Coasters

Be careful who you work with

When I was in Texas we hired a guy named Erland in 2014.  I interviewed him and was sure that he’d be a good fit.  He had a social referral from a coworker so it seemed like a safe bet.  We had a hard time hiring at that company so often we’d take what we could get.  In retrospect I don’t know how we got so lucky most of the time.

When Erland started he was a tricky hire.  He was (marginally) older than me and he believed that his opinions were better.  I reviewed every single line of code that we released before merge, and the code reviews gradually got more and more tense.   At one point I remember doing a third round of review on a feature and telling him, “listen, this has turned out much harder than we expected, and we’re gonna can the feature.”  He looked so angry I was seriously worried he was going to break his keyboard in half.

He was a weird guy.  Once when it rained, he ran outside and screamed at the sky.  He came back inside completely soaked.  He’d run ecstatic prayer groups from his office, where he and some of the tech support guys could be heard yelling.

Our office was on the same block as a tech bookstore, who usually sold books online but we would walk in and get some books in person every now and then.  The owner of the bookstore had a couple big golden retrievers.  Once Erland was walking around the block and one of those dogs came up to him to get some pets.  Erland didn’t like that, so he kicked the dog, hard.

There’s no question that the presence of Erland at that job made leaving easier.

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The project my coworkers were working on was codenamed OCD (for observational data capture.) I wanted to tell them that I appreciated their effort. Talk is cheap though, and in this modern age we are all drowning in swag, baubles, and trinkets. I wanted to make something out of wood that would both show my appreciation and demonstrate that there is an alternative to a custom T-shirt printed for a price.

After much deliberation, I decided on a gift within my skill level and useful: Coasters. I watched a video by James Wright on how to do some carving and did a couple tests to make sure I’d be able to make the coasters.

I started by planning the sawcuts for each coaster. Below you’ll see my plan to make eight coasters; one for each team member, one for me (I didn’t end up doing that,) and a spare. My plan was to start with the rip cut (see the little x marks; that was intended to make the coasters nearly the same height.)

Below you can see the sawn out coaster blanks. I left them in pairs to assist clamping.

Next I planed the tops of the coasters smooth. You can see the farthest left was still pretty rough. I think I ended up not even using that one.

Next I printed out some celtic knot patterns and glued them to the blanks:

The rest was “just” doing the work to carve each knot’s lines. The straight portions are easiest: you use the chisel in the way it wants to be used.

Carving the curves and angles is tricky but after doing one of these it gets pretty easy.

In addition to the knots I hand drew some lettering for the project code name. I’m not thrilled with how that part came out. I investigated other options and couldn’t find anything I liked. I don’t like this either. Such is life.

After carving the letters and scraping off the paper, I needed to add some depth by carving out the sections in the middle of the knots. You can’t tell in this picture, but I also added a little bit of a pattern into that part with the corner of the chisel.

Here’s the first complete coaster. You can see some pretty poor carving on the curves on the right, especially compared to the curves on the bottom. Sometimes that is due to the angle I had to carve at, as the clamp would get in the way of the chisel.

Here’s all of them after the carving:

I chamfered all of the corners and did a little bit of sanding.

Finally, I added the finish. While I normally use boiled linseed oil or paste wax, I really wanted to make sure that these were reasonably waterproof. I finished the coasters with a 50/50 mix of Tung Oil and Citrus Solvent. I think I did something like nine coats.

Just by looking at these pictures I can smell the citrus solvent

I mailed each coaster out via USPS and was happy to take a break from this project.

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One day I will do this kind of project again. These are pretty nice coasters and I am pleased with the end result. Here are some things I would at least reconsider:

• Use a different species wood. The above is rock maple. Carving it was hard work!

• Use a V-Tool and related carving tools. I expect the end result would be better and easier.

• Less rushing. If I had done these carvings one day a week I would have been less stressed about the project.

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Erland was a control freak. Maybe his goal wasn’t control, but the outcome of his actions pointed that direction.  He bridled under my leadership and wanted to manage either the whole department or the tech support department.  At one point, as a power play, he printed out his resume, and just put it on our shared bosses desk.  I think he expected Kevin to beg him to stay for a raise or for power, but I think Kevin probably said something like, “what the fuck, do you just want me to fire you Erland?”

Erland’s thirst for power led him to some strange places.  He would surreptitiously record conversations, presumably to catch them saying something and show it to the boss.  He would even secretly take pictures of people, but he forgot to turn off the flash, so the cat was out of the bag on that one. 

Eventually, in late 2016, Erland got fired.  My friends and I would sometimes talk about how bad and weird it was working with him.  I would look him up on LinkedIn once in a blue moon but for the most part we didn’t see much.  One of my friends Googled him in 2020 and ran into this.  In summary: he threatened someone over email, then physically assaulted some military police, and then went on the run for over two weeks, and was finally captured.

Be careful who you work with.