Sleeping with the Sharks

Roy Scheider, the hero cop in the monster movie Jaws has died at age 75.

Hmmn, the notice says he won an Oscer for his role in "All That Jazz." Really? I didn't see that one. Not really my kind of flick. About a dancer, I think. Somewhat less macho that the role of shark-killing lawman.

Jaws was an amazing movie on several levels. The screenplay and dialogue were expertly crafted. Virtually nothing in the movie was irrelevant to the story. The use of sound and symbol to get the viewers' hearts racing was scary in its manipulative genius. The lameness of the phony-looking shark head that they used as a prop was overshadowed by the tension of the moment. I recall seeing it in the theater and joining the audience in a audible GASP when the shark finally appears.

The images of that movie have stayed with me (and I suspect many others) ever since then. Even 33 years later, I remain leery when swimming in the ocean deep water. Try not to swim like a wounded fish, I tell myself. Don't go over your head. What's that shadow in the water?

The obit says, "In 2005, one of Scheider's most famous lines in the movie - ''You're gonna need a bigger boat'' - was voted No. 35 on the American Film Institute's list of best quotes from U.S. movies."

I have used that line repeatedly throughout my career as a Business Systems Analyst. During the planning phase of most projects, there comes the moment when you realize that the deadlines are unrealistic given the scope of the plan and the scarcity of resources.

I would use the "We need a bigger boat" line to dramatize the point to inform the boss that we did not have enough resources to do the job well. Usually the boss would look at me and ask "What the [expletive] are you talking about?"

(Ach! The wretchedness of a poet trying to earn a living in the business world.)
I would explain the metaphor to little avail. The project would go on, like the Pequod in "Moby Dick", to meet its fate.

We - the more poetic minded - were fond using shipwreck disaster analogies, like "...rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" for the irrelevance of many of our meetings and activities in the face of certain doom. (The managers preferred sports imagery like "Winning is the only thing. Losing is not an option.")

Typically, 99 out of 100 corporate system development projects were conceived by upper management types, who were trying to show their superiors that they possessed magical abilities. Thus, they always initiated projects that were under-funded, understaffed, and called for unreasonable deadlines. Somehow, they believed that they could acheive impossible results by exhorting, threatening or seducing the development staff.
It never worked. Not one project in my experience was completed on-time and on-budget. A few were considered successes, but most of them were abandoned before we got to implementation. Strangely enough, only a few of these projects were considered failures.

The wonderful thing about the corporate business world is the short tenure of management. They were always moving-up and away. New guys were always showing-up to take over. The subtle benefit of this executive turnover to the working staff was that none of the new managers felt responsible for projects that they "inherited." They often pronounced the old project obsolete. And then they would started a new major project that had their personal ego stamp on it ...

Thus the life of a corporate systems guy was a constant iteration of beginnings and very few endings - be they triumphant or even quasi-failures.

I never claimed to be the most astute bulb in the drawer, but I realized early-on that in business and politics, no one gets fired for failure. It was not a bad life: The people I worked with were usually fun and our companies spent a lot of money sending us to nice places in the name of training.

...And every now and then, one signs-on to the Project Orca and ends-up swimming home with a pretty good story to tell.

Thanks for the memories, Roy.