Today Was "Morale In The Toilet" Tuesday...

As he ordered one last round
He said I guess we can't complain
God made life a gamble
And we're still in the game.
  - Joe Diffie, "Ships That Don't Come In"

For the second time in less than four months, we had a layoff at work today. This one was a lot smaller than the last one, 4 co-workers gone compared to 21. I even understand why, but that doesn't help so very much, not when someone from my team is one of those gone. Someone that I had worked closely with during the last month, whose skills I had come to appreciate, respect, and depend on.

This is the third time in 23 years in IT I've weathered a layoff. I'm feeling a bit of survivor's guilt, but I have dependents to provide for, so that suppresses the guilt.

All in all, the quoted lyric seems appropriate.

A Balanced Equation

A couple of days ago, the Applications group, both maintenance and new development, received a request from our overall boss that we report no more than 40 hours a week. This is another facet of cutting our customers' IT costs; it's a very good thing to make sure that we don't price ourselves out of the customers' affordable range. The flip side to this is that we've also been told not to put in time that's not billed back to the customer.

No problem. If all I can bill is 40 hours per week, then I'll make sure I don't work more than 40 hours per week.

A possibly unfortunate confluence of words

I'm one of the web application testers for a change to the security infrastructure at work, and we got an email this morning concerning our upcoming test schedule. This line was lifted directly from the email: Focused testing sessions will core project team members, which have proved successful with a couple of applications over the past couple of weeks. I wonder if any of those project team members have ever been described as the apple of someone's eye?

Not Worth It

At work this morning, several of us were in the break room waiting on the first pot of coffee to finish brewing. One of my co-workers, a project manager, was especially anxious. She said she had checked her email first and really needed to get back to her desk. I remarked, with humorous intent, that the only way that could have sounded worse would be if she checked it on her Blackberry. She agreed, said that her husband had given his back, and that it wasn't conducive to her personal life to have a boss that would email her at 10:30 on a Friday night and expect a nearly immediate response.

I recognize that I have a responsibility, indeed an obligation, to be available for application coverage. That's been part of my professional reality for over 20 years; being on-call is part of a programmer's job. Sometimes that requires, for a short period, 24/7 availability.

I reject the notion that a corporation has any more of a claim than that on me, not without a lot more loyalty and commitment than the workplace gives any employee these days.

Grumbles From The Job

I have an administrative user id that I use on several Windows servers at work. I needed it last Tuesday, to research some production results that a user felt were incorrect. When I went to login to the prod server, I couldn't remember the password.

This happens from time-to-time, and it's usually solved in 10 minutes with a call to the help desk, with a request to reset the password. This time, it took six days.

The contractors that man the help desk aren't allowed to reset admin accounts. Such security work is done by a subsidiary in Europe. There was a language gap, and the technician assigned to my case didn't understand the request. By the time on Wednesday that I realized my password hadn't been reset, the European office was closed for the day. Since Thursday was Thanksgiving and we were going to be closed Friday, I didn't complain very much on my second help desk call. Really, I expected that the work would be complete when I got to the office this morning.

Once I realized that it wasn't done, I made my third help desk call on this case. This time the help desk analyst was casual with me, almost slackerish, rather than professional. He made excuses for the work not being done in the previous five days, and that just pissed me off. I'm usually the most civil guy you could want on such a call, but this was just too easy a task to take almost a week to complete.

I had the case escalated to a much higher urgency than I normally would, and it was taken care of within a half hour.

Not long after this, I needed to use a test server for some enhancements on another application. I tried to map a network drive to the test server, and that failed. I tried to login remotely to the server, and that also failed. After another help desk call, I learned, to no surprise at all, that the server was shut down. A Windows support tech got the server restarted, and I was off to the races.

Between these two incidents, most of my workday was shot. I'm reminded of an Emo Philips quip: Some days, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.