Mr. Cosby Sweatah

Oh Mr. Cosby Sweatah. He is the current bane of my existence. Over the course of 2005, many of you have heard my tale of team woes. I was given a team of the most incompetent people when I started at my current company: The Intern and Mr. Cosby Sweatah. It was The Intern's first real design job, but Mr. Cosby Sweatah had previous experience. The Big Project I was hired on to head up used a software none of us knew how to use because it was brand, spanking new. I had to learn it when I got there just as they should have. The project went really slow. So slow that for anything to be submitted to me should have been pretty near perfect. Nothing ever was. Nothing was almost acceptable. Nothing even came close to kind of okay. It was all bad. These two guys never proofed or tested their work. You would think that at least this craptacular work would have been "designed" at a rapid rate. But, unfortunately, the answer is no. In fact, I designed (correctly, superbly even) at twice their rate. Combined. If not faster. And I did not have to return my work to myself with pages and pages of corrections. The worst of the slow transgressors was Mr. Cosby Sweatah. He was painfully slow, though a little less on the mistakes. So, when the project began to wrap up round one, I recommended letting The Intern go. He was the worst of the two and was always making the same mistakes over and over. Since I was redoing all of his work anyway, I thought cutting out the middle man would be a good idea.

So it was just me and Mr. Cosby Sweatah. Seeing The Intern lose his job was not a deterrent. Mr. Cosby Sweatah continued to slowly submit bad work to me. So, when things hit a manageable/slow state, I recommended not bringing him back in. I should clarify that The Intern only had a 3 month internship with us (which could have been renewed), and Mr. Cosby Sweatah was only a contractor and paid hourly. Since I am salaried, I will have to be paid regardless of whether there is work to do or not. So I am not just so cruel or so powerful that I can banish people on a whim. I just wanted to clarify that point. With Mr. Cosby Sweatah gone, I was happy to go into work. Everything that I sent off was done correctly (for the most part. I am not perfect by any means and require a QC.). Those were good times.

Now, Mr. Cosby Sweatah has returned. He is working with me on my new project. When I first was told he would be "helping" me out, I had to strain not to roll my eyes. But I tried to give him the benefit of a doubt. My initial thoughts were correct. He sucked. We are creating an interactive user guide for a snazzy new phone from Famous Mobile Phone Manufacturer. We must create the phone screens pixel by pixel. It is very detailed, tedious work. This client is VERY important, so everything has to be exact. They will KNOW if you are one pixel off. Put your eyeball up to your cell phone screen. See those little squares? That is what I am talking about.

Anyway, Mr. Cosby Sweatah is supposed to design them with me. I explain that we have to create a new Illustrator (that's the graphics program we are using) screen every time anything on the phone screen changes. So say you are dialing a phone number. There would need to be about 12 to 13 screens: the beginning screen, a screen for each new number that appears and the dialing screen. I KNOW I told him that. I said things like for each step, there will be multiple screens. When I look back over his work, he has made only one screen for each step. So just the main screen, the final screen with the 10 digits and the dialing screen. I wanted to throw things at him. It took him TWO days to do that. Two days to do like an 1/8 of the work he should have done. I explained to the higher ups that if I was to meet my deadline, I needed someone who knew what they were doing. So I got a wonderful new guy to help me out: Cool College Kid. He is like a godsend. I love you Cool College Kid! He and I are getting through the screens. He seems to understand my very difficult directions of design every single screen in the step.

I once again, incorrectly, thought that my woes with Mr. Cosby Sweatah were over. Oh, how wrong I was. Mr. Cosby Sweatah didn't follow my simple directs of how to export the screens and what to name them. I was going to go with the first screen would be named Screen01.swf. Apparently he didn't "get" my crazy naming system. And then I am looking over the storyboard he was supposed to verify. You know, look at the steps, check that they match how the phone works. He has signed off on all of these steps being "okay." Only, the storyboard, and therefore the coding, will have things like click the OK button when the button is really labeled SAVE. Not a huge deal, but if you are going to sign off on things, people expect that they are actually right.

He is so frustrating. I am beginning to actually develop ill feelings towards sweaters in general because of him. And I love sweaters. Darn you, Mr. Cosby Sweatah!