It is not well known that I have a little sideline selling stuff, on Ebay as well as on retail consignment. In the consignments, which I market in retail establishments, the worst thing that ever happens is that the retail venue hires a cretin who does not grasp that I need to get my tags back. Those enable me to see what sold, determine whether I am making reasonable profit, and (if need be) tell the IRS what I did sell. I can live with the occasional cretinous moment.

That frustration is nothing compared to Ebay, which I have taken to calling “Ebenezer.” Don’t most of us normally assume that major changes to policies and technology that are used by millions of people happen only after various committees and managers review them, think through the potential outcomes, and schedule implementation? Don’t we assume that, on some level, these people are smarter than most of us?

I don’t. I think it’s possible that they really aren’t too bright. My experience-based belief is that the technical changes at Ebenezer are directed by a pointy-haired boss who parlayed a gentleman’s C- at a low-rated business school into a six-figure income managing Ebenezer’s “vendor experience.” I don’t think this PHB answers to anyone, ever. I think he just gets whims in his head, sends his code monkeys* a memo, expects them to work 100-hour weeks implementing his directives, then starts to cook up another memo.

In the year I’ve been doing us, the list of Ebenezer’s f-bomberies is long and monthly. Every month, every single month, it’s some fresh hell. I can live with the fact that it’s always pitched as though it’s to our advantage, when in fact it’s the opposite, because I expect that of all corporations. The key phrase is “to serve you better, we are…” That’s b-speak for “because we can screw you, we are…” What are most irritating are the petty stupidities, and those are what convince me there is no oversight here, no management. I think it’s just some PHB with a Word memo template and a deficient intellect.

Here’s an example. When you sell stuff on Ebenezer for a fixed price, there are a couple of ways you can push it. You can set up to entertain offers, and you can set auto-accept or auto-reject amounts (or choose to listen to any offer at all, which I think is smarter, because you can then counter with something rational). You can also use promoted listings. In these, you agree to pay Ebenezer an extra fee if the item sells because they shoved it in someone’s face. This, in my experience, gets rid of more stuff than does considering offers.

Now, sometime in the past, the PHB determined that it would be nice if sellers could name and track promotional campaigns. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? What’s to complain about? It even defaulted to creating a campaign named (in my case) something like “US Campaign [date]”. Sounded so official, so markety, so businessy. It made me want to ramp up my solutioning of problems, my verbing of nouns, and my total quality management to get to the client delight level. Okay, whatever. I accepted the default name, and thereafter that was the default campaign for promoted listings. About three months later on, it decided to start a new one for me, similar rubric. Okay, fine, don’t see how this is going to hurt me.

This meant that when I was relisting, say, a hundred items, I didn’t have to make a choice on that dropdown box unless I had some reason to assign a given promotion to a given campaign. Lacking such reason, I plowed through, accepting the default. Until one day the default changed without notice.

No longer was the default campaign an existing campaign. Now the default was to begin a new campaign. If I didn’t make a dropdown choice, every single item I chose to have promoted would be assigned its own new, special, unique campaign. I would eventually run up against some limit of total campaign listings.

Now, because a PHB (in my supposition, which I admit is based mostly on outcomes and plausible explanation based on having worked for a number of PHBs) told a code monkey to change something–or, perhaps, simply failed to review a code monkey’s work–all of a sudden there was an extra step necessary. Just one more step, where there wasn’t one before. I only created three new campaigns by mistake before I realized what was happening.

I also learned that I couldn’t just reassign existing listings to a given campaign, the better to clean up the mess. The choices were greyed out. I could delete a campaign, but that would remove the promotion from any listings currently live that were using that campaign. A feature that was nothing to me, transformed into an unannounced pain in the rectum: that’s Ebenezer and its vendor experience PHB.

So I got annoyed. When I get annoyed with a corporation, which is not infrequent, I find a creative way to mock it. Even if I am the only one who gets a laugh, that’s the candle I light rather than cursing the darkness. More accurately, I light it while cussing the darkness pretty hard; fair enough. But I do light it.

I needed a campaign name that would sort to the top of the list, that I would recognize, and that would reflect my opinion of the PHB and his (in my experience, men are more likely to be PHBs) vendor experience management.

Campaigny McCampaignface was born.

Now, at least, I get a laugh every time I relist an item and choose to have Ebenezer ram it in people’s faces promote it.

*I get the term “code monkey” from one of my cousins, who posted a video long ago to explain what his work was like. It is not meant to disparage those who write code, but to highlight how management uses those coders’ skill sets.