This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Charles Miller. Original Post: Artistic License Feed Title: The Fishbowl Feed URL: https://fishbowl.pastiche.org/atom.xml Feed Description: tail -f /dev/mind > blog Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Charles Miller Latest Posts From The Fishbowl

I found a link to Where is Bob? on Reddit, a WTF-style blog about an incompetent IT manager. It is decently written and I was enjoying the latest article. Then I came to this bit:

And that is the long story (the short story is always simply “Bob is an idiot, and here we are”) of how I found myself stuck in a conference room with four Jira sales-people, a small wall clock ticking away the minutes of my life, and a large pot of coffee.

Er… huh? We would send four guys out to a “small university IT shop” to sell a product that costs at most $5k? We even have four sales-people? Sure, in really special cases where there's a lot of money involved (and you’re within half an hour’s drive of San Francisco or Sydney) we might send two guys out for a chat, but for most customers our entire sales process consists of slightly weird automated emails.

Granted, most blogs of this nature have a large fictional component. Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, one assumes she took two stories that on their own wouldn't sustain a full article — “stupid boss wants to replace Bugzilla with commercial issue tracker” and “stupid boss didn't turn up to early morning meeting he scheduled himself” — and melded them together. Still, the artistic license really doesn't help with the suspension of disbelief.