And then there was one... less
We lost another body at work today. Careless, I know - you take your eye off a corpse for a moment and the next thing you know it's lumbered off looking like an extra from a George Romero film. But seriously, at least this one was down to a resignation rather than redundancy. It's still not great news for the rest of us, but at least it's tinged with happiness that someone has managed to go off and get themselves a better job.
That said, it's difficult to conceive of the development team growing any smaller - we passed the bare minimum required to get any serious work done some months back, and we now seem to spend most of our day fending off the marketing teams increasingly inane requests and questions.
Today for example, I received an email from a marketing bod containing a question I couldn't answer. I responded by saying that I couldn't answer the question and referred him onto someone else who might be able to help. About 15 minutes later he came around to speak to me because, and I quote "you didn't respond to my email." I actually went and pulled up the mail I sent him and pointed to it, since, to be honest, I resented the implication I hadn't been doing my job properly and I wasn't quite certain what else to do. He then casually dismissed what I'd sent him, since it didn't contain the answer he wanted, and proceeded to ask me again.
I just don't know how to deal with that sort of behaviour. After all, how many times should you need to answer "I don't know" before your response sinks in? I remained courteous at least (or as courteous as I could under the circumstances), but inside I despaired a little more.
One day I hope to work where the marketing people don't.
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Marketing people don't respond well to "I don't know." To them, that would be the equivalent of being a hungry lion and finding a wounded baby gazelle. Harsh, but true.
Beyond responding with trite catch words like "transparency" and "long-term goals" and "we have to syngergize with so and so" I would just say with a strong tone, Ask [fill in the blank] in a sharp, clear tone. The kind of voice you use to correct a bad dog. Believe me -- I worked in marketing for years -- it works.
I think you're probably too polite for this sort of thing Mark. Behaviour like that calls for escalation.