earlybird...

There's an IT programme manager working with my team.  He works for one of the big consultancy firms and has been attached to our project for a number of months in a vaguely supervisory role for our IT colleagues.  No one is entirely sure exactly what he does, but he seems to have some kind of overall managerial role and certainly acts as though he's the senior IT representative on the project.  

You probably know the sort: he's a nice enough guy, but he spends all his time either on his BlackBerry or on his laptop, including when he's attending a meeting.  That would be bad enough, but sometimes they're meetings that he's called and he doesn't even have the courtesy to listen to the updates people are giving him.  To be fair, he's hardly alone in that particular rudeness: last week I was in an important weekly project meeting, and at one point I counted 8 of the 11 attendees tapping away on their laptops.  When I looked across at one point, the lady sitting next to me was sending ME emails.  The bloody cheek!

Anyway.  

This guy's major role seems to be to get other people from his consultancy firm employed on our project and to confuse the IT guys working on the project who don't work for that firm.  He answers to the senior IT stakeholder of the project, and not to the business sponsor and spends most of his time trying to please and influence his boss and not the guy who we're all ultimately working for.  I'm sure he wants to do a good job, but it sometimes just feels as though he's playing IT politics.  I didn't have much use for IT politics when I did work in IT.  I've got even less use for it now.  This chap is probably about my age and, for some reason, has grown a beard like a fisherman... not a hipster beard, you understand, but a proper Captain Birdseye.  The ladies quite like him, on the whole, but are somewhat baffled by the extent of his facial hair, which he's showing no signs of cutting back.  I even think he's a guilty crush for a couple of them.  To be honest, that's not that important to this story, but is an excuse for this picture.

Yesterday morning, this gentleman arrived in the office at about 0745.  Pretty early, but about half of my team was already in and getting on with their work.  

"Ah!" he says, "the early bird catches the worm!"

He paused, and then added.

"Good morning worms...."

Now.  This guy is German, so perhaps I should be charitable here and say that his idiomatic grasp of English isn't quite there.  After all, for a non-native English speaker, it's pretty good that he knows the phrase at all, isn't it?  Do you know the German equivalent?  Is there a German equivalent?  It's possible that he just hasn't fully got the hang of it yet and that he didn't really mean to say that we're worms.

Hmmm.

It's possible.....

Besides, we were all there before him anyway.  Some people, eh?  I ask you.