Alright, so today’s topic, “7 inc dick.” Sounds like a mouthful, right? Lemme tell ya, it’s not what you think. Or maybe it is, depending on how your mind works. For me, this whole thing brings back one particular nightmare of a project. A real pain, that one, a true record of a tough practice.
It all started simple enough. I was tasked with what seemed like a small job, just a quick update to an old piece of software we had. Should’ve been in and out, a week tops. That was the plan, anyway, when I began this practice. Famous last words, eh?
The Creep Begins
First, the “inc” – short for “increase” in my book, and in this case, it was an increase in sheer project scope and, frankly, stupidity. Suddenly, this manager from another department, let’s call him Dave – a real dick if I ever met one in a professional setting – decided he wanted a whole new user interface. “Make it snazzy!” he kept saying. Snazzy? We were just trying to get the core function to not crash every five minutes! That was the first big hurdle in my practice.
Then came the second “inc.” More features piled on. And with more features, another dick move from higher up – they slashed our already tiny budget. “Innovate with less,” they told us with straight faces. I swear, some of these folks are completely detached from reality. This was a real test of my process.
It just went on like that, this practice of mine turning into a marathon. We hit seven of these “increases,” each one bringing a new level of difficulty, a new kind of dick-tatorial decision from someone who clearly hadn’t touched the actual work in years. I kept a record of these:
- Inc #1: Scope explosion thanks to Dave, the marketing “genius.”
- Inc #2: Budget cuts. Because that always helps innovation, right?
- Inc #3: Our most experienced coder on the team quit. Just walked out. Said he’d had enough of the chaos. Can’t say I blamed him. That threw a wrench in my recording of progress.
- Inc #4: They decided, mid-stream, that we had to switch to some new, barely-tested programming framework. “It’s the future of development!” they declared. Yeah, the future of my headaches.
- Inc #5: An impossible deadline suddenly appeared. Some bigwig wanted to show it off at a conference. Because, you know, appearances are everything, even if the thing is held together with digital duct tape.
- Inc #6: Even more stakeholders got involved. Everyone wanted their little feature, everyone had an opinion. Too many cooks, and frankly, many of them were behaving like complete dicks about their tiny demands.
- Inc #7: The final “inc” – the cherry on top. They wanted it all to flawlessly integrate with Sarah’s ancient database from the finance department. Sarah was a sweet lady, but that system was a proper beast, a real pain to work with, making the end of my practice incredibly stressful.
We somehow, miraculously, managed to duct-tape the whole thing together by the deadline. It looked like a digital Frankenstein’s monster, barely chugging along, but hey, it “worked,” according to them. They even paraded it around and called the whole practice a major success. A success! I nearly spat out my coffee when I heard that.
Why am I sharing this whole painful record? Because that entire ordeal, those “7 inc dicks” as I privately nicknamed the stages of that project, taught me an awful lot. Mostly, it taught me about how projects can go off the rails, how corporate nonsense can derail good work, and how some personalities can really make your daily grind a misery. It’s one of those practical experiences that really sticks with you, you know? Like that time I tried to assemble flat-pack furniture with instructions written in Martian. You just don’t forget the pain.
So yeah, “7 inc dick.” For me, it wasn’t about size, folks. It was a measure of my sanity stretching thin, seven times over, thanks to a cascade of bad decisions and, well, a few individuals who made the whole process a living hell. That’s my practice record for ya. Hope your own projects are running a damn sight smoother.
