Month: September 2019

Rules are probably a good thing but even rules with the best of intentions can have negative side effects. Even if the side effects are somewhat minimized, there might be other factors that really should be carefully considered – a car that is costs half as much as its competitor might not be as good a transport solution if it doesn’t have any brakes.

Unfortunately, my new boss isn’t able to make this distinction. When his boss says jump, he asks how high. Recently the rule came from above that all external staff should be working off campus which is really not a problem if they are not needed for face to face interactions. All communications are supposed to be done via the ticketing system and for that one location should be equivalent to all others.

The fly in the ointment is that it is still not possible to do all the same level of diagnostics and support remotely as while on-site. However, our boss is insistent that they have to leave by the end of next month whether or not full connectivity has been achieved or not.

On some days I can actually picture him marching over a cliff based on some silly order from above.

Never, or almost never trust someone who opens an argument with this line, but in my defense, I think I was right. The company was going to transfer the developers from London to Chicago. Everybody who was going was terribly excited and as they should be. Getting transferred by the company with all the necessary paperwork to a foreign land. See the world at the companies expense – priceless. Yet some of the guys were leaving soon enough that they would get a chance to experience a Chicago winter.

I told Paul he should go and purchase the warmest and thickest coat he can. I actually did like his choice, which was cashmere overcoat and it looked really good. My counter point was that it also felt about as thick as a couple of pieces of paper. The wind will blow right through.

I probably should have also mentioned he might want a hat and a scarf. We never spoke about it after this but once we were both relocated I did occasionally see Paul with his coat, but most of the time he wore a winter jacket that he bought in Chicago.

I was chatting with my colleague about vacation time that he is currently getting with a German company and he admitted that six weeks was pretty good. However, back in the Soviet Union times he had thirty six days of vacation versus the German 30 days. I thought that number was a bit unusual only to find out that back then they used to work Monday through Saturday and so six days a week was the norm. Eventually things at his institute changed and the working week ended up being Monday through Friday but oddly enough the vacation was still calculated the same way.

I was speaking with my colleague Kevin the other day asking about a mutual colleague in IT.

Me: How is Martin?

Kevin: Is is fine as far as I know. Why do you ask?

Me: Well, he was very helpful when I submitted my last trouble ticket and mentioned today it still hasn’t been approved. If this isn’t approved soon it will be canceled.

Me: He was so helpful, it just isn’t like him

Kevin: I don’t think he has changed.

Me: Well, perhaps I have changed a bit. I used to call him to discuss these issues, but he kept ending up trying to lecture me on everything.

Kevin: Yeah, you might want to change how you package up your software.

Me: uh, whys that.

Kevin: In most of the packages they something like “package xxxx successfully installed” as the final step.

Yet this usually simply means that the install process has finished.

Me: Whats the difference?

Kevin: Well, usually when they see that message then IT doesn’t bother to read the log files, and during the installation there can be a lot problems!

Me: They don’t read the log files after the install?

Kevin: Well, eventually. Last week when another package was installed they looked at the log file and saw a lot of warnings about files to be linked could not as there was a higher directory linked. He was complaining that this was about 160 errors that my package had. I had to explain to him, yup, it was bad style on my part but those warnings have been there for six months so they would have to live with it for a while until I get this fixed.

I am sure that we have all done something at one point or other that we hoped would never see the light of day. Just like most embarrassing stories this one began with a few beers.

Oktoberfest is indeed a very large and special festival but in Germany it seems that during the summer months there is a festival every single weekend if not every single day. I never did manage to make it to “drei straßenfest” in Frankfurt which from the name appears to be a festival for the three small streets in that part of town.

Our project was in Stuttgart and although it also has more than its share of small festivals there were two big ones that took place every year, one in spring and one in fall. It was at the fall festival that a lot of us from the project let our hair down. Just like like Oktoberfest, beers are served by the Maß¹

At these Stuttgart festivals, just like the Oktoberfest festival, there is a local constabulary to help keep order. With that much beer flowing there can be arguments between patrons as well as other interesting issues. I never heard about it at the time, but it seems that a couple of people from our group were caught in the middle of a call to nature. It was almost certain that they would be caught as the building they “were watering” turned out to be one that housed this same group of security personnel.

This is actually a fairly naughty turn of events and is taken very seriously at such a large and organized event as this. Normally there would be some formalities but due to a spot of luck they were able to talk there way out of it, but not without first involving their bosses. This turned out to be a big manager from the client who was several levels above one of developers while the other boss was the direct boss for the other, er, infringer.

1 One Maß is approximately 1 quart

I was sitting at my desk working with someone from IT because there were problems. The goal was that my laptop should be setup so it is possible to do all of my daily tasks remotely. I should have know that it wasn’t going well when he made the following comment.

Nobody works quite like you

Everyone hopes that comments like these are well meant or at least I was certainly hoping so. It is also possible that I am a bit of a walking anachronism. Back in the day when computers had no windowing environment on your PC and to a certain degree every PC user was a command line user.

Everyone else grew out of this phase but somehow I am a bit stuck, so my while the technician was asking questions I was showing him how various programs were started which for me meant from the command line.

It took about an hour before he had investigated all of my issues and had actually not come up with any solutions to my problems. It was just before he was going to leave that I found out that most of the other external users for the treasury used another aspect of the token device for their access. Most of the users were using only intranet enabled access while my access was a bit more global, so perhaps the comment was truly putting my usage into a separate category.