A Crusty Old Programmer Reminisces About A Startup Boss

The CTO, Captain Narcissus, was a certifiable nutbar. In speech, he dropped F-bombs like other people breathe in. He was similar in temperament to a toddler; demanding, screamy, and always, always, always right.

At one point, our poor tech moved Captain Narcissus' monitor while he was out of town. Upon his return, he had a literal screaming meltdown, where he stormed around the Programming Pit shrieking "DON'T F***! WITH MY S***!" over and over at the top of his lungs.

At other times he could be quite affectionate, like the time he crept up behind me while I was coding and started rubbing my face, saying "I like your beard."

One evening shortly after a major client product launch, the site started experiencing slow response times. Even though it was well after hours, a few of us were still working when Captain Narcissus stomped down the stairs demanding to know why the site was slow.

Our network guy saw that our office network was saturated-- this was back when we we ran network services out of our physical location, on whatever boxes we could scrape together, so office traffic competed for bandwidth with the product.

The network guy told Captain Narcissus that he was able to narrow down the cause of saturation to a well-known streaming porn site, and he was trying to figure out which computer in the office was causing the problem.

"Oh," said the Captain, with uncharacteristic calmness. "Oh. Well, I'm sure it's fine. Don't worry about it."

Then he went upstairs.

Minutes later, the network situation resolved itself.