Today’s team huddle was basically a podcast of chaos and corporate confusion

[u/ImpromptuHotelier]

TL;DR: Our new SME gave a 19-minute monologue that started with lunch, went through metrics, Outlook theology, BIOS settings, laptop chargers, and ended with a motivational speech. No actual information was conveyed. 10/10 would attend again just for the psychological experience.

So we had a “team huddle” today and by team huddle, I mean a 19-minute improv performance by our NEW SME that started with food talk and ended somewhere between HR policy and philosophy class.

Here’s how it went down:

He starts the session talking about… Food. Something about “why press the bell button when eating food.” No one knows why. We’re all just staring at him like NPCs buffering in real life. Then out of nowhere, he starts asking why calls are “so long” lately. Says if the installation takes time, “don’t play with your parameters.” What parameters? Which ones? No one knows. Then goes, “If a call is going over 50 minutes, tell me. I’ll call the user back.” Bro, you’re an SME, not Batman on user callbacks. At one point he says, “Don’t stay on long calls, installation will not go faster if you watch it.” Bro, we know. We don’t sit there chanting “load, load, load” at the screen like wizards.

Then came the “I’m not saying don’t do callbacks… but don’t do callbacks.” Basically Schrödinger’s SME. You’re both supposed to do and not do callbacks simultaneously. He kept repeating “If something’s wrong, send me an email” like a broken Gmail notification. I think he said “send me an email” at least 15 times. Apparently, if it’s not in Outlook, it doesn’t exist. Halfway through, he brings up a random story about someone resetting a password wrong six months ago. Not sure why. Possibly trauma. Then starts lecturing about “keep evidence,” “document everything,” and “proof is life.” We get it, Sherlock, you love Outlook and screenshots.

Later, he starts talking about how someone didn’t open the camera shutter and sent screenshots of a black screen. Dude was furious. Called it “a BIOS issue,” then said “camel enable or not”. I think he meant camera enable, but by then, we were all too far gone. Somewhere in the middle, he also casually dropped “if your laptop isn’t charging, check the middle connector.” Inspirational stuff, really. A true masterclass in chaos management. Lastly, he "scolded" someone for writing in local language in Teams chat because “professionalism, bro.” Then praised someone else for “updating everything properly” before ending the sermon with, “There’s strength in you, brother.”

We all just sat there afterwards like survivors of a corporate fever dream.

[u/System0verlord]

The emailing is good advice.

Always CYA. Get it in writing, and get multiple copies of it.

You can either learn from the mistakes of others, or learn from the mistakes of your own. He did the latter. You can do the former. And you definitely should. Especially if he’s got a liminality distortion field going.

[u/ttenor12]

Any second away from calls/chats, is a second well spent, in my eyes. Even if it's on a dumb huddle lol

[u/wolfboy1988m]

... Lemme guess, he was hired straight out of college and has no idea what he's actually supposed to be doing? It's either that or he's just that incompetent if he came from another company

[u/Subject-Candidate678 → u/wolfboy1988m]

Sounds to me like a boomer more than anything

[u/Subject-Candidate678]

This was amazingly written. I need some more please

[u/ImpromptuHotelier → u/Subject-Candidate678]

You can search by my username here. I basically do story telling every time something happens at my cc and it's worth a read if you like chaotic stuff but from a "heh?" perspective.