Category: Tales from work

Lets be realistic. Mathematics is not really going to be any different next year when compared to this year, nor is English, Biology or even German class. Yet as a music teacher there a small opportunity to change. Every year there is a music concert and the children of the fifth grade try to pick out a song that they would like to sing.

Of course the children have access to the radio and all have their favorite male and female singers, yet at age 11 they may not really understand those lyrics from Jay Z, Beyonce or Katy Perry.

So of course, most of the suggestions from the class are passed over quickly. Not sure if the parents are ready for “I kissed a girl” coming from a choir of eleven year olds.

As a programmer, I am never really surprised when at some point a program pops up an odd message to either the screen or a log file. During development virtually every developer at one point or other will encounter a difficulty that cannot be easily tracked and will add some small messages to help with diagnosing the problem.

However, I had always imagined that publishing, even on the internet, would be a bit different. While looking for other interesting articles I ended up on this page only to see what appears to be someone having a bit of fun at work in an area they don’t think will be caught at.

https://www.financnasprava.sk/sk/vyhladavanie?englishhttps://www.financnasprava.sk/sk/vyhladavanie?english

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.

Zach and I were chatting about current events in the news when Sophie came in. It was right before the German public holiday “Tag der arbeit” which this year fell on a Thursday and she was planning on taking Friday off. Her opening line was “Zach, as you are not here after Monday I thought I would say my good byes now”.

Zach had heard that heard some rumors that his six month contract may be cut short but earlier in the day his boss said that he was unaware of any changes. Well, half a day later apparently it was a bit more cleared up in a team meeting as Sophie was wishing him well on his next assignment.

Things had been going wrong for a while now and unbeknownst to the client and to his agency Zach was not planning to extend, he had enough “fun” for one lifetime. Thus this was not really that much of a shock, it was however a shock to Sophie that nobody had told Zach he wouldn’t be sitting there in 4 days time.

Despite how correct all this information was, nothing was really official. Our boss had to go to his daughters school to pick her up and said that he would talk to Zach in the morning. Well, morning came and morning went. No official word came from either the client nor his agency if he should be doing any kind of handover. It wasn’t clear if or when he should turn in his key or his laptop either.

It isn’t all that uncommon in large buildings or in building complexes to have some sort of security to keep everybody honest and keep any “bad” people out. It never fails to surprise me how easy it is to circumvent most security setups. The most strait forward method usually works best, walk the goods out the front door. Ok, it doesn’t always work but when the setup is not high security it has a tendency to work out just fine – well or I have been quite lucky.

Not that long ago I wanted a new desktop and my coworker Mathew suggested that we simply build one from scratch. I liked the idea of getting my hands dirty with the hardware again, but there was one little snag. I was working out of town and it would take a few days best case for the parts to arrive. Simply put I might check out of my hotel before everything arrives. Well, Mathew suggested we should order the parts and bring them to the office and assemble it after work.

I must not have been using the critical thinking part of my brain as it seemed like a good idea. Once all the parts had arrived we knocked off work early one day and built the computer. It was fun and actually took only a little over an hour to assemble it. We installed the operating system and played around with it over the following week but finally Friday came and it was time to go home. It was only then I considered how it might look if someone started to ask questions why I am leaving with a fully functional tower computer.

We put it back into one of the boxes and then carried out the side entrance through the employee turnstile. I just left about the same time as everyone else and blended in with the crowd. To be honest it was a great computer but even so it was more than a pain carrying it on the train back home.

Yet it was lucky that I didn’t try this in Chicago. That security guard in that building was concerned about a paper bag full of books and some odds and ends from my desk.

“Laws are like spider’s webs, which hold firm when any light, yielding object fall upon them, while a larger thing breaks through and escapes.”

Athenian Solon (638-559 BC):

Just because it is the end of the year doesn’t automatically mean you will get a pay raise, but if the company does well it is somewhat expected by the staff that there will be a little something more in your pay packet.

If management simply says, no, we have no plans to give you a raise then management looks bad. However, if management can divert the dissatisfaction somewhere else then they don’t look like the enemy. So the bookkeepers had an idea, we will tell the nurses that because of the raises for doctor’s salaries there is no budget left to give them a raise. Yeah, it did deflect the attention but it didn’t really improve inter-group communication.

However, it may not have been the most effective ruse as the pay raise that was given to the doctors was only 1%.

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.