…by posting a link from Boingboing to a Flash Katamari game. Drag the King of Cosmos head and your prince will follow. Watch out for the trucks.

(This is your best bet right now for Friday work distraction)

This post is a design/HTML/faulty manager rant and while it does have a general theme of poor business practices, some non-industry people might glaze over. In case of boredom, please visit the links to the right.

You might remember that I once complained about a certain staff member that thought it was ok to use Dreamweaver’s drop down menu to higgetty piggety create CSS rules for web pages and not care about multiple Class elements.

He was fired 6 months ago and I’ve stepped in to take over his job while still doing my own work. Beyond his ability to create crappy code, he had an unerring skill to get under everyone’s nerves by not being able to concentrate beyond 2 minutes of the start of a conversation. Soon, the company is getting a web-based app that manages all departments from online booking to website updates, which will be far beyond my tech abilities to maintain. Sooner or later I will be delegated back down to designer when they hire a real “developer” who can code ASP and Java servelettes. Fine by me. I hate coding. Right now I’m getting more money equal (snort) to the extra work load which makes the day go by fast, thankfully. So work has been “good” in the sense that Higgetty Piggetty code guy is gone and we’re all talking/laughing again in the design cube.

But I am still up against a company staffed by web-illiterate zombies.

Okay that was harsh, but there is a grain of truth in that.

For the last 9 months, I have been trying to incorporate two sites into one, our Air division site, where agents can book flights, with the Agents site, where agents can get up to date info on specials. Easy? In theory. I’m up against 5 managers who for the first 4 months of the project provided me with no feedback or cohesive ideas on how to go about merging these sites. So I went to the server logs and looked at what parts were being used and pruned back some of the crap (who really wants to click twice to get a “world clock”?). I got to the point where the new site was on the test server and waiting feedback from the managers.

Nothing.

Three months go by with the occasional prodding email.

Tumbleweed.

Suddenly at my desk is oh lets call him Mr Roo. Hi. Have we been introduced? No? Who are you? The guy hired to get the Agent’s site up and running? Beauty! Lets go.

Seeing Mr Roo run with this was like watching one of those bump-and-go toy race cars smashing into dining room table’s legs. He got things moving, that’s for sure.

We went “soft launch” yesterday, meaning the site went live, internally. The final stage before the public can see it. Test test test… Suddenly the marketing director comes to me and asks where I was with the project. He’s been touching base with it since day one and offering a steady hand in it’s creation but unfortunately he couldn’t chase down these managers either and was happy to have Mr Roo on board. I tell him about the soft launch. He seems a bit stunned and runs to his office to look at the site. 5 minutes later he comes out of his office and asks what the name of the new site is.

I blink. With that question, 9 months of discussion, design and display have suddenly been negated.

I tell him.

He says the redirect isn’t working. I check and it isn’t. With some research, we find the accountant has purchased the new site name but in singular. XXXagents.com has become XXXagent.com. In terms of deadlines, this isn’t a real big deal, some images and text will have to be tweaked. I was more cheesed at that we were less than 24 hours away from a launch and such a small, minor miscommunication that should not have been an issue at all, nearly blew us out of the water. And I’m thankful that we hadn’t been marketing the site heavily yet.

This company is on a familiar cusp of “growth or crumble”. Moments of gross miscommunication are commonplace here. For example I like to watch one particular manager get distracted while he’s in the middle of conversations with any one of us in the design cube. He’ll allow someone interrupt him while he about to advise us or is advising us on a particular project and never comes back to the cube to finish his thought. While he’s doing an amazing job keeping things together, its comical to watch him slap his head and come back into the cube to finish a thought hours/days later. He is going to require an assistant outside his door soon, stopping the small stuff.

I’ve seen this as a constant in the offices I’ve worked in over the last ten years: micromanagement divided by ghost management is directly related to how much shit the head guy drops down from above.

Whew. I’m done. You can come back.