WorkTales

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.

Nobody ever would want a nickname that made them sound especially weak or silly. I am however amazed at how difficult it is to pick out a good name. When I was young I was speaking with my friend in the entryway and my father overheard us, he overheard me speaking to someone and so asked me to whom I was speaking. I thought it would be clever and said that I had a mouse in my pocket.

From that day forward my friend was called “mouse” by my father. The nickname stuck despite being a rather offhand comment. Over the years I have tried on occasion to give a nickname to a friend or a colleague but usually it was a futile act. Unfortunately at my first job I had a better luck, yet like my father it was not so much of an intentional act, and Dan didn’t seem to appreciate it.

Dan was clowning around one day carrying a plant as camouflage just like in the cartoons with the goal of not being seen. My comment was something similar to “whatcha doing skippy”, well that was said out loud and even heard by a couple of people. It was an instant hit. The nickname fit so well he couldn’t get rid of it. To his last day at the company he was trying to get away from that nickname.

Sorry about that Dan