Storage Wells

My personal observation is that if I had to identify one thing that separates men from women in the workplace, I'd have to say "pranks".

I hardly know any women at all who are into pranks. I'm sure I'll hear from people out there who know differently, but it has been my experience.

On the other hand, I know a lot of guys who are into pranks, encourage pranks, think up elaborate pranks, and even carry them out (see previous post).

It's neither better nor worse, just different. BTW, I even tried a prank of my own in college but it flopped.

I'm also not sure if this just a North American trait (some of the best pranksters I know are Canadian), or a more universal tendency.

Storage Wells

Stuart Wells was a fellow manager when I joined the Windows group but within a few months, Bill Crane left as senior manager and Stuart replaced him, starting his steady rise at Sun to director, VP, and beyond.

There was a lot going on in Windows Engineering at that point. After a lot of angst, we were abandoning NeWS - the brainchild of James Gosling - with X11 tacked on as an emulation to real X11 with a Adobe DPS. Shortly we would also leave OpenLook behind and move to integrate Motif (and subsequently CDE).

Stuart was (and still is) brilliant, driven, and passionate about everything. He is also Scottish with a classic Scots temper, thick brogue and a competitive streak a mile long.

He liked to manage by walking around. In those days, of course, we were all co-located and we all came into the office every day. Everyone learned that if you got an email from Stuart, you had about 30 seconds to jump up and head in the opposite direction from his office unless you wanted a talking to about the issue at hand.

His work ethics was infamous.

At one point a woman joined my group and she tended to come in earlier than most of us.

Eager to make a good impression with Stuart, she noticed that when she arrived at 8:00, he was already in the office. So the next day she came in at 7:30. He was already there. So she came in at 7:00. He was already there. She arrived at 6:30 and he was already there. I'm can't recall at what point she gave up. It may have been even earlier.

Needless to say, he was also still at work when most of us left as well.

I've never worked for a manager / director / VP who engendered so much conversation across the team as Stuart. It seemed like every lunch conversation or party lull was soon filled by some discussion of something that Stuart had said or done. Even though the comments were not derogatory, as a first-time manager, I worried. Were my reports talking about me like that??

The answer, for better or worse, was No, they weren't.

According to the instigators, there was something about Stuart that was just too tempting when it came to pranks. He was just too big a target to ignore. In fact he is the only manager I remember being pranked regularly even when it wasn't April 1.

Storage Wells

Just after the group had moved to MTV21, Stuart went on a trip (reasons forgotten - business or vacation).

While he was gone, a select (male) crew gathered all the recently emptied moving boxes and packed up Stuart's entire office. Everything went into a box, including the telephone, his monitor, his pizza box... Then all the boxes were stacked along with empty ones to fill up his office wall to wall, floor to ceiling. And someone ordered a new name plate: Storage Wells.

Stuart showed up on his first day back. His phone was ringing. That box was way at the back of the office. Some calls would have to wait.

S'uar'

My father and I once played golf with Stuart. After we finished and were driving home, my Dad said, "He seems very nice but I can't understand a word he says."

In fact, for some reason Scottish accents seemed to dominate in the extended Windows group, including the toolkits at that time. There were no fewer than 6 Scotsmen roaming the halls. That might not seem like much but most were BIG personalities.

Stuart's accent seemed to involve a lot of dropped consonants with glottal stop substitutes. T's were in particularly short supply. There were also many long ooooooo's (book becomes buuuuuk) and other sources of confusion from time to time.

Stuart's good-natured explanation was that the Scots had perfected the science of compression and as masters of the English language, they had figured out how to drop out all unnecessary consonants.

This was Windows Engineering after all and we owned the fonts. Every day the engineers would crank out another daily release and then there were the weeklies, and then the handoffs and so forth. All of us were required to run the dailies which were mounted automatically for us overnight.

One night, our font guy Jim arranged for a special daily. All the T's / t's in all the fonts would instead be replaced with an apostrophe [ ' ] representing a glottal stop.

Needless 'o say, S'uar' did no' disappoin' with his reac'ion.

My Best Manager

In my 16+ years at Sun, I had at least 16 managers and Stuart was my manager for close to 5 of those years so he is without question the manager I got to know the best.

I had once inadvertently said in Stuart's presence that Peter Young was the best manager I'd ever had. Stuart - the consumate competitor - never let me forget that. No amount of backpedaling would let me wiggle out of that one.

But I'm glad I didn't back-pedal too hard. At that point, I'd only had about 6 managers at Sun and not many before that.

Now as I look back, I am blown away by the quality of the managers I had at Sun.

A couple - mercifully short - were not very good. But the funny thing about bad managers is that it is actually easier to learn from them because their flaws are so obvious. With good managers, it is usually harder to figure out how and why they are successful because what they do well seems so seamless and integrated into their personalities.

And I'm happy to say that the vast majority of my managers at Sun were much, much better than merely good.

I hear many complaints about managers but based on my personal experience at Sun I'd have to say that I'd be thrilled to be half the manager of most the people I reported to and worked with and that definitely includes Stuart.

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