The Riddler began his day by explaining to me that he couldn’t come into the office yesterday because he had to get his childen off to school.

We had a meeting later in the morning about contracting a significant piece of work to a designer. The designer has worked with us briefly, and we have a good opinion of his experience and capabilities. The Rid’s job was to negotiate a term of work and rate of compensation for the dude in question.

Unfortunately, the Rid has agreed to a rate with the designer without defining what role he’s going to play. Or what he’s expected to do. Or when he’ll be finished. And then asked me to write a contract based upon non-existent parameters…except I’m not allowed to know the designer’s rate of pay, either. When questioned about what exactly should be in the document, I got “You know. Standard stuff. Keep it simple.”

Later, when discussing the designer’s workload, the Rid quickly made it clear that 1) he doesn’t know what is going on with the project and 2) he expects to be in full control of the entire project.

He began by trying to convince HPDEB and myself that we should have the designer work on a product we might want to build two or three years from now instead of the project that spawned his contract. The quote that stuck from this one:

We need to show him our near-sightedness. Then we can show him the farsight we possess and have him build proactively.

If one was to assume that the speaker’s first language was English, the literal translation of this would be something along the lines of “We need to show him how incompetent we are. Then we can reveal our psychic powers.”

In addition, one of the requirements for having the designer in-house is that we have a computer ready for him. The Rid took the task of assembling a machine upon himself last week, with the HPDEB’s encouragement. I’ll leave the full story of the resulting embarassment to the HPDEB, but suffice it to say that:

  • A week has passed and the machine isn’t finished
  • My bet that the Rid would bring in a metal lathe and an arc welder has not panned out yet

I have no sympathy for the HPDEB on this one. He sewed the seeds of his own destruction and nourished them with bitter waters from his private lake of sorrow.