byterock

Anyone who has ever run into my will know I like to tell and hear good stories and I ran across one surprisingly on CPAN today.

Well I blundered upon Morale a rather old bit of code that has been around since the last century that total and as it is rather unremarkable old school, well that is unfair really as it was written well before there was a new school and most new school programmer will still playing with their gameboys, that simply stores a scalar value of 1 to 100 for a uses moral and can also calculate the moral for the group based on the individual user values.

It wasn't the 90 lines of code that caught my attention or the 12 lines of POD it was the 100 or so lines of the story that caught my eye.

If your like me and have been kicked about the high tech can a few times will relate to the story. You will get a laugh as I did when you read the management reaction to this little gem of a program.

Moral is such an important factor in any enterprise and is always one that is hard to figure out. You can sum up misunderstanding of moral with the old joke

The Sergent Major reported to the Colonel that the moral of the men was low. So the Colonel posted an order that all leave was canceled until moral improves!

Moral is tricky many times I have worked long long hours for no extra pay, I didn't expect anything but a little note on my desk saying thank you from my manager did make my day.

Once I worked with a very good team of complementarity skills and we learned and supported each other, too bad the upper management split us up so we could take our good team skills to other teams that where not working, that was a very good way to crush moral.

Musical chairs or workspaces was another of my favorite things. As if lowering or raising cubical walls or providing bigger monitors will help moral.

Oh well I could go on and on, I remember one place where the lay-offs would come in May no matter if the company made a profit. I tell you it is hard to build any bonds with the people you have to work with when they may be gone the next day and you the day after.

Anyway read the story and have a laugh.