A clean cut hurts the least and heals the quickest

Back in the day my company was transferring their development staff to Chicago due to entering a new market and the staff was terribly excited. So excited in fact that productivity suffered. Yet not every one of the developers were going to be transferred. Not everyone wanted to leave London nor was everyone invited. For those that were not invited, they could see the career opportunities would be rather limited in the future and so they all started to find new jobs.

The bad news was this was around Christmas time and some of the departments were having small Christmas parties at the “pub” during lunch. Coming back to work after being in a bar was not the most productive, but the real problem was the different developers were having leaving parties for all their coworkers once they found a job – also celebrated at the pub. The party would start about lunch time in a nearby pub. The culture in London is a bit more laid back about have a pint or two over the lunch break thus having a leaving party at lunchtime is also accepted. It only took a few weeks of the entire development department going to lunch and either not coming back or they coming back after having “a few too many”.

Thus the company’s official line from that point on was that leaving parties must be scheduled after 4pm1 It probably would have been more productive to transfer everyone and fire the rest over a month period than the fun yet not so productive six month period that it took to transfer all of us.

1 Darn those American kill-joys in management

Working hard or hardly working

The boss had made up his mind – my department will be able to work remotely to support in various situations such as year end reporting or during Christmas. It was a bit of an empty threat as most issues that would come up were something that required IT assistance to correct. Not difficult things, it could be as simple as delete that bad datafile or re-run that process. I like IT, some of my best friends are in IT, but it tends to be difficult to reach anyone from that group outside of normal business hours when these types of issues occur.

The command came from on-high so I tried to connect from home and was pleasantly surprised that most of my daily activities worked just fine. I did encounter a few small things that didn’t work that were important enough to get fixed. So I filled out the form on the intranet which although convenient didn’t really allow for much in the way of details. In a nutshell, I could give my details and a small description of the problem and attach a single document.

I tried to describe everything and the attachments had screen-shots showing all the errors. The way support works at my company is not very different than trying to report a PC problem to the manufacturer. It involves emails, no telephone calls unless they call you.

I don’t want to say that my boss is impatient but that is the impression he gives so I had to show him where the process was breaking down. The first time it was ticket about two connectivity issues and the second ticket was almost the same as the first but it included a new issue.

Every week or so I created a ticket asking for information or status on my original tickets but this didn’t seem to make any progress. Finally about five weeks later someone actually stopped by and looked at all three errors and could see that indeed the program didn’t work. He then called other specific support groups for each issue but all he managed to do during that hour was update my company profile permissions, which didn’t solve anything.

I thought his efforts were benign until a few weeks later when I actually needed my laptop, now nothing worked remotely. It took half a day and a few phone calls before it was working as it had previously – sigh.

I told the boss that he would need to escalate this through other channels and he said he would do so. I was quite surprised the next afternoon to receive a contact from support who wanted more information. The questions are almost exactly like talking to a large PC manufacturer in the sense that most of the information was either already provided or the question didn’t apply.

What I found to be really annoying was this was not the support person, but rather the situation. They sent someone who did not understand any of my issues nor who could actually make any corrections to my environment. She only wanted to gather more information for the rest of the support group who had not to this point even seen my request.

I suggested I could try to gather up some of this information but my account is that of a normal user and most this was not available to me such as which IP addresses of the destination computers or what ports am I using. My support person did have a solution to how I could get this information, she suggested that I fill out another support ticket asking for that information.

I guess if this was a soccer game, it would be support 1 user 0. The only thing that has happened is that two months have passed and no issues have been solved. I guess that my boss doesn’t have quite the power I had thought.

Tales from the dark side

It would be nice if all stories from work were about missing coffee cups, missing food from the fridge with the occasional Christmas party story. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

I really try and keep this quote at the front of my mind every time I encounter what seems to be a pathological story from the work place.

Hanlons Razor

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

These stories are not the most severe examples of workplace obstruction but just a few to describe some of the things that happen in big companies, governments and far off lands.

Telling funny stories

I have worked at both as an employee at both large and small companies as well as on some large and crazy software rollouts. The individual stories never actually struck me as all that surprising nor even funny.

You want is when?

That is actually a funny punchline in a Dilbert cartoon but not so much when it is your project manager and the deadline is quite unreasonable. It was not my work life that would have caused me to put pen to paper.

If it were not for an incident in the kitchen with my children. I thought we needed a few items from the hardware store and so I informed my kids we would be visiting the baumarkt this weekend. I though that my parental visage would be enough to ensure that this would not only be a good idea but also “the plan”.

It was the minor rebellion to my plans but more the reactions of our family that reminded me what is not funny at the moment to me may indeed be funny to others. In the end I had to ensure my boys that there were a lot of rules on the internet and one of them was as follows.

Saturday is baumarkt day if mom is working at the hospital

This rule does now live on the internet and I will strive to fill the internet with other fun little stories from work as well as a few from my children.

Enjoy ….

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