Timing...

OMFG - I just had to explain to a project manager why its better to keep repeatable scripts in a file rather than email the commands around for a project.  < head desk >

Shoulda waited a few minutes to make that last entry in order to find something funny in the day!

Method in the Madness

I had this goofy professor in college, Dr W., I'll call him.  The students who took his class often referred to his class as the "Dog and Pony Show" because the lectures were of absolutely no use to the class of about 75 students.  The homework assignments were a different story, though.

Dr. W. taught the senior-level program debugging course.  Apparently my college thought I'd be doing a lot of debugging in my career.  Dr. W was a man who obviously had red hair before it went grey and always had rosy cheeks.  I always got the impression he had long ago given up on trying to keep up with technology, so he allowed his students to teach him all the new cool stuff.

Dr. W was famous for placing intentional mistakes in his programs that he gave the class to work on.  He'd change a zero to the capital letter O, or switch a number one to a lower case l, then tell us to find the error and run the program.  He told us to expect stupid mistakes, the kind you don’t think to look for, like that in the real world, and man was he right.

When I thought about his teaching method, it was really more like the way my dad taught me how to drive.  He just put me in the driver’s seat, taught me about inertia, then told me to expect another driver to do something absolutely moronic and I'd be fine.  So that's how I got taught to fix code at work...by expecting something moronic at every turn.

So, when I get called to get on an all-nite call with the VP of operations.  You better believe I start looking for what stupid stuff got done.  Honestly, I usually check myself first, AND, you'd think everyone else would self-check but they don't.  That's when I found it.  50Gigs of missing memory, making the server slow because some sysadmin decided to "leave a little on the side for another project" he didn't specify what.  

ARRRGH!  Thanks for a week of pulling my hair out because someone decided to "set something on the side" for himself without telling anyone.

I wish I could make this funny, since my journal is supposed to be comedy and all.  Maybe it will come to me after I'm not so mad any more... :(

I have a client who is driving me nuts...

Thank you jetgirl for the contribution to the content today. ;-)

Anyone who has ever run a business where you serve a client has run into this one.  Working in I.T. is no exception.  Have you ever had a client who, shortly in to the project, starts doing things like this ?

• initiates contact by talking about price first - of course that is the only driving factor in a good business deal, right ?
• always want to talk on the phone - how dare you try to multi-task ?
• constantly changes requirements - this makes me want to get sick
• imposes emergencies on you - that's what lazy people do when they want someone else to do work for them, fast.
• complains about other vendors or clients he/she's worked with - shows an overall disregard for professionalism.

What you've got is a problem client my dearies.  What I typically have done to keep these people away from me, is over-quote them.  If they realize how much it actually costs to do the work they need, they are most-likely going to bail.  (Folks who start out by asking about price are concerned with paying as little as possible and you'll most-likely end up doing free one-offs and hating yourself at the end of the project.    )

But what do you do if you really need the money ?

Seriously, how do you manage get the coffee you want when you order?

Q: "Can you help me identify what user X is trying to do?"

A: "Check now"

Q: "Try again, that answer sucks?"

This is what happens when you don't do your own homework

I knew sitting in close proximity to the contractor dungeon at work was going to encourage more drive-by activity. A drive by is when another co-worker sneaks up on you in your cube with the goal of getting you to do his work by disguising it in the form of a "question".

I hate these type of approaches.  It makes me have to stop all 4 or 5 different things I'm working on at the moment and do only ONE thing, for someone else.  It also tells me that you aren't articulate enough to express your question in writing.

So in the contractor dungeon, there was this one little guy that seemed to be pretty much high maintenance.  He seemed to operate by drive-by's alone.  It obviously isn't working for him, because I saw him drop and re-create the same databases a total of 4 times.

The questions he started sending us really made him look stupid.  He managed to cut and paste the error message into an email, but obviously didn't even read the message because it told him how to fix the problem he was having.

Then later on in the same day, he started complaining about not being able to get the proper permissions to create databases....when he had already done it 4 times, remember.  Turns out, he was fat-fingering the login.  < head on desk >

So this guy gets so frustrated later in the day, that he sends my team an email asking us to just walk over to his cube, login with our administrative id, and create his databases for him.  That was about all I could take of his high-maintenance ass.

I emailed him back, copying everyone he worked with and told him what he was asking me to do was unethical, and that beyond that, his constant bugging us was rude and disruptive and that he needed to do his own work.

And do you know what?  I didn't even get in trouble.

So, the moral of the story is, when you get through college by paying people to do your homework for you, you look like a douche in the real world and you get bitched at.

Man, that's Stucked Up

"The loads are stucked up," I read.

WTF?

"The loads are stucked up."

What the heck does that mean?  Was it naughty?  Was it a type-o ?  Only one of the many ciphers I'll have to sort out today while receiving emails from people who don't know English very well.  Despite living and working in the United States, I was some what of a minority at the workplace.  Me, a white girl.

But it is not my differences that make up the story I will tell.  This story-telling is a trip through the rabbit hole into the world of I.T. and it can get pretty "stucked up"  uh, I mean fucked up.

I looked back at the email with the curious title, and I realized it was a non-native English speaker's attempt to use an euphemism.  How cute. On to the next email...

Oh joy.  It looks like I will be working again this weekend.  It won't be a question of if I'll need medication to get through the week, the question will be what kind.  I'm slowly loosing my mind, one deployment at a time.