The Super Villains I Face

A while back I started to realize something. Well, besides the fact that I have never had sex at the end of an interview, or have ever actually eaten whale bacon, I realized that I see Super Villains almost daily. I spent some time trying to classify a few of my more well-known enemies and perhaps as time goes on I can classify some of the lesser known ones as well.

In the end I hope to compile all of this into a resume or CV that I can post to Monster to see what kind of responses I get from recruiters.

“I see here you defeated King Tut…how old are you anyway?”

Yeah, this needs to happen.

The Riddler

I see the Riddler every day, in one form or another. Quite often the Riddler pops his head up at me when I am looking at a database design, one devoid of any keys whatsoever (primary, foreign, or domestic). As I sit there staring at what is essentially a collection of Excel worksheets I start to understand that the entire database is a riddle, left for me to decipher.

The Riddler also is responsible for organizing meetings with no agenda items. If you dare to accept the meeting invite you immediately start to ask yourself “What is this meeting about? How will I know if I am prepared for this meeting?” About the only piece of the riddle that you know going into the meeting is “Will this be a complete waste of my time?”

The Joker

This guy keeps popping up daily despite our efforts to put him away for good. Somehow he gets access to the email system and sends requests like “Please increase the size of the data page on this database, and let me know when it is done.” Requests so crazy that you figure “Hey, maybe this person knows something I don’t”, so you spend some time looking into getting it done only to realize that they do not know more. They know less. Far, far less. And that is when you can hear that maniacal laugh from two cubes over. By the time you get up, your arch-nemesis is gone.

Sometimes the pranks are quite obvious, as the emails say things like “Please reset my password”, but never list the name of the instance. Or “I deleted a document from Sharepoint last week sometime and I need it back now.” Or the insidious “…the server seems slow today, please fix immediately.”

The Penguin

The Penguin is not as smart as the Riddler, and doesn’t play jokes on people. The Penguin is like a little mafia boss, someone who sits outside all day watching people walk by his store, then goes inside the store and does things HIS way and you don’t even want to think about suggesting that a different way exists. Like a developer that will always use a cursor, despite being shown sixteen different ways to write more efficient code. Or someone that insists on using an older version of MS SQL because that is what they are more familiar with.

Try as you might to put this thug behind bars he just finds a way to skirt the system and lands right back in the same seat, staring at you, daring you to challenge him again.

Catwoman

Catwoman is always looking for ways to entice, then exploit you or the ones around you. She will appear as some sexy piece of code, making people enamored with her, and then she digs her claws in and makes you scream. Like all those developers that thought scalar functions were the greatest thing ever. They built functions in order to save on code only to find out how badly they can perform when not used properly. And functions that use linked servers? Yeah, pure evil.

The only way to stop Catwoman is to remind everyone that if something is too good to be true, then it probably is. Like SQL Fabric or BizTalk.

Now that I think of it, there are many other villains for me to choose from. Perhaps I need to make this a recurring theme. If you have some ideas for villains you want to see profiled, let me know. In the meantime I will continue to profile them as situations arise.