There is new champion in town

After Senka quit, champions faced a big problem. Nobody of the remaining staff wanted to get even close to debugging Stinky's trash or producing dull reports, two trivial and humiliating tasks that Senka usually did. It was really important to speed up manhunt and find appropriate person willing to do whatever is asked from him without asking too much questions or doubting in great leadership. Off course, it had to be a male person because it was obvious from dealing with Senka that women are unpredictable and unreliable as programmers and once a month so driven by hormones that they even start to doubt in all-mighty management and question its authority. How outrageous!

One of the stories related to those days when Senka's hormones went wild goes like this: In one of his inspiring moments, Zakro gave Senka task of finding appropriate icon for one of the forms in DAMP application. After few hours of search, she succeeded in finding one and put it on the form. Then Zakro came to scene and started to play indecisive customer. "Can you please move the icon to the right? No, make it to the left! Maybe it would be better to make it more darker, can you add more dark blue colour in it?" etc. After few such orders, which Senka experienced many times before, she finally exploded and said that she had more important things to do than to play with his bloody icon and that he could as well adjust the icon himself. Zakro was very surprised by her reaction, although he shouldn't have been, because he already enjoyed his second marriage and had a lot of experience with women. Anyway, that incident didn't help Senka to get more responsibility but at the time she was surely relieved from much of the accumulated frustration. 

OK, let's go back to Dodoni's problem of finding new employee. As usual, job newsgroup ad attracted many candidates, mostly because Dodoni was Dembelian firm and people assumed that bigger salary and better working conditions automatically come with the position. Zakro and Stinky were stuck with many resumes and after many hours of careful reading and evaluating all possibilities they came to conclusion that guy named Rudi Topalovic had the best chances for becoming a true champion. He came for an interview and shortly after that he was hired.

Profile of the new born champion

Rudi was 34 years old and that made him the oldest champion, right after Zakro. Considering his age, everybody thought that he had to have much experience and that he was serious and reliable developer. When they found out that his experience was equal to zero and that Dodoni was his first job, they didn't stop to believe in him because in his resume Rudi wrote that he was an experienced self-taught developer and master of Microsoft technologies. The thought that maybe Rudi blatantly lied just to get a job didn't cross their mind.
One thing in favour to Rudi was that he spoke Dembelian language, which surprisingly no other champion was able to. Zakro thought that it was a nice opportunity to reduce firm's budget and ditch the official Dodoni translator, a woman who processed all Dembelian documents and who shamelessly asked to be paid for that.

Rudi proved his seriousness with one more fact - he was one exam far from obtaining bachelor's degree in computer science. The sad truth that he was holding that status for years without any visible sign that he really intended to finish his studies again didn't change Zakro's and Erich's opinion because Rudi was very cooperative person - he happily accepted all the dirty tasks that Senka previously worked on and the most important, he agreed to be paid like a junior developer.

What else to say about Rudi? Silent, reserved guy, whom many people would describe as "focused thinker" while some less forgiving would interpret his constant staring in one direction as mental problem or even dumbness. Well, wise man once said that there was a small step from being talented and being dumb, and careless observers usually don't see the difference.

Master of pure theory or "Why finish something in one hour if you can spare two days?"

Rudi was very precise in his work. After getting his assignment, no matter how trivial it was, he would always analyze it to the tiniest details in an attempt to find the best possible solution. That analysis could take hours without any significant result, but Rudi didn't rush, as long as nobody asked for it. Efficiency is for dummies and robots, and I am an intellectual who doesn't get his hands dirty by actually producing something, he probably thought.
His system worked until he realized that Zakro demanded that every working hour should be justified and entered into DAMP timesheet system. That finding made him very upset because he knew that many envious champions would interpret the time he spent on "thinking and evaluating all possible solutions" as wasted and unproductive, so he found a Solomon solution. He simply ignored Zakro and kept "forgetting" to fill his timesheet. When Bartol suggested that it was not a wise decision and that he could justify his work as "Learning", Rudi was again upset. "If I enter all those hours under task Learning, it would only mean that I don't know much and that I am not an expert. It is not consistent with my reputation of experienced and knowledgeable developer, as I presented myself when I came here."

When Zakro finally forced him to fill the timesheet, Rudi spent half a day on making up fictious tasks that would cover all that time he wasted on playing with "all possible solutions". You should see the despair on his face when he tried to transform the task that normal person would require two hours to complete into huge task spanning two or more days and to avoid the forbidden word learning. Or not to mention real tasks he performed like "escape to my fantasy world", "dumb staring at the screen for hours" or "pretending to do something useful". Good for him that he decided to listen to Bartol who had very good imagination when it came to filling the gaps in timesheet. He learned from him that two hours of surfing the porn sites could be justified as "four hours of searching for optimal code snippets on development sites" or that ten-minutes conversation between developers could be entered in timesheet as "one or two hours of consulting team members regarding the architecture or design of the application."

For Ripley's "Believe it or not"

There are numerous examples of Rudi's dedication to details. One of the anecdotes says that he has written the "cookbook" for installing patch for MS SQL server. The text started with "Turn the computer on by pressing the button labelled Power" and ended with "Shutdown Windows by selecting Shutdown option from Start menu that is located in lower left corner of the screen". Another anecdote goes like this:

In one of the desktop VB projects, Rudi was assigned a task of creating a code that would populate a tree control on the form. It was a rather clear task because the data for tree came from recordset that was specially prepared for that task - each record in the recordset represented one node of the tree with all the necessary data, even the id of the parent node. It was enough just to loop through the recordset and create tree nodes, maybe handle some special cases, a bit of error handling and all in all, it was estimated to few hours of work.
Rudi took different approach, because it was obviously too simple solution for him. First he spent 10 hours in drawing sketches of the tree on the paper and trying to figure out how that mysterious structure really worked and what was the theory behind it. After he finished his self-brainstorming and threw away all those sketches, he came to an idea that it would be a shame not to develop an universal class that could be used to populate all kinds of tree controls, not just this one. After he spent another 16 hours of proof-of-concept programming trying to understand how "that bloody control worked", he came to conclusion that his concept wasn't so universal at all, because he was missing the node level number in input data. After another 30 hours of playing with his class and original data he decided it would be wise to listen to Bartol's advice and forget about the universal class and just write the simple loop that would iterate through the recordset and use InsertItem method of tree control to fill the structure. Although he wasted almost two weeks of work for something that could have been done in two or three hours, he was still convinced that he almost did the right thing. If only his creativity wasn't brutally restricted by stupid delivery dates and "develop efficiently" rules.

Few months later he again proved that he didn't learn from previous mistakes. This time he was assigned a task of developing an error handling for new version of DAMP. For every other developer it would mean creating a simple class that would handle three typical cases of errors - ADO, system and XML. Many three tier sample applications like Duwamish or Fitch&Mather already come with such class and it is just a matter of copying it and adapting it to particular needs. But Rudi was not an ordinary developer and he proved that by spending entire month in developing his super universal error handling class. And at the end, what do you think, did Rudi succeed in his effort? Or maybe other developer threw away his class and in 5 or 6 hours wrote another one that actually worked? It is up to you and to your common sense, our dear visitors, to find an answer to that dilemma.

One of his annoying personal habits was that he liked to work in the darkness. When he came to work, he would immediately draw the curtains and left his colleagues in complete darkness. "I can't stand the sun reflecting on my screen, it blinds me and I can't work", he would say in his defense. Unfortunately, Rudi was equally productive (or better, unproductive) with or without the presence of the sunlight in the office.
There were few theories among his co-workers that tried to explain this strange behaviour. One of them was based on predictable pattern of traumatic childhood. The other stated that Rudi avoided light because it would expose his dumbness and lack of efficiency. Another one said that he simply wanted to be in the dark room full of men so he could fulfil his fantasy of being in Turkish prison. Bartol wasn't fond of any of those theories and he thought that Rudi was using the darkness just to piss his champ co-workers.

Long live the theory

Rudi was obsessed with theoretical and philosophical discussions of any size, shape, colour or flavour. And if discussion had something to do with mathematics or physics, he was happy as a baby on a mother's chest. The ultimate subject that made him tremble like he was having an orgasm was Theory of the chaos. If some of his teammates said something even remotely related to that theory, he would stop all his boring programming activities and immediately involve himself in the discussion. Off course, under the assumption that he was the superior authority in that field and that everybody should just sit down and listen to what he had to say.

If he was ten years older he would probably make a career as a high ranked communist party official whose main responsibility would be to make party meetings interesting and free of unpleasant silence. Some non-champions think that constant talking is not a virtue and that it is better to be quiet if you have nothing important to say. But, Rudi as a perspective champion knew that a meaningless blabbing is a good tool for assuring other people of your great competence and knowledge.

Rudi's ups and downs on his road to championism

Except Bojan, Rudi was the only person whom Bartol could tolerate and normally communicate with after Senka left Dodoni. Rudi and Bartol worked together on one desktop VB project and many times Bartol was irritated by Rudi's obsession with theory so he usually instructed him to implement something in shorter and normal way and not the way Rudi liked or wanted to. Rudi was very offended by that approach and he would probably refuse to obey Bartol's orders if he wasn't aware that his dedication to details and his habit to spend five to ten times more time on the task wasn't very popular with Zakro and other colleagues. So, even he didn't like it, he agreed to follow Bartol's directions. As for Bartol, although he knew that Rudi's consent was result of fear and compromise, he was still pleased that there was one person in champ firm who was supposed to work according to his ideas.

Bartol wasn't the only person irritated by Rudi's behaviour. Management didn't like him either because he used to ask "unnecessary" questions instead of reading other people's minds. "What is that you don't understand? It is so simple...", Zakro used to say to him on many occasions. In time Rudi understood that he is expected to obey orders, be quiet and never ask for further explanations. He also realized that he should follow the basic champion's principles: never ask questions, never waste time on documentation and code before thinking why. If he sometimes found out that he completely misunderstood what he was supposed to do because he never asked, he still didn't doubt in process and the way things were done around him.

Considering all these facts, it was obvious that Rudi gradually became a real champion, full of faith in Zakro's leadership and his firm's future. Off course, he should still be monitored 8 hours a day to prevent him from spending 5 times more time on assigned tasks, but as long as he didn't ask too much questions and didn't doubt in management, he was tolerated. At the end he realized that his position and his salary perfectly matched his abilities and that he would have hard time finding another job, so he became a real proponent of his firm and of champ methods of programming. When Bartol once insisted on careful planning and good design of the application instead of fanatic coding, Rudi replied: "Why so much planning? It is like we are building a house and thinking that maybe one day it will become a high-rise building. Instead of making it right now, we are losing time on what-if scenarios. It is crazy, let's go and code something!"