A Bullet You Wish You Could Dodge

I work for a small company in a niche engineering field with even more niche specialization. Our sales and marketing director has worked in this engineering field for over fifteen years, and yet, she has no desire to learn anything about what she is supposed to be selling. She does latch onto keywords and misuse them like no tomorrow, though. Think using “cold gas thrusters” to describe the entire rocket. And if you try to clarify terms, good luck! She will yell at you for treating her like she is stupid.

Today, it is “bulletproof code”.

Director: “We need some internal demos once the code is what I call ‘bulletproof.'”

Me: *Thinking* “Code is never bulletproof.”

Coworker: “Sounds good.”

Director: “We really need some bulletproof code for these demos so we can start selling. The code must be bulletproof.”

She went on and on about bulletproof code, asking us when the code would be “bulletproof”. And this wasn’t some small algorithm. This was a complex piece of code that needed to be used for over a hundred different specialized cases. But she kept going on and on and on about how it needed to be “bulletproof”.

She wasn’t happy when she didn’t get anything that day like she thought she was requesting. No, she is not capable of learning. And no, no one wants to ask for clarification.