. The trouble was, neither did BodgeCo. It was a family-run company, where everyone in the family (even the family dog) held an important position. The grandfather, Mr Griffiths, was the managing director; his 25-year-old son Stimpy was the technical director; the MD's other son, 12-year-old Timmy, was the office brat who regularly invaded the office during the summer holidays and threw tennis balls at the programmers, to shouts of encouragement from Stimpy. Mr Griffiths also had a 24-year-old daughter, Rage, whose job title was "personnel director". Rage spent most of her time standing outside, chain-smoking and complaining to anybody who would listen about just how over-worked she was.

Other members of the family included Mrs Griffiths (a director of unknown purpose), Stimpy's confused wife Linda, their four-year-old daughter Mercedes (who also used to invade the office regularly and entertain staff with cartwheels and neverending shrieks), and of course the office dog Wolf (who, yes, used to invade the office regularly and entertain staff with his ear-piercing bark and foul breath). Wolf, Timmy and Mercedes together formed the company morale department.



John & Stimpy

John spent 15 months programming under the tutorage of Stimpy, who would frequently advocate the use of "goto" statements (no kidding!). Stimpy, who had been handed his directorship by his father Mr Griffiths, had no programming experience outside of BodgeCo. Yet he was the technical director, head of software development.

Stimpy hated procedural programming. He liked programs to form one unbroken wodge of source, with a minimum of annotation. All variable names had to be prefixed with "THE", as in "THE_ITEM_COUNT", "THE_VAT_TOTAL". The programming (all done under DOS) had to take place in a 40-column window. Minimum tab size for any indentation was 10 characters. John often wondered what planet Stimpy was from.

John did like to write his code with some semblance of good style (e.g. with the use of procedures, local variables, meaningful comments). On each occassion that he dared to do this, Stimpy would sit patiently with him and, talking energetically about how everything should be as "clean as a whistle", he would churn through John's code removing the comments, making the variables global, squashing the entire program into a single procedure. It was the BodgeCo way, and everyone had to follow the way of the guru Stimpy.



Increased Company Morale Through Great Policies and Directives

The company stance on such important items as documentation, development life cycle, testing and Q.A., were never documented - but from what John could see, the company policies (development and otherwise) were as follows:

• No documentation must be put together in any way, shape or form. If any attempt is made at documenting a program, it shall be treated with the scorn and derision deserving of such a foul attempt to subvert the technical director's own knowledge and authority;
• In line with the "no documentation" policy, there shall be no functional specification for any new project, however large the project. If the project is vital to the company's survival then it must be written as quickly as possible, and writing a specification would just take up valuable time which could be spent driving one's tensed fingers deep into a smoking keyboard, churning out code without knowledge of its purpose or how the program will fit into the rest of the project, if at all;
• If the telephone rings, you must answer it. We do not see the need for a receptionist at this time. Programmers are perfectly capable of answering the phones just like everybody else. If they complain about "lost concentration" or anything else vacuous, they will be accused of not pulling their weight. Programmers are paid more than enough money to double as receptionists;
• An hour's lunch break is allowed, but must never be used;
• The company working hours are 9am to 6pm, but all staff are expected to remain in the office until a minimum of 7pm (plus an extra half hour to show keenness) on most nights, otherwise they will be frowned at upon leaving. The minimum eyebrow angle for such a frown is 38 degrees from the horizontal;
• On at least two weekdays out of every five, the employee must be seen to remain in the office until at least 9pm, to show keenness. If they have completed all their work by 6pm and proceed to leave at 6pm, they must be called back and made to realise the error of their worthless ways;
• If an employee is seen to show initiative, he or she will be stamped upon from a very large height. This directive is vital, as the ego and authority of the board of directors is paramount. Repeat often: nothing else matters;
• There shall be no software testing. This is essential, as software testing only delays the time between development and installation. Any subsequent problems noted by the customer shall be written on a "post-it" note and stuck to the programmer's monitor for everybody in the office to peer at. The fix, whatever form it takes, shall be quickly hacked out, and modemmed to the customer site on the same morning. There shall be no integration testing for said fix. It must work first time;
• If the development team asks for some support staff to create an adequate "buffer zone" between the programmers and the customers, the directors shall moan and brush off such requests for at least two years (per request) before finally giving in and hiring a non-technical ex-cookery teacher to handle the finer details of software configuration, training and support;
• If a programmer is kind enough to work at the weekend, this shall be taken as the cue to start taking such favours for granted. After the first weekend, these shall no longer be "favours", but "expected". If the programmer then wishes to "take the weekend off", he must book in advance, and be made to feel like he is the one asking for a favour. The key phrase shall be: "Are you with me this weekend? Or against me?"

John had the BEST Time

As you can probably imagine, John had the wildest time at BodgeCo. The company's sane policies and realistic attitude to software development made him wonder why all companies were not like this (of course, he had not worked for any other companies, so could only assume that all software houses were indeed like BodgeCo).

After 15 months, Stimpy became a lot busier as, miraculously, the company was gaining clients at an incredible rate, only matched by the rate at which it was also losing clients. Stimpy's progression to "genuinely busy person" was a godsend for John, as he was pretty much left alone to write his code exactly how he wanted to. He took great advantage of this, and was able (by working in his spare time) to rework some of the more critically insane portions of Stimpy's hacked-about code. Eventually, the product (for which John had taken the helm as "senior" programmer) started to work properly. As new code was developed, customer complaints actually started to subside.

The company also took on an experienced programmer, Malcolm, who actually knew what he was doing. Malcolm was horrified at what he saw, and (though he was working on a different project to John) helped John to re-learn the art of good programming. Thus John was pretty much saved from a lifetime of burnt-in insanity.

The way in which Malcolm's functional and design specifications were rejected by Stimpy as "pointless" was comical. Stimpy still saw software development as a turbo process where as many stages as possible must be cut out. Time to market was everything for Stimpy.

Rage

Rage, the mad personnel director and bad-tempered daughter of Mr Griffiths, was well suited to her extremely fragile boyfriend, Kevin the hardware manager. Kevin's official title could equally have been "Most bad-tempered man on Earth". Rage and Kevin, during their brief (and many) periods together, would spend many happy hours standing by a window outside the office, in full view of everyone inside, trying to out-smoke each other and necking and groping each other persistently. One time, John was sure he saw a long line of slobber trailing down from their intermeshed mouths.

Interestingly, Rage let slip that she was pregnant, at around the same time that Kevin was stripped of his "Friend of the Griffiths Monarchy" title and fired from the company. He took the opportunity to grow a beard and put on a huge amount of weight. Three months later, it was announced that the baby was not really Kevin's, and therefore Rage and Kevin were "back together".

Rage used to keep a dossier on Malcolm, whom she saw as a threat to the family directors' authority. Every conversation, every e-mail, every late morning, was written up and stored in this hefty tome. Each employee had such a "secret" dossier, but for some reason the files on Malcolm and John were the largest and most sinister. John only found out about these dossiers when he started dating the new office manager, Beverly (Beverly only stayed at the company for three weeks, after which she stormed out, telling John that she had never met such a self-interested, authority-crazed bunch of cowboy directors).

Stinky Stan

As time went on, the development team expanded, mostly with the addition of inexperienced junior programmers as they were cheaper than normal programmers, and could be treated as an empty canvass and painted up any which way the directors wished, just as they had attempted to do with John.

It is probably not worth going into detail about the new recruits, though special mention is definitely warranted for Stan, a junior programmer with a serious hygiene problem. Stan's "manly scent" is best compared to a side of beef which has been left to rot in the sun for several days. Perhaps this is "politically incorrect" (after all, the side of beef is not here to defend itself), but his stench really was something quite other-worldly.

Stan consistently failed to respond to any subtle hints to "clean up his act" - so, with a hot summer approaching, John and Malcolm (plus half the office) had no choice but to lodge a complaint with Rage. Her response could be summed up as "piss off, I'm too busy smoking a cigarette." So they took their complaint to Stimpy, who promised to do something about Stan. His approach, of course, was less than professional: the next morning, he marched into the over-crowded office and jovially barked (for everybody to hear): "Wow, Stan, is that you I can smell or is it my sweaty armpits? Nope, it's definitely you!"

Incredibly, this had no effect on Stan's hygiene problem, and one of the hottest summers on record was "fondly" remembered by John as the one where he had to sit next to stinky Stan for the entire summer.

The Contracts

One incident stuck in John's mind more than most. In trying to raise its level of professionalism, the company directors decided, one afternoon, to issue everybody with actual contracts of employment. Rage went round to each employee with a friendly comment to "please sign this and hand it back as soon as possible." Not many people bothered, as the contracts were less than acceptable. Lots of archaic wording like "master...servant" gave the contracts a slightly surreal air. Embedded somewhere in the more tersely worded gobbledegook was a paragraph explaining that the subject could not go to work for a similar company (without really explaining what "similar" meant) for at least four years after leaving BodgeCo.

John and Malcolm were amongst the many who did not hand back their contracts. Then, one pay-day, one of the employees noticed that no pay had materialised in his bank account. The other employees rushed out to check their accounts - sure enough, only the people who had signed their contracts had actually been paid that month.

Rather than walking out in anger, most of the employees signed their contracts and returned them very quickly, no longer caring that they were not acceptable. John held out for fifteen days, but finally gave in as he needed the money to pay for such extravagances as rent and food. Malcolm held out for the longest, and after lots of badgering from Rage and her mother Mrs Griffiths, he got fed up and walked out, pausing only to send an "e-mail of resignation" to Rage & Stimpy. The aftermath of this action was amusing to watch, as the entire Griffiths family congregated in a glass-encased office and paced up and down looking alternately furious and worried, whilst the entire company watched with bemusement from the outer office.

After about an hour of this, the Griffiths family decided that they needed Malcolm more than their extremely fragile pride, so Mrs Griffiths agreed to phone him up and beg for him to come back. He agreed, on the understanding that he would be paid more money. She agreed (probably through clenched teeth), and Malcolm returned the next day. He eventually signed the contract, as it was non-enforceable anyway - full of bullshit boilerplate legalese.

The Angry Departure

After three years at BodgeCo, enough was enough for John. The clinching factor was when he was ordered to sort out an "urgent" problem at an Australian client's site. Due to the time difference, he was given no choice by Stimpy but to stay in the office until 6am, continually trying to call the Australian office (from about 4am onwards) until somebody there finally turned up for work. The client, when John finally got to speak to her, agreed that there was a problem, but expressed surprise that John had stayed up all night to sort it out. The client laughed, and said that the problem "really was not that urgent. It could have easily waited awhile. After all, it's not as if we can't get any work done in the meantime!" John also laughed, and then quit the company.

More accurately, he turned up for work at 11am the next morning (having left a note saying he needed to sleep and would be late in), and was dragged into Mr Griffith's office, where he was stamped upon from a great height for being late.

The next day, he resigned with two other disgruntled programmers: Malcolm, and another programmer who afterwards went to work abroad somewhere.

The three of them very nicely worked through their four week notice period, as they were genuinely nice people. During this time, they each received a fiercely worded solicitors' letter, warning them not to do anything harmful to the company or to try to persuade any other employees to leave as well. The letter also ranted on about their client's "anger and disappointment" that they were choosing to leave "in this manner" (presumably meaning "in the manner of handing in a letter of resignation and working for another four weeks, just like it says in my contract (which, by the way, I was forced to sign under extreme duress)").

The same afternoon that John received his unpleasant solicitors' letter, he was called into Mr Griffiths' office. "Oh no, what now," he thought angrilly. But Mr Griffiths was all smiles. Very surreal. He explained that the angry solicitors' letter was "just a bit of fun", and he really would like it if John could stay on at the company - he was sure they could come to some sort of arrangement. Suddenly, John felt as if he was in an episode of "The Prisoner".

Out of the frying pan, into the mud swamp

That probably sums up BodgeCo quite well. On his final day, at exactly 6pm, John walked to a leafy-gladed tube station, and a profound sense of freedom and relief coursed through him. He was free at last.

He had spent his last four weeks at BodgeCo looking for more work as a programmer. Due to the short amount of time he had, he knew that he could not be too choosy about the next job he took. Nevertheless, he was pleasantly surprised to land a role as a senior C programmer.

What follows is pure history. Like Gulliver (only in a different order), John went from the land of the giants to the land of the circus midgets. You'll see what I mean in the next chapter:

>>> Next Chapter: John's time at CrapScape
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