Last night, I was showing new protege Poindexter her next task. As I "rebrand" existing documents, she's going behind me and making sure I caught everything. I explained that Marketing came up with a new design, and that's what we're rolling out. As I walked her through her task, she interrupted. "Wait. Which one is the new design?" I pointed at the one that looks like a glaucomic secretary banged it out in five minutes on her iMac in 1999, then printed it on a dot matrix printer from 1983.
"But it's worse," she said, genuinely confused. "A lot worse." She's still in high school and of course has no real world experience, let alone corporate experience.
I explained that Marketing is bush-pissing. She didn't understand. I explained the politics of how we were wildly successful without them, and that this embarrassed them, and now they're finding fault with our work and "saving" us, and how we're letting the babies have their bottle because this is not a hill worth dying on. Yeah, I used pretty much every metaphor in my arsenal.
Now she's upset. "So...you're being paid to ruin your own work?"
"Now you get it."