Ah, Teamwork...

Before I launch into this tirade let me preface it with this: I understand that the concept of teams is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But like all lofty goals this concept is far better in theory than in practice. Nuclear power is a good example of this: "If we just control the reaction we can have amazing supplies of relatively inexpensive and clean energy. Or... we could just say eff that and blow someone to hell." (I realize that isn't how things actually played out but sometimes accuracy must be sacrificed for the sake of an appropriate analogy). Anyway, what you generally end up with is a group of people controlled by the person with the least amount of actual knowledge.

I was recently placed on a team with lofty aspirations. Our group is responsible for researching and interviewing people to determine what technologies we're going to use on our company's website when we redesign it. A worthy goal to be sure and yet I already know how our weekly meetings are going to play out. Everyone on the team is going to insist that the methods that we would be best served by are coincidentally the ones that they already know. Then there will be arguments where no one actually presents any unbiased pros and cons and then I will step in and tell everyone to shut the hell up...

Seriously. I'm fairly certain that my widely-known intolerance for long meetings and baseless complaining coupled with the fact that I have no problem telling people to shut it is why I've been slapped into this group. This mess will continue for as long as 3 months and then we'll finally agree to using PHP for the marketing portion of our site and .NET C# in our online store. Neither will make anyone happy but neither will infuriate anyone to the point where they'll actually fight the transition. This has already been predicted by a number of people and the best that I can hope for is that if I'm enough of a cranky bastard people will get sick of me and agree to it faster just so they don't have to meet with me anymore.

However, since we haven't met yet I have to act like an optimistic Alzheimer's patient on a battlefield. Sure this shit has almost killed me on numerous occasions and I'm fairly certain I've done my share of damage but... wait who are all these people? I seem to have stumbled onto a party!