August 2020 – WorkTales

August 16, 2020May 13, 2020

I thought that they knew what they were doing …

Well, just because we are all working for the same company doesn’t mean unity, as a matter of fact, it is not any different from when I was in high school. There are different cliques and not everyone get along with others.

Yet when working in a very large company the situation can be a bit worse than that. Implementing new functions either as a project or on an existing process will bring a lot of people together for long periods of time who would not normally even spend the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. The problems occur when personalities start to act out. One such case was when rolling out new functionality due to a change in the local law.

It was learned later than some of the rules in our system that were required were not properly setup and activated and that this fact has been known for months. Rather than to be proactive and inform the other group about this apparent oversight nothing was done up to and including go live. It was later discovered that processes have been running with an improper setup and thus a lot of things may be missing in the future. This topic came up over lunch and indeed Bob knew that this was not setup for at least six months but comment was “well, I thought that they knew what they were doing”.

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity

Unfortunately neither of these two options make Bob look very good.

August 13, 2020September 14, 2020

Its just two days

I was a bit at a loss for words with what was going on, mainly because it didn’t really make all that much sense to me – but that is a different story. While standing there I was speaking with a friend of mine and we were talking about jobs, well about my job. I was not really at liberty to discuss what was going on there so most of our talk ended up about my friends last job.

He used to be a foreign correspondent who covered the plastics industry. It is not really clear how he always managed to get the “good” assignments, but at least 3 or 4 times a year he would end up in a country where people were literally shooting at each other.

In this instance he ended up at a trade-fair in Iran. Every country has different rules for its visitors. If you are an American flying to Germany or Spain, you can simply flash your passport and come in, but if you are an Uzbekistan citizen visiting Germany you actually need a lot of papers and visa and it bit of luck to get in from the airport.

I am not sure if everyone requires a visa when visiting Iran but American citizens do. David received his visa however there was a small delay at the start of the trade-fair and he could see that his visa would expire two days too early. He did ask about this and was told by the people he was with that this would not be a problem.

Well, of course, when he tried to leave the country the two day difference was discovered and no it was not ok, he was brought to the police station and put into a cell. It turned out that being an American in Iran without proper papers was a problem.

You cannot accidentally get a visa in a foreign country, some countries it actually requires local sponsorship. This was one of those cases and David was invited by a national champion firm which is essentially the government itself (in some countries). Governments are just like bit companies, the left hand doesn’t always know what the right hand is doing and in this case inviting company was furious as this reflected badly on them. It only took an hour for the situation to start to correct itself.

While this issue was being corrected this they instructed that David not be shut up in a cell. Instead David was brought to a bazaar, which is indeed much nicer than a cell, by a police escort until the paperwork was once again in order.

August 9, 2020May 13, 2020

The documentation is wrong

Every business department at our company has their own associated IT group to support them. In addition to that, there are other departments that support the general IT infrastructure for the company. The departments that I will be talking about are general IT which do network administration, firewalls, and other necessary IT setup.

The business unit of the application support group needed a MQ connection in order to transfer data to other divisions. We provided our documentation which shows all MQ connections that we use, showing machine names, queue information, and application information. We made a special point of making sure the IT department knew which page, section and queue information that needed setup.

We were a bit surprised when after sending a fairly detailed request including our documentation. Nothing had been processed despite waiting for weeks. The request came back along with a one liner saying that the documentation was not clear. We reviewed our documentation, the request worked with the support group only to simply receive this same comment. Finally this mental masturbation was starting to threaten our schedule and so we had a face to face meeting with Charles.

Oddly enough the meeting still took about an hour of excuses and such but in the end we found out what the problem was. On a different page of our documentation, one that nothing to do with the request, we made a mistake and had the name of one of the old machines. It seems that IT had switched out one of the machines but had not informed us of that fact. This inaccuracy was the reason that our requests had been rebuffed.

We did amend our documentation and through a bit of good luck our MQ setup was done in slightly less than a month from our meeting – the overall time was about 3 months. Big companies certainly do have their own rhythm.

August 6, 2020May 13, 2020

Honest I was checked

Every country has borders that are controlled in someway or other. Travelers usually bump into the border patrol when intentionally crossing the border using a plane or train. Sometimes this is as simple as just checking for a valid passport but other countries are a bit testier and require additional visa’s for some people but require even more additional forms and special invitations from others.

When crossing the border you want to own a “good passport” which simply requires an annoying wait rather than other “less good passports” which usually has some pretty unsavory alternatives to a long wait. It is bad enough to be pulled aside, as there is always the possibility you will miss your connection but if you look suspicious enough you will get questioned.

Why are you coming here?
What are you bringing with you?
Were you ever involved with political groups that we don’t approve of?

The more suspicious you look the longer the process will take, and the more rigorous it will be. A friend of a friend was suspected of smuggling something into the US and so he had quite a long chat. That eastern European passport meant he could have been importing Dracula, non-pasteurized dairy products or any other products so the border control decided to strap on a pair of rubber gloves and check very thoroughly.

As an honest passenger, this is probably the worse it can get, you miss your flight, you are detained with plenty of non-relevant questions and then you are physically violated.

Well, this poor soul had it worse than probably any other due to sloppiness. It was the end of a shift and it turns out that the people doing the body cavity search forgot to properly fill out the paperwork or handover this case to the next officer at the end of the shift.

So the first thing the new officer did was to question the individual and then see that it appears he has been selected for a body cavity search. This of course make the patient very agitated and thus somewhat suspicious which of course made it look like he had something to hide and thus ensured that he was searched a second time – probably quite vigorously.

August 2, 2020September 14, 2020

Bad communication

It was that time of the year and everyone got an annual review whether they liked it or not. Vladimir felt this was not going to be time productively spent as Finley who may be a nice guy really didn’t understand IT and that can be a problem if you are leading an IT group.

There had been a number of misunderstandings and downright blunders on Finley’s part but today he was focusing on Vlad. Of all his goals for the following year two stood out. The first was that the team morale had been very low since Finley joined the group and so he wanted Vlad to improve it. The other interesting goal was for Vladimir to hand over his role of leading the interface group to another colleague. This goal wouldn’t be so ridiculous except that the recipient of the task will be taking paternity leave for three months, followed by extended paternity leave for another six months.

All of this was going to to take place in about 5 weeks so by definition this was a goal that either could not be done or could only be done in the most superficial way possible. The final goal was the improvement of Vlad’s communication skills. Finley wanted to give him a zero points on a scale of 1 of 5, but had to change to one point as that was all that the HR form would support.

In addition there was one more task that he wanted to be achieved by the end of the year. As previously mentioned, the team morale was quite low and so Finley wanted that one of Vladimir’s goals for the year would be to improve the team morale.

Finley’s ideas of what a successful review looked like was very different from Vlad’s, the rest of the team and the company standard. In the end, Vlad gathered some feedback from other managers and vendors and it was brought up to the workers council. The workers council were quite aware of Finley’s reputation due to previous run in’s with him and company policies. Thus due to this particular review a new page was added to Finley’s company file.