WorkTales – Page 16 – So unbelievable it must be true

September 27, 2020September 14, 2020

It’s a pain

The symptoms were a bit generic and but there was not enough detail to solve this case over the phone. The doctor was sent from the emergency service to check out a patient. The apartment was very not only large and very nice it was in a “nice” part of town. The doctor and his medical student trudged up the stairs and were let into the apartment.

The patient, approximately 40 years of age, appeared to be in good overall shape. The symptom was pain while urinating. The doctor simply wanted to listen to her heart and to thump the kidneys and so he asked the patient to take off her shirt. Well, it seems that she was very comfortable in her skin – so she dropped her Kimono. Well lets just say he got an eyeful and was able to thump and prod without any restrictions.

Oh, the final diagnosis? It was a simple urinary tract infection.

September 24, 2020September 14, 2020

The inmates are running the asylum

Have you ever done something that you knew wasn’t quite right but you did it anyway. Perhaps as a child you snuck a piece of candy that you shouldn’t have. Maybe you have parked where it wasn’t allowed using the ages old excuse “I will only be inside for five minutes tops”. I can only imagine that is what my colleague was thinking when he began work on one of his little projects.

His career in itself would would make a fascinating book. Starting out working in electronics back when it was literally a pile of resistors, capacitors, transistors and lots and lots of wires. These parts were simply put together with wires holding things in their place – soldering parts was not yet a method of construction.

Depending on your feelings about intellectual property you may either admire or hate him. To this day it is not fully clear what he did back in the day before the Berlin wall fell, but I do know that he did do some reverse engineering of existing hardware as well as creating suitable replacements for said hardware back in the Soviet Union.

Fast forward to today and his current job is software development and support which is certainly a far cry from his hardware roots. So I guess it is to be expected that waving a hardware project in his face was much like offering an alcoholic a drink – you simply should not start as you cannot stop.

It turns out that Mathew’s colleague Calvin was the one who started it. Calvin was looking for something to do while working out of town and somehow got it into his pointy little head that he would fool around with electronics. He went to the local electronic megastore and it turned out that they were selling electronic kit advents calendars which was basically learn how to make a LED blink one day at a time.

It didn’t take too long before Calvin started to encounter difficulties, part of it was because the language of electronics was not familiar to him but part of it was because the instructions were also in a foreign language. Well, Mathew understood both and was more than willing to help out. Every time I visited their room I saw something new posted on the wall or some scribble laying on the desk.

Only later did I learn that they were also planning a small electronic project that they could hopefully sell on ebay. The project was that of a LED cube. A LED cube is pretty much as the name says, a number of LEDs that have been built into a cube shape where the LED’s blink on and off in various patterns.

To do all of this would require electronics knowledge, quite a few electronic components as well as some tools. You might be thinking that certainly one of them has a basement, a work room or a garage that would be suitable for this task. I failed to mention one small fact, both Mathew and Calvin were external consultants for the company. These guys were hired guns who came in from out of town and were staying in a hotel.

That is what makes this story unique, these guys purchased small amounts of the required materials and tools and brought them to work. So during the day they were Clark Kent working as mild manner computer professionals while at night they brought out the tools and parts to build what might someday, dare I say it, a fledgling company?

Well, it take a lot of time to train up a novice in the dark arts of electronics and before the task could be started in earnest they ran into a small difficulty. The client decided that they would need to provide their services remotely starting next month. This created quite a problem as they had pretty much set up shop right here at work and now they need to shut things down. After all, the client probably wouldn’t be all that happy to learn they were using their premises for unsanctioned activities that in their theoretical worst case could cause a fire. So they began to reverse the tide.

Well, to the uninitiated they just looked like a couple of guys leaving work at the end of the day but if you had x-ray eyes you could see the following items slowly being transported out of the client’s building at the end of each day.

Oscilloscope
Dremmel
Hot glue gun
De-soldering iron
Two soldering irons
Helping hand
Four different spools of solder
A small container of kolophonium (wood resin)
A couple of different types flux
Soldering paste
Tips for applying soldering paste
Wiring pen
Two jewelers headsets
Various magnifying glasses
Safety goggles
Breathing masks
A pile of custom pcb’s boards unsoldered
A pile of custom pcb’s boards with microcontroller and SMD parts
PCB board cleaner
Approximately one thousand 5mm RGB leds
Approximately one thousand 1cm RGB leds
Hundreds 5mm leds of various colors
Hundreds of through hole resistors covering quite a few different values
Bags full with switches, resistors, integrated circuits, and dozens of microprocessors
IR receivers and IR leds
Half a dozen breadboards
Small speakers
Spray paint
Exacto knife
Box cutter
Caliper
Hex wrenches
Screw drivers
Mini screw driver set
A few sets of pliers
Flush cutter
Eight pair of tweezers
16 dc power supplies of varying output current
Power cords
ITX mini tower case
Water cooled cpu cooler
One raspberry pi
Several raspberry pi cases
Several arduinos
Several different types of AVR programmers

The crazy thing about this story is that this wasn’t something happening at a small mom and pop store, nor was it happening at small regional office that had a lot of autonomy. No it was happening at a Fortune 500 company with a reasonably large international influence.

Although these circumstances are perhaps not overly common, it is the type of story that could only happen at large company. Fancy ISO standards and internal rules is not substitution for a management that is not paying attention to what is happening on its own premises. Too much political infighting to remember that despite the fact they worked for different departments they all work for the same company.

What happened to the consultants you may ask? Well, they eventually went separate ways without even producing a single LED cube. What is happening at your company right now?

September 20, 2020September 14, 2020

Good fences make good neighbors

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):

September 17, 2020September 14, 2020

Divide and conquer

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%.

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.

July 30, 2020September 14, 2020

A matter of trust

Finley was the “new sheriff” in town. He was now in charge of Arthur’s group starting on October 1^st. Finley had a rather odd management style and because he was only in charge of the group for two months Arthur asked that his old team leader be included in this year end review as well. It actually was not a terribly unusual request everything considered and so Arthur told Finley that would be fine. Imagine Arthur’s surprise when the meeting invite came only for the two of them.

Finley explained that he had contacted Arthur’s old boss who said that he would refuse to take part in the review. Arthur’s experiences with the new team leader were pretty rocky so he was very skeptical to hear his old team leader would not take part. This was especially true as his old team leader was an old friend of his who had promised him personally he would take part.

Finley “don’t you trust me”
Arthur (thinking not really)

It was because of this specific example not to mention a few other events with the new team leader that caused Carrie to refuse to have her yearly review without a representative from the workers council.