Virtualisation should make life more flexible

I use a Mac as do many of my colleagues, although the majority of my company use PCs. Using a Mac isn't completely trouble free as some of the intranet applications I need to use are PC/IE only. I heard my company was providing Virtual Machines of the corporate PC build to testers and thought this would be ideal - I could run the corporate PC as an official VM and not have to have a second PC lying around for those times when something will only work on PC/IE.

Apparently that would be too easy as when I contacted the Terry who dished them out I was told "Sorry, we do not provide a corporate VM for running on Mac devices" and was told to contact a second Terry to query the policy. Despite leaving voicemail & sending email I'm being ignored.

Pushing Terry #1 a bit more went nowhere either and was just met with "I am not the decision maker here. I have more than enough on my plate, and no particular desire to challenge on this".

Well thanks for your help Terry!

Light on the Dough, Heavy on the Nuts

Terry is very uncomfortable with conflict. I think we've discussed this before.  One example is how in today's current economic climate, Terry has to make tough decisions like making choices about how many employees he can afford to keep on staff but he will avoid this decision as long as possible.  Due to lots of concessions and agreements he made with his employee unions in the past to avoid conflict then, he is now faced with many difficulties related to how to prune his staff now -- in effect paying for his past mistakes now. The hard decision of whether or not to axe staff is difficult under normal conditions, but by avoiding conflict during the good times when the contracts were negotiated he is now faced with even worse conditions and worse -- extremely conflict-full situations. To avoid this -- or rather delay it a little longer,  he now decides that cutting costs (and benefits) for everyone is apropos: bonuses, salaries, travel, etc.... He will not fire workers yet despite the writing on the wall even though it would mean that this would likely keep the standard of benefits for those really productive workers at current levels.  You see, Terry likes it when all things for all people are equal, and this includes  preserving jobs for even the Twinkies (R) at the expense of the well-being of the others that really get the work done.  This is why often jobs in Terry Town are short on the dough, but heavy on the nuts.

Progress Calmly Into the Comfort Zone

A colleague was recently taking an internal Stress Management course and stumbled upon this line in the guide in the section pertaining to fire alarms:

"When the alarm first rings we are stimulated into arousal and progress into the comfort zone."

Complexity

I came across this family tree of US Telecommunications companies:
http://www.neatorama.com/neat/family-tree-telecommunication.htm

This quote caught my eye:
"Since the very first telephone companies were founded, it seems that telecommunication companies never do business as just one entity when ten would do. Whatever the reason - be it compliance with local regulations, taking advantages of tax loopholes, obfuscation or simply fondness of complexity - subsidiaries and complex corporate structures are the raison d'être for these companies."

It seems complexity is a family trait for Terry that he just can't shake off.

Unwarranted Optimism

Terry hates change; change is bad because it might result in his formal 'job description' changing. Heavens that would be dreadful.   What often happens is that some Terries may identify this and hire in some non-Terries from elsewhere. They might come in with unbridled optimism and try to 'fix things'.  Unfortunately as the narrative above explains, this most often results in unwarranted optimism because Terry and  his Immune System (see below) often comes to the rescue and kills any such optimism before it can flourish.  

Effort

A few weeks ago I was working on a project whereby I needed to get some slides to review. It was getting late on Friday and I was to take a flight home, so I asked Terry to give me the slides so I could read them on my flight home. Terry refused because his union rules only allowed him to work 32 hours a week. Despite my not being in the union, he told me that he was not allowed to encourage others to work more than him. He sent me the slides the following Monday.