2002-08-17 11:58 a.m.
The Contractor Under the Bridge
We have a new contractor in my group. One day the old contractor was gone; the next, without any warning a new guy shows up to take his place.
The old contractor was both fiercely ambitious and none too bright, with a good resume but without the chops to back it up. He seemed to think that if he dazzled us hard enough, he'd get hired on, and regarded me as, at best, an inconvenient obstacle to his success. He was of the old, conservative school of Indian guy, who couldn't quite believe a woman could be competent technically, let alone have anything to teach him. He was pleasant enough to deal with, at least as much as someone who is dismissive of your abilities can be, but he wasn't contributing anything and I wasn't sad to see him go.
Enter the new guy.
I came stumbling in one morning in my typical pre-11 AM haze, desperately clutching my cup of coffee, and it took me about half an hour to notice that there was a guy over in the corner. He didn't introduce himself, and I felt a little dumb for not noticing him sooner, so I didn't introduce myself. This continued for about three days. (I suspect he was waiting to see how long it would take before I'd break.) Finally I introduced myself after a meeting, and I think he grunted at me. (In front of the boss and the boss' boss. Way to make an impression.) Since then he's has perhaps half a dozen words to say to me, all of them delivered with a sneer. And it began to occur to me that his name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place it.
So one afternoon I was waiting for some stuff to finish building and I popped onto Usenet to kill time while waiting. Three posts into one of the local groups, this guy's name popped up. Turns out that the reason this guy's name is so familiar is because there's a troll by the same name who's been sleazing around some of the local newsgroups for years. I hadn't read the local groups consistently since college, so I'd forgotten who he was -- and apparently, in the intervening fifteen years he hasn't found anything better to do with his time.
TheBoy pointed out that I can't be certain it's the same guy -- even though he has the same (admittedly fairly common) name, lives in the same area and works in the same specialty of the same field. But the guy has the pleasant demeanor and cheerful facial expression of someone who belongs under bridges chowing down on goats, so Troll he is and -- unless the boss, who usually has pretty decent judgement, fills me in on what he was thinking -- Troll he will ever be.