Ironically, part of today's news-cruise involved catching up on the Rands in Repose blog, which dealt with the fine art of meetings. This art includes knowing when to stick to the agenda and when to let it extemporize. Which merely demonstrates that knowing what's right and doing what's right can sometimes be two different things.
Anyhoo, the dev. team was collectively trading notes on our evaluation of the next-generation of our bug-tracking system. Surprisingly, this didn't turn into a free-for-all of scope-bloating wish lists. Maybe because we're mostly developers and have been poked--yea and verily even perforated--by the sharp end of that.
That was until someone--who doesn't like the system anyway--quibbled with a modest request that I had for making the issue history somewhat more scannable. So the little red-garbed, horned, trident-brandishing version of me then encamped on one shoulder said, "Can we have a 'Like' button for comments, then? I think they should have a 'Like' button." Then QA pointed out that a "Dislike" button would be equally applicable, to which others of our party concurred. Then someone else went so far as to suggest reworking the user interface along the lines of "Farmville." Aaaaand the cork basically popped out of the genie-bottle.
Alpha-geek quickly jammed said cork back in place with, "Alright, does anyone else have any valid suggestions?"
Hrmmph. Buzzkill.
It's probably a good thing that the next month or so promises to be insanely busy, or rising to the challenge and spicing up our scenario-planning UI to flirt with being sued by the makers of "Tetris." Or perhaps hijacking the iPad interface to replace the single-tap placement of a person in a workstation with something more reminiscent of the cheap plastic BB-based games I grew up with. Or, if I'm feeling lazy, Facebook's "Kidnap" game could be suitably adapted to our purposes--and you could make the argument that if you can't be bothered to look up information about your new workplace, you really aren't interested in working there anyway. (We're just helping our clients weed out the unenthusiastic clock-watchers...yeah! That's our story and we're sticking to it!)
I mean, aren't you supposed to come out of meetings with different perspectives on things, after all? But, alas, keeping my primary client happy trumps all. Not to mention that I think there's actually something in my contract about not slipping Easter Eggs into code--mine or otherwise.
Silly capital-R reality, getting in the way of a perfectly harmless UI revamp. Sigh.
