Quality

I work for an engineer which, at least at my current company, is a job that requires a lot of team work. So to facilitate that need, our desks are organized into "quads" which are basically one huge cubicle with a desk in each of the four corners. It's great to be that close if you are lucky enough to sit with awesome people. It also makes it pretty tough to slack off without at least three other people being aware of it. And that was the case a few years ago with our 58-year-old Head Designer, M.

When I first started working at this company, I was put into a quad with M, J and E. J and E are both super awesome. Those two guys had already become great friends, and I fit in really well with them too after I joined the quad. The 4th member of our group however (who I'm happy to say no longer works here) was one of the worst people I've ever know. His lack of commitment to his job and his family was absolutely despicable. Here's how a typical 8 to 5 workday for him would go:

8:30 - Show up to work
8:30-9:00 - Check email (work and personal)
9:00-9:30 - Go to Starbucks
9:30-9:45 - Tell me a boring story...

M (holding a camera): What year were you born?
Me: 1980.
M: Would you believe that I bought this camera in 1977.....

9:45-10:00 - Take a break
10:00-10:45 - Call girlfriend
10:45-11:00 - Call wife
11:00-11:30 - Work
11:30-1:00 - Lunch break
1:00-1:30 - Eat the lunch he brought back, while surfing the Internet
1:30-2:00 - Work
2:00-3:00 - M.I.A.
3:00-3:30 - Work
3:30-4:00 - Take the camera out of his desk again and tell me the same boring story he told me earlier...

M (holding a camera): What year were you born?
Me: 1980.
M: Would you believe that I bought this camera in 1977.....

WTF?? Is he doing material? Does he rehearse this in the shower every morning or something? And does he seriously not remember that he already told me the camera story?

4:00-4:30 - Call girlfriend again
4:30-4:45 - Pack up and leave for the day

Now, you might think I'm making it look worse than it was. I'm absolutely not. It got to the point where I actually said something to him about it. He'd been talking to his wife for at least a half hour about some maintenance issue at their house. When he got off the phone...

Me: If you have personal business to take care of, then you should use a Personal Day and go take care of your business.
M (surprised): Did you need me for something while I was on the phone?
Me: No. But that's not the point. We are so far behind on this project schedule, E and J have been working shit tons of overtime for weeks, and you're charging hours to the budget that are spent making personal phone calls.
M (still surprised): ......Okay....

He turned around and started to pretend to do a little work, just moving the mouse across the screen and zooming in and out of a drawing a few times. Awesome. And when he (not surprisingly) had continued to keep up with his usual daily schedule, the other three of us were so mad, that all we could do to keep from smashing his testicles into the ground was to just try to laugh at the situation.

So we started timing him whenever he wasn't working and we would make bets every Monday on what we thought his weekly total of work time vs. non-work time would be. I think it averaged out to about 18 of 40 hours a week not working, although I know that's giving him the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes it was hard to determine if the periods of time he was away from his desk was work related or not. And a lot of the time the three of us were so busy actually working that we wouldn't notice he was gone, or on the Internet, or eating peanuts, or playing with his camera, or clipping his fingernails...but either way, he was clearly a slacker.

And as the project deadline got closer and closer, and M's pile of work was getting bigger and bigger, the rest of us were getting more and more concerned. So one day E asked M what his thoughts were about meeting our project deadline. M replied, "I'm not concerned about the project schedule. It's more important to take as much time as we need to make sure it's correct....because I believe that quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality, is quality."

No exaggeration...he repeated it at least a dozen times. And the other three of us were trying SO HARD not to burst out laughing. It was so effing ridiculous! Of all people to be talking about quality...was this guy fucking kidding??

But apparently he actually was aware of the fact this his level of "quality" wasn't quite up to par, because as the project deadline approached, M knew that he couldn't possibly get everything done in time. And he knew that the boss would question him about all the hours charged to the project and that he wouldn't have adequate justification for it. So he quit. Without any new job lined up, he just quit. He made up some lame excuse that he'd rather be working at Starbucks and two weeks later, he was gone. About a year later, one of M's friends who still worked at the company told me that M still hadn't found a new job. I guess Starbucks wasn't interested in his personal policy that quality, is quality, is quality, is.....