Category: Tales from work

I guess when it comes to monopolies most people think of either cable, phone or regular mail. Well, In this story it is either the Deutsche Post or it is the Deutsche Post + DHL. I ordered two different items, one from Ebay and one from Amazon. Some weeks later I found a small card in my postbox I was curious what exactly this parcel or letter might be.

I was out of town for a few days and when I got back I saw a slip of paper telling me that there was a package waiting for me at the post office. The document that the post left implied this was a book and that was a bit surprising but I headed off to the post office that afternoon.

I was feeling really lucky, nobody was standing in line and this should take just a few minutes before I can enjoy some nifty book or electronic gadget. Well, the person was actually quite helpful in all aspects except for giving me my package. It turns out that once they left the receipt saying it was too large for my mail box they promptly lost the package.

Who could have foreseen that the Deutsche Post, a little German monopoly, could manage to lose one little letter/package. Well, I guess I wasn’t all that surprised when the person from the post office gave me a small piece of paper the size of a business card with the letters DHL on it and their service number.

Wow, the opportunity to call and complain to someone who isn’t really interested in my issue and do it all in a foreign language. Well, just like most human beings, I also sometimes think of reasons to procrastinate on topics but this one was a no brainer. I would simply ask my wife to break out her German and give this fine organization a call and ask about the package. Well, she did call and was given a different number (from their package desk) which was different than the telephone number that we were given for missing letters. I guess once you get to the size of DHL you want to split up the department of missing stuff.

I wrote down the date and time of our conversation so I would have this for my records only to realize three days later that, gasp, I had not been called back by the DHL about my missing package. I figured, what better way to start of a Monday for me and for DHL than give them a call about lunch time. I did call and explained the history of this call to what seemed like a very friendly person who after about five minutes suggested she would transfer my call to the appropriate person.

Well this second gal was also a pretty good listener and as I didn’t have the form in front of me she pointed out that without being able to recite the “magic” number from this form that she would not be able to help me any further. I must be getting old. Instead of asking how I can “klagen”, which is to complain or sue depending how you translate it, I let it go. As I happened to be out of town I once again asked my wife to give these fine people a call.

Well, she called, and the conversation did go quite similarly but as she could confirm that no magic number was on the card, that did narrow down their search. It turns out that the person on the telephone did not know the current status of the letter but he could see that a letter has been sent to us with the response from the post office.

Wow, the quite small package came from China only to be lost within less than a mile from my house. This is considering that this particular package was outside of my house, well briefly.

What does this letter say?

You have made the effort to describe your experience with our service. For that we say thank you.

We are sorry that you have tried in vain to pick up a consignment at your local post office.

We cannot determine what happens to your package. For letters in contrast to packages – the individual processing steps are not documented.

We have forwarded your document to the appropriate department on site. Thus we want to ensure that you continue to receive your post also from the local post office branch that is on your delivery notification.

If you have questions about the Deutsche Post DHL, then please contact us.

My favorite part is the weaselly way that the post office tries to distinguish that normal post is treated differently from packages, despite the fact that this “letter” was brought to my door before being brought back to the post office to be lost.

I guess it is still too early to put full trust in the German Post or the DHL.

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.

It isn’t all that unusual that you see motivational posters on the walls at work. Over the years I have had a keychain and a coffee mug that was also intended to help me “think outside of the box” and “work smarter not harder” but it was just recently I was blown away.

This week I haven’t seen any motivational items but I have seen a few signs and stickers advertising internal trainings. I was not expecting to see a sign on the door stall that I have seen around the office.

The sign says that this is open the door to success. The sign was interesting enough but it was hilarious when I saw it used in a slightly different setting.

The number five is a small number if you are comparing the number of breaths you take during an hour, or quite a lot if you are measuring how many heartbeats you have in a second – everything is relative.

In the world of computers you might find five to be quite a big number if that is how many times you have to reboot your personal computer a day. Yet when speaking about some of the large Unix computers in the computer center even the number three is much too large. These computers can be run months or years without a reboot, and a lot of them do.

That is why we were particularly troubled by the payment application that we were supporting. It was pretty unstable, so unstable in fact that we decided to automatically restart it every eight hours. It was started in the morning before daily processing in Europe, Asia and America. We knew this pretty bad, but management wouldn’t commit to rewriting this interface if we couldn’t guarantee that the new one would run better – it might and it might not. The system stability was tied software vendors API and their product and we couldn’t make any promises about that.

Actually three wouldn’t have been so bad if we could have held it to that, but when the system became confused it would have to be manually restarted during the working day. This may be anywhere between zero and five times during an eight hour shift – well the most manual restarts ever required during a single day was about eight.

To be honest, I don’t think that the vendor’s product was 100% at fault. A great deal of it was how that customer extension was written along with a somewhat unstable product. It would not be even terribly noteworthy if my company wasn’t a fortune 1000 company.

My buddy was looking at the statement for his reported hours the previous month and he was a bit surprised that there was a small discrepancy in the hours he reported versus the statement. The difference was that 15 minutes were missing over the course of the work week which seemed to be an impossible number considering that the time was entered in whole hours.

Martin is a bit of a perfectionist and had to find out what had happened, so he called the company help desk and ended up having discussions with second and third level support. Eventually he discovered that according to German law (or perhaps it was company policy) that he must have a 15 minute break after each four hours of his day, and on Monday when he traveled to the project he had exactly eight hours entered into the reporting system which considering no lunch was correct. Yet the system knew about this special requirement and automatically deducted 15 minutes from his time-sheet which is where the discrepancy occurred.

I did agree with Martin that it was a bit ridiculous that during his five hour train journey that the system automatically inserted a “break”, which I tried to imagine him standing up and trying to do a just bit less for the company during those minutes while trapped on the train. Eventually he learned that if there was no pause during the day, such as lunch, the system automatically deducted this time and there was nothing that could be done about it. I am not positive about this but I think starting the next month, his train journeys including the time at the client site started to take about a quarter of an hour longer on Mondays and Fridays.