The tech world is full of a lot of players these days, at all different levels. I imagine figuring out how to work with a new team on a new project when there’s a tight timeline can be a recipe for disaster.

And in this case, OP learned his lesson about skipping important meetings.

He is a middle manager at a tech company and recently hired a “real” graphic designer.

Working at BigCo with lots of agents in the field. Agents had pretty decent 15″ laptops to work with customers in the field.

New project comes up to give the field people some better tools. Project owner and the other stakeholders haven’t been pleased with the way the old apps work.

“Looks like it was scraped from a 3270 terminal” (pretty close, but well before my time). They make sure I hire a “real graphics designer” to develop the GUI.

Fine, I can do that.

Interviews, offers made, designer arrives.

Suze is nice, and our programming team is excited to start, looks all good.

As a gesture of “welcome to our IT group” get her the developer setup. souped up 15″ laptop, docking station, two big monitors.

Developers like it, they get to put windows all over the place, life is good. Suze seems to be happy.

All seemed to be going well on a new project.

Pretty soon her, the lead developer and the business liaison go to make a great GUI experience.

Time passes and I check in with the PM. “Going ok, on schedule, and we have the GUI walk through in the morning”.

Super, I ask about how that’s going to work. “Built a mock up as static web pages, they can just click through the pages. Dev team gave some fake data for the drop downs.”

Sounds like it’s under control, I go off to see what fires may be getting started elsewhere.

Then, the proverbial poo hit the fan.

Next day come back from my last meeting of the afternoon. Email box is showing full red alert (Lotus Notes unread emails) and my message light is on my desk phone.

Before I can mouse click my way into the mess, my boss comes into my office.

“Kilted, what exactly happened in the demo today?”

“No I idea says it was all set, business liaison was good, I had other priority ones so I skipped it.”

“Poor move, get on top of the disaster NOW”.

Find PM, Business liaison, Suze and started asking questions. Demo in the conference room went fine. They sent the link out to the field people to look at.

Field people had some issues.

“Like what?”

“Well a few said it was completely unusable” said Suze.

She turns, pulls up a browser window on one of her big monitors. “This is it, a very nice clear GUI.”

He found out that, because the graphic designer was looking at a site on larger screens, she insisted all was well.

It looked a little busy to me, lots of boxes on one page. “Hey can you drag that down to your laptop screen?” Yep looks pretty crowded now that it’s 1/3 size.

“Suze, it looks a little tight”. “Yes, but it looks perfect on my monitor” as she slides it back to the big monitor. “People in the field have 15″ screens.” “Well we should get them bigger ones, it looks perfect here, and I’m the GUI expert.”

Sigh. Second sigh. Tell the PM to meet me in my office, tell the others to go home.

Long unhappy conversation with PM, much arm waving, etc. May have used the F word a few times. Maybe a few times in the same sentence.

Bottom line was going to be hard to move Suze from the “works perfect on my monitor”.

Next day, Suze comes storming into my office “What the bleepitybleep happened to my bleeping monitors some bleepwad bleeping stole them that bleeper.” breath “And they left a bleeping note, what the bleep does “Eat the Dog Food” bleeping mean.”

Wow. She could be management material.

So, they took away the screens.

“Oh, that is a phrase we use, “Eat our own dog food. Every time we build a new system that has user impact we are the first users. So when it’s bad we get to see it first.”

Suze yells “What does that mean to me!?!”

No f words. Maybe not management material.

“It means that your users have 15” screens, you had a giant screen and kept going “it looks perfect on your monitor. Now you have 15″ screens to see what they see. Ya know, eat the dog food.”

Suze sighed and walked away.

Four days later the revised GUI demo went very well and she got her monitors back.

Problem solved, and everyone was happy in the end.

There’s usually a simple solution.

A lot of people remember those days.

Apparently it’s common to get wires crossed.

The graphic designer should have known better.

You can be dedicated without being good.

It seems like such a minor miscommunication.

Good thing it didn’t go worse.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.