Cats and Dicks

Chris,

I was between Product Owners and brand-new to the job. The team was coming to me, but I still wasn't sure what I was for. I had words with each of them, and we knew one another. I wasn't excluded from things; I was present at all the meetings, but I was more like Dian Fossey than a team member. Their heads were down, they slumped in their chairs, and the talk was dry and rote. I saw a team that I had seen before.

I saw line cooks finishing service and prepping for tomorrow. I saw them sitting there, wiping down counters and counting up stock for tomorrow. These guys didn't drink away their pains for the day, they needed something different. They had a new boss coming in soon, and they had no idea what that would bring. We needed a prank.

I set up the hour-long retro meeting with the team in an office space right by the new PO's office. We took the mandatory sticky notes that all Scrum Teams seem to hoard, and we drew cats on them. Any kind of cat, didn't matter, just make it a cat. What they don't tell you in Agile training that you get to when you hit art school is that drawing 100+ different cats is hard. You run out of ideas of what a cat should be, and then go into what a cat could be. This stretched the imaginations of the team and got them thinking a bit about "What is cat?" I had been using this example as a way to explain better acceptance criteria cause everyone's cat looks different. This was not that; this was: let's cat paper the PO's entire office to say, ' Welcome to the Code Monkeys. ' Nothing like a warm, what-the-heck-is-this welcome to a new team to say, "We care, and here's your hazing."

We got into his office and started taping them and sticking them to everything. We did an entire wall that now held a collage of cat stickies of every shape and size. His desk was engulfed in cat stickies, shown like a multicolored patchwork quilt. He would find some months later and still curse at us playfully. Little did we know he was a cat guy, so it worked out.

It's just another night,
and another round of scream cat fights
-Dance Hall Crashers (Cat Fight)

It set a tone that the Product Owner is now a part of the group. The team had a great time placing them all over the Product Owner's office. Exploits like that spread around the office. We had pranked him good, and the entire company was talking about it. One of the VPs had nicknamed the incident Chairman Meow. Though the VP could not endorse the prank cause that wouldn't be proper. It wasn't the most notorious prank the company had ever pulled, but it was the first one in a long while.

It takes some safety to do something like that. As a contractor, I would never have suggested it. Or would have been an idiot to suggest it. We weren't all employees; we weren't on the same playing field. I've learned that by seeing it and not being the one who did it, thankfully.

If you're a contractor, your job is to do the job, that's it. Come in do your work and get out just a cog in the machine. It's combating that culture that is key to not losing your mind at work. Not just doing your job well, but not killing yourself slowly while doing it.

The MBA would chastise me for wasting an hour of burn rate for an entire team doing that prank. The Scrum Guide would have me say that I wasted a good meeting chance to get actionable items down for the next sprint. Any sane business would say that was a waste of time and sticky notes for little Return on Investment. I like to think I'd tell them all to fuck off, this is what the team needed.

I remembered getting into a prank war with another high-end restaurant in town while bartending. It helped cohesion in the back of the house. This wasn't something for the bartenders and servers, just the line cooks and chef. So when I got asked to help out, I was honored and more than willing. The key was to break the tension everyone was feeling without breaking anything else. So sending a giant phallic sausage with meatballs via Uber Eats to the back of house at another restaurant went over about as well as could be expected. The war was on, and we'd get dildos sent to us on equipment we would lend them. The topping was me photoshopping dicks all over their promotional photos and sending them copies of that. That's where it stopped. It was getting too heated, and both Chefs put an end to the war. I still hear about it from the cooks from time to time when I catch up with them. A good prank isn't mean-spirited and makes the person feel loved. Seeing that line and knowing it is key.

The certifications and the schooling would never have taught me that a prank would be the best course of action. No one lets you know when to joke, but it's the make-or-break for a lot of teams I've found. It humanizes the workers and the work itself.

Chris,

I'm hearing a lot of the same stories from your team, one who's been beat up and burnt out. What kind of cats and dicks do they need to get back together? What thing that you won't find in any book can you give the team that will show them you are a part of the team?