Employee Profiles: Steve

I found loads of chat logs from work, and additionally found a few quotes I wrote down from various employees. So today we are going to discuss the legendary employee Steve.

“Steve looks like a confused garden gnome that lost his hat”

Adam – colleague

Introduction

Steve joined as a Software Developer, and I think Steve’s carefree attitude meant his code was a bit inconsistent in quality. I liked working with Steve though, he was often quiet and just got on with his work, not really paying attention to anything else. It’s a pro and con really. Work got done (though often you had to prompt him to tidy parts up, or spot mistakes for him to perfect it), but then he didn’t know who many employees were because of the lack of attention around him. When he joined in the banter, he was quite “laddish”. A simple northern lad, Steve was well known to like his food and beer.

I just looked on his Facebook – and under “Political Views” it says “Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong.”

Andy

Sometimes he seemed to be quite unlucky and trivial events became more hilarious. Once, Steve opened up the window to let a butterfly out, and another one came in.

He always wore a t-shirt and even when the aircon was chilly, he loved opening the window. Sometimes even had the fan on whilst sat next to the open window.

Me 13:13:
how come Steve has a different body temperature to everyone else? Sometimes I think he isn't human
Andy 13:13:
haha, has he got his fan on?
Me 13:14:
he has the window open. Last week the air was directed at us so we were freezing. Now we have got him to open a different window, it's not so bad. Although, after a while, it does get freezing but Steve insists he isn't cold. Meanwhile Liam just said "I'm wearing my headset to keep my ears warm"

Knowledge of Colleagues

“I know people that are relevant to me”

Steve

Matt: "Do you remember Colin?"
Steve: "No, of course I don't"

“out of all the companies I’ve worked at before, I can only remember about 2 names”

Steve

Me: "Why is Simon leaving?"
Steve: "I don't care"

After our team member Paula moved up to Scotland and worked in our office there, Steve asked if Paula “was on her own, or if there was someone else on her team up there“. Paula is on our team, therefore if someone else was on her team, they would be on our team.

Charlotte asked Steve who wanted all these database changes and he said “John Bundy”. There is no colleague called John Bundy, and there never has been.

Matt: "The documents work item needs moving off the board because the Documents team are doing it"
Steve: "who is doing that? is it Gary?"
Matt: "No, it's Tony. You emailed him about it last week"
Steve: "Oh yeah, I did"

In his update, Steve once said “A chap called Jon Reaves has made some changes”. Jon had worked there for several years and is well known to everyone. Saying “a chap called” suggests he had never heard of him and thought he was new.

Food

Having 2 glasses of wine a week is unhealthy. You should be aiming for 30 units a week, mainly from beer.

Steve

“I’d rather eat my own feet than a KFC”

Steve

“Giving up beer and pizza is never a good idea”

Steve

Tracey was explaining how she went to London and had a fancy meal in Gordon Ramsey‘s restaurant. Steve chimes in:

“I went to Sheffield and had a kebab”

Steve

Matt: "I tried loads of stuff in Vietnam, no idea what it was"
Steve:[loud and affirmatively] "Bollocks"

It could have been testicles, Matt was explaining the interesting and different meals they have there, but it was funnier the way he said it like he had no doubt it was that.

“Four pints is what I call breakfast”

Steve

Steve was complaining that the office canteen has had “Toad in the Hole” for 2 days running. I said “I bet you ate it anyway”. Then he replies in a passive-aggressive tone:

“what else am I gonna do? eat the vegetarian option? Not likely.”

Steve

We once had 2 offices located close together. Our team had moved to the other office but we received a mass email from Mark stating he had brought cake in and placed it in the kitchen. Steve started walking to our kitchen (in the different office), Matt told him it’s not in that kitchen… but Steve checked anyway! He was desperate for that cake.

“Chickens come from seed which comes from oil”

Steve

Matt was originally talking about cars. Then Steve said all food comes from oil, then said that. I was instantly lost.

Software Development/Attitude to Work

“Matt! Myself and Phil are having a bit of a disagreement, and it’s about to turn to blows”

Steve

Matt: "Steve, have you done your Information Governance training?"
Steve: "I did it last year"
Matt: "what does the email say?"
Steve: "It said it is fine"
Matt: "Read it again"

In our team “Retrospective” meeting, we had to vote for “Team Member of the Sprint”. Steve voted for me. Matt asked him for the reason and he said

“I was hoping there wasn’t a second round of questioning”

Steve

A few weeks after finishing the Online Request project:

“Do you know how to switch on ‘Online Requests’?”

Steve

Me 13:41
guess how many unread emails Steve has. It's like he has been on holiday for weeks
Dan 13:42:
100
Me 13:42:
way higher
Dan 13:42:
500
Me 13:42:
closer, higher!
Dan 13:42:
I give up
Me 13:43:
550

No wonder he didn’t know what was going on.

His manager, Matt once stood at his desk and simply stated “Steve”, and Steve was baffled. I correctly assumed it was his one-to-one meeting. Even after Matt told him to check his calendar, Steve was still baffled what it could be. Classic Steve. Probably a meeting request in one of his unread emails.

We once had a meeting located in the main office. All our team dialled in remotely apart from Steve. From the video feed, we saw him walk into the meeting room late and say something to Adam.

Andy 12:36:
did you see Steve randomly turn up to the meeting?
funny as can be
Me 12:36:
yeah
Andy 12:36:
Mia had tears streaming down her face
Me 12:36:
why?
Andy 12:36:
cos why did he turn up when everyone else on his team dialled in
Me 12:37:
did he ask Adam if he was at the right meeting?
Andy12:37:
yeah!

“I was thinking of going for ‘Looks Good’ because there’s too many files”

Steve on doing Code Reviews. Too many files gets instant approval.

Charlotte: "what did everyone think of the meeting yesterday?"
Steve: "What meeting?"
Charlotte: "the meeting with Ronnie"
Steve: "oh, that. I'll be honest with you. I wasn't listening. I have no idea what was said"

Steve took an extended lunch break, and then later he went for a long walk. Matt challenged him on it "Didn't you go out for lunch as well?"
Steve said "yes" with a right cheesy grin
Doesn't care.

“Soon, I’m gonna be introducing lots of bugs. I’ve nearly finished my work; and I’m not dev-testing it”

Steve

Dan 16:18:
is he… what!? is he trying to get fired in the same way you'd act like a jerk to encourage your partner to split up so you get to feel morally superior?
Me 16:18:
haha, great example

A similar example…

Matt: "Steve, are you sure these changes haven't broken anything?"
Me (with fake confidence): "Yeah, because he ran the unit tests"
Steve: "Have I? I only ran the build"

Steve wrote a unit test with the following test data (Michael Jackson).

string doesNotContainsNumeric = "you know I'm bad, I'm bad, you know it, I'm bad";

He often used his name in variable names. He was supposed to choose good names before submitting it to review, but he sometimes forgot. Examples:

boolSteve
strSteve
SuppressMessage("Microsoft.Naming", "CA1702:CompoundWordsShouldBeCasedCorrectly", MessageId = "IOn", Justification = "steve") 

Me 13:53:
user.Surname = "O'Cake";
user.GivenName = "Pat";
Andy M13:53:
i'm sure i've seen that before
Me 13:54:
reminds you of your days in Pre-school
singing children's songs
Me 14:14:
OMG STEVE IS HILARIOUS
Matt googled Pat O'Cake and its a character from Bottom. He asked Steve about it, and he said "I wouldn't Google them all though, sometimes I use pornstar names"

Then a week later:

private const string _vouchingUser = "Bearstrangler McGee"; 
Andy 10:52: 
wtf
Me 10:52: 
Steve special
I never dare search for anything Steve puts in unit tests after he said "I sometimes use porn star names"
Andy 10:54: 
haha
i hope that's not the name of porn star

Then there were some interesting reasons:

Me 14:48:
"CancellationReason\": \"patient has lost keys to handcuffs\"
why is Steve different?
Andy 14:48:
what the hell?
Me1 4:48:
const string cancellationReason = "patient was visiting a massage parlour";
Andy 14:49:
is he checking this stuff in?!
Me14:49:
yes, it's in our branch
Andy14:50:
he's an absolute lunatic

Steve was working on fixing a bug that Matt was also fixing (but we didn’t know it at the time). The next day Matt and Steve were both on annual leave, so Matt had handed his work over to me, and Steve handed his over to Jim. I finished my work, and Jim even passed my code review without even realising the similarity. It’s like a comedy show sometimes.

Steve had completed a feature, but his changes had broken Matt’s last bug fix.

“it worked for my user story”

Steve. It’s like the classic “it worked on my machine” that software developers love to say

Steve completed the work for saving Users to the database. I just tried it and it crashed. We asked him how much testing he did and he claimed it was all working. I showed him and he said “I forgot about that way”. There are only two scenarios, add from existing user, and add new user.

“I don’t think the Database Tool is working. I think it is completely goosed”

Steve

I just caught Steve smurf naming even though in his last code review, Phil told him not to.
So then he looks up Smurfs on wikipedia. He clicks Smurfette and says “I’ll see if she is fit“.

I have no idea who brought a “dunce hat” in, but we decided that if you somehow break the build, then you wear the hat. Steve wore the hat quite a bit.

“I don’t need to wear the hat; I haven’t broken the build. I’ve just broken the product”

Steve

Not sure how he did it, but Steve once sent code to review which had the same title as the previous change he did. It also had the wrong User Story linked to it. (－‸ლ)

I told Steve that he was supposed to roll back one of his work items. After a few seconds he said it was done. I was sceptical. He said that I had already deleted the other part of the change. So I looked, and I hadn’t. He then said

“to be honest, I didn’t even look at it. I didn’t even compile it”

Steve

Miscellaneous

“Any advice that starts with ‘do not expose’ is good advice”

Steve

Liam was telling Steve that an angry resident left him a note on his car telling him not to park there again. Steve then comes out with this…

“Just piss through their letterbox”

Steve

We were playing badminton after work, and Steve said he had to rush off. Mike asked “are you doing something interesting?”. He said his parents were coming over later and he had a massive stash of weed to hide or smoke.

“I accidentally googled porn with my mum on mother’s day”

Steve

He was helping her with a crossword and the clue was “goddess of nature” and he wrote “goddess of mature“