Category: Tales from work

You know you are working for a Fortune 500 company when …

• Your boss’s boss sleeps in meetings
• Your coworker surfts blogs and forums all day
• You are requested to fill out the same form for two different departments even though you boss knows the other department has a copy.
• Your boss seems to be on holidays more than at work.
• Your coworker takes naps at works.

Consultants dictionary

Re-phase the project	The project will not meet its schedule, it will be delayed.
Initiative	Project is a bad word usually requiring money and resources, we will use extra capacity of internal resources to do a project
Issue has surfaced	Problem or bug has been discovered in your computer program

Management Styles

Keep to the “law”	Problem or bug has been discovered in your computer program
Don’t have time	I either have a lot on my plate or I am not interested. I will just do the easiest solution even if that means negative repercussions later on.
In it for the money	I have a budget and will personally gain more if I don’t spend it. Rather than using the budget for two personnel in my department I will keep those spots empty force the rest to work insane hours and get a bonus for saving money this year.
In it for the power	Some people just like being their own deity who can boss people around.

Processes are like a cage. If you working with humans you don’t need them, but are definitely required when working with animals.

The processes at work were quite heavy which is somewhat understandable as after all we were speaking about the treasury, you know where the money comes from. People whether they are regular business people or IT people just want to get their job done. Despite what the rules say they tend to behave in a manner most likely to get things done.

I like Lewis a lot but he can be a bit of an optimist, and so he put together a small program which was intended as a work around for a failure in the vendor’s system. He knew that the vendor, his ex-employer, was working on it and would be coming up with a solution any day. The planning period for releasing new program changes to production is two months so Lewis took a short cut.

He created a small script that could be scheduled by the system to be run periodically during the day and put it into the temporary directory on the production server. He didn’t need to deal with IT nor its processes.

Well, Lewis left the company but his fix was still sitting in the temporary directory. There wasn’t anything our group could do about it but we did document the situation and save the script. Well, eventually a system restart did delete the script and of course the scheduler kept reporting an error about the program not existing. Zachary received a phone call from Sara in the business group about a problem.

It turned out that she saw a process that was scheduled to run each day but it kept failing so she simply deleted it. She told us that she knew nothing about the process that was failing but she deleted it anyway. It was only some days after the last down time that she realized that some data was no longer being processed.

It is difficult to say who made the bigger mistake. Was it Lewis who put a program where it would eventually be deleted due to system cleanup or was it Sara who deleted a process that was failing despite not knowing anything about it.

There are usually a number of possibilities for solving a problem. The first would be any solution that quickly gets the job done yet not actually permanent while the second would be a proper solution – which unfortunately takes longer and costs more. I was surprised when speaking with my colleague to find out that he chose the temporary solution for one of our important computer programs.

All of this sounds so vague. Here is a small clarification. On a UNIX server there is a temporary directory called /tmp which is used by the operating system or other applications for temporary files. This directory has the unique quality that the permissions allow anyone to write to it. It sounds like a very convenient place to put programs or files, what could possibly be the downside. Well, this directory is by definition a temporary directory and the contents can be deleted at any time. Yet the contents of this directory are not usually deleted from one day to the next, but usually when the machine is restarted.

Paul was putting the user email configuration file for his program into this directory. The location of the file was convenient as Paul could easily maintain the contents of the file without dealing with any of the normal IT rules about production access. The file was actually harmless but it did have to be recreated every few months when the system was restarted. Despite this Paul didn’t redesign his program until this breach of the security rules for this program was discussed in one of our group meetings with the IT department.

It was mid-December when my Rochester roommate Jeremy had asked me if I would bear the responsibility for having the phone and electric bill in my name. I had no idea even if I would still be here past December so I said no. So on Thursday Jan 6th I found out from Jeremy that he was moving out the next day. Now Jeremy was a good guy but hey I had only known him for about a month so I wasn’t all broken up.

Yet, I guess I should have been paying a bit more attention as the next day both phone and electricity was disconnected. I was a bit upset, I didn’t think that the other two students would be have also turned down responsibility for this. I was speaking with Jeremy to try and figure out why he is moving out. Despite seeing his lips move, I couldn’t pin it down to anything specific. Yet, this didn’t trouble me too much so I went home for the weekend.

The weekend was over and I was getting ready to go to my temporary apartment in Rochester when I get a phone call from Jeremy who says that the locks will probably have to be changed as both he and Hong have now officially moved out. While driving back to my apartment the concern that I can’t get back into it does cross my mind and it did put me into a bit of a foul mood.

I didn’t have any problems getting into the apartment but that was the only good piece of news. It became more apparent who owned what possessions in my apartment. It wasn’t only that most of the dishes and kitchenware were gone but the shower curtain was gone too. I don’t know how they managed this but the only dishes left were dirty and in stacks everywhere, but perhaps not too surprising for a student apartment. I turn up the heat in my room and went to brush my teeth.

A few minutes later I hear somebody come into the apartment and that person starts to open the bathroom door. I am quite pissed by the situation and open the door. I was really planning on giving someone an ass-chewing when I discover that the person on the other side of the door is a policeman.

My other “responsible” roommate John had the jitters as he thought he heard a noise from Jeremy’s room. There were two policeman in my apartment and while one was checking out the apartment the other was speaking with with John. Little did I know it, but that was to be the last time I would see John.

The next day Hong stopped by with the utility bills. I almost choked when I saw it was 511.22, which was not too far off the rent for the whole apartment. My phone calls were sixty five dollars but poor John’s were almost three hundred.

The apartment was empty as were Jeremy’s and Hong’s room. A few days after that I moved out too.

I didn’t have faith in my current company and so I was looking for a new job. I ended up with a small consulting company who wanted to put me at a project with IBM. Never having worked at a large company I was pretty excited but the problem was that the job was in a different city a couple of hours from my apartment.

Rather than really committing to this location by moving there I decided to take it for a trial run and to look for cheap accommodations instead. I let my fingers do walking and came up with a few different places I could check out. Most of them were not good enough for one reason or other, but the most interesting was a bachelor who owned a house and was looking for someone to share his costs. I explained my situation that I was not really moving to Rochester but looking for temporary accommodations thus I needed a furnished room.

He seemed to be a bit anxious in his mannerisms but we spoke about the costs and he mentioned that I would even have a garage for my car. It was about then things started to go down hill. He told me that he smoked marijuana and asked if I had a problem with that. Well, not knowing him I did have a bit of a problem but the room itself pretty much made up my mind. I needed a furnished room and it had no bed, no lamps, just an empty room.

There are a lot of topics that are taught in school, starting with the three R’s but also encompassing other issues ranging from sex education to nutrition. Oddly enough students only recognize some of the facts that they have learned but usually when it doesn’t really affect them.

It was after a students birthday party and there was once piece of cake left. It was just sitting on the corner of my desk.

Student Cake is not really a healthy choice, perhaps we should throw it away!

Teacher If you want me to remain happy, you will leave it right there.