Pensieri di un lunatico minore
... or why you shouldn’t believe anything you’re told sometimes.
In the ongoing saga of the world’s worst-managed project—an epic clusterf_ck—we pick up where we left off: me at home in Arlington.
I received an instant message on our internal system Tuesday mid-morning from my “project manager”, a label that is insulting to anyone with a clue, saying, in his passive-agressive style “So I guess you’re not coming down today.” My response was simple: “Per previous arrangements, I will be working from VA this week”. Nothing else.
Then, later that day, around 6:30pm I receive a call from my actual manager, saying that they had identified an “expert” resource to work on a system that I’d been fighting with1 for weeks. That person was supposed to be flying in this morning, I’m assured. Suspicions were aroused when my request for a resume and contact information were met with a resounding silence. Regardless, I booked tickets on the 7:30am flight out of National and arrived here prior to 9am with the absolute assurance of 3 different managers that this “expert” would be here.
It’s now 3pm, and nobody knows where this person is, nor when he will arrive, if he’s coming, or anything else about the details of the schedule. To make matters even more maddening, he lives in suburban MD, perhaps 30 minutes from my house.
Once again, I’ve been duped.
1 A system, I might add, which I was told would take 3 months to get up and running, and which I got up in 2 1/2 weeks. I never saw it before.
1 thought
Last night I got a call, at 10pm, from my boss saying that the project manager was demanding I be down on-site this week. This was after we agreed I would be home for a week this week over 2 weeks ago, and after I worked through a weekend to make sure that I could do that. What makes it even more laughable is that what he’s worried about is something I know nothing about and can’t really promise I can figure out. I’ve been saying he needs some specialized skills for 3 months now.
I told him no.
2 thoughts
The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time. What do you get at the end of it? A Death! What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating …and you finish off as an orgasm.
—George Carlin
No thoughts
In the continuing saga of insanity, I received an email this morning, sent at 9:30pm on Sunday which contained this lovely tidbit:
Traveling members of the team need to plan for a Saturday morning departure home and a return to RDU on Sunday night. Please plan on working through Fourth of July weekend.
That’s right, forget your weekends, forget your Federal holiday—it’s only a celebration of our independence from the King. Never mind that the delivery date is July 3rd and therefore working through the weekend indicates failure and therefore should be resolved with the client prior to failing. The real psychotic cherry on the sociopathic cake? The closing:
Best Regards,
Wouldn’t “F#ck you” have been a better, and more honest closing?
2 thoughts
So historically on this project, I came in Sunday evening and left Thursday evening. That meant 4 full days with the client. A few weeks ago, the “PM” decided we all needed to come in Monday (by noon) and leave Friday (afternoon). Not any more time, but certainly more useless. Today, as I’m leaving around 1pm, I’m cornered by the PM asking where I’m going, and when I’ll be back. I point out our “agreement” that was his idea, and he gets upset, says I need to stay the rest of the day and come back Sunday afternoon.
The “conversation” then descended into him threatening me and telling me I was “this close” to losing my job for not working 70 hour weeks. Funny, I just got a bonus, a raise, and several commendations from executives. Not really matching his craziness.
The fun continues.
2 thoughts
In today’s status meeting, the team was “motivated” by the project manager by being told he expected everyone to work 10hrs/day, or more, 6-7 days a week or “risk losing their job”. Nice. That’ll get everyone motivated … to find another project.
Dick.
3 thoughts
For those who know me, they know that to say my father and I aren’t close is to misstate the epic lack of closeness. Having not spoken to him in over three years, and entirely unsure of what happened, I can only read wistfully from PZ Myer’s memories from his father.
4 thoughts
For those who doubt the insanity of my current projects, I need only tell two things from this weekend that have happened:
- While I’m at dinner on Friday with friends at Jaleo, I left my phone in the car. I came back, around 9:45pm to find a call from my project manager at almost 9pm saying that he needed me on a conference call tomorrow (Saturday!) at 9am to discuss the schedule.
- Today, around 11am, I get an SMS from a coworker who is stuck staying on-site this weekend telling me there’s meetings today (Sunday) at both 2pm and 3pm.
Bizarro World indeed. I’m sorry, no. You don’t call people at 9pm at night to tell them you need to ruin their weekend. You ask politely early in the week, understanding how much of an imposition it is, and schedule it around what they have going on.
3 thoughts
Today is the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby—the most elegant two minutes of racing in the world, surrounded by a week of parties—and as my mom grew up in Kentucky, and my parents met in Lexington, there’s a bit of nostalgia for the time I spent in the hills of Kentucky. While I grew up in Austin, it was typical for me to spend quite a few summer months with my mom’s family. Part of that family, though not genetically related, was a wonderfully kind woman named Janice.
Several years ago, Janice passed away. She had been my mom’s best friend for decades, and she had been like an extended aunt for my sister and I. One of the best memories I have of her is all the wonderful food and hospitality she extended to all of us. So, when I ran across a recipe for Bourbon Balls (some history), I couldn’t help but be reminded of hers. I have no idea if her recipe is “better” or “more authentic”, but the taste has lingered with me all these years.
So, in celebration of my heritage and the extended family I’ve been lucky enough to call my own for 35 years, today I’m making some Bourbon Balls and plan to have a fine Mint Julep.
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I’m not speaking of the platonic love of family, nor the warm love of romance. What I refer to is instead the cold, steely glare of being loved “at work”. Perhaps it is my somewhat unique background and skill combination, but at my current employer—more than ever before—I feel entirely too loved. I want to be ignored sometimes; left to my own devices, and projects.
Instead, I am constantly asked to come in and resolve problems that others have been unable to. This invariably happens under immense time constraint and political pressure, thereby making it “extra fun”.
1 thought
I try, very hard, to do two things: 1) to not discuss my work in any detail on my blog, 2) do what’s in the best interest of my clients. Of late (the past year), I have had a client of unwavering stupidity that tries even my epic patience at work. They are to the worst stereotype of government workers what those same government workers are to MIT rocket scientists. To say they are stupid does a great injustice to idiots. To say they are officious unfairly maligns Vogons.
First, just some general observations:
- All questions must be put into a computer system so baroque that Bach would scarcely recognize it. Then those questions must be printed out and signed in blue ink1 and submitted, where-in the responses are typed up, printed out and submitted back to us, in paper copies only. Now, I ask you: why did we bother with the computer?
- All purchases, even of a power cord, must be submitted in seven (7) printed copies. The first of which is scanned and turned into a PDF by the client and then destroyed. The other six are destroyed immediately.
- We have been repeatedly forced to find obsolete hardware and software because “that’s what the specifications require”. No discussion of the inanity of the situation will be tolerated.
That, however, is only the tip of the maddening iceberg. Let me play for you, a snippet of conversation that happened today, in a mixture of conference calls and e-mail. This happened after they rejected one of those submissions because we used the wrong size hard drive.
Me : Notice that those 2 73.4GB 15,000RPM drives, in RAID-1, are only used for the operating system. The data is actually stored on a RAID-5 array of 4 300GB 15,000RPM drives. That satisfies the specification requirement for “300 GB usable disk space”.
Client : But the specification requires 80GB hard drives and RAID-5.
Me : Yes, and you’ll note all data is on a RAID-5 array. RAID-1 is at least as reliable as RAID-5. Also, there is no such thing as an 80GB server-class hard drive.
Designer : Yes, but the specification we wrote says 80GB or better and RAID-5.
Me : But the operating system is only 4 or 5GB of storage, the rest is empty.
Client : But the specification says 80GB.
Me : But it’d all be wasted.
Designer : But you must provide what’s in the specification.
Me : We are exceeding the specification by an order of magnitude in performance and reliability2 and this design is typical to everything we have done for the past decade with all our clients. We are using 16GB of RAM because the application needs memory not disk, and we have 4-cores, not two as the specifications requires.
Client : Yes, but the specification…
Do you see where this is going? Madness. A complete inability to understand that specifications, written by an “architect3”, based on heresy and 15 year old ideas, is not a reliable guide for modern computing design. Machines that need, at most, 5-10GB of disk space are having to be purchased with RAID-5 arrays of 146GB SAS drives. What is the sense in that? Oh, right, “it’s what’s in the specification”.
I have never, in my entire life, dealt with a collection of more useless people, where the simple fact that they can remember to breathe is shocking.
1 No, I’m not joking. Not black, not anything else. They’ve been rejected for having the wrong color blue even.
2 Note, that the specification has nothing useful in it like performance or reliability. It does, however, specify the length of the power cord.
3 I’m not talking about a software architect, or a systems architect (my role). I’m talking about a blueprints and pencils and concrete architect.
6 thoughts
Job titles don’t matter, but I’ve decided—if they’d let me put it on my card—I should simply put:
Technical Hit Man
It’s about the only thing that accurately describes what I get asked to do.
1 thought
As we sit in our comfortable houses, with our safe and sanitary conditions, munching on our bountiful food supply, it is important sometimes to maintain a little perspective.
No thoughts
Sometimes, my job consists of pulling off virtual miracles—and then being told they’re the wrong color.
2 thoughts
I blame my friend Randy for getting me interested in watches. I used to never give them a second thought, and while I had one or two, they were largely relegated to jewelry status when I was wearing a suit or tuxedo, but never really examined too closely. Since his immersion the horological world, I’ve learned a lot from him, but more importantly, I’ve started to become aware of a lot of interesting watches.
Right now, my object of horolust is the Seiko Spring Drive Chronograph. Alas, baring any massive bonus this year, I’m unlikely to pop the money for it. Still, it’s not only pretty, but immaculately built, and quite innovative in design. Basically it’s an automatic watch, but without the escapement that normally drives much of the watch. Instead, it uses a continuous unwind of the spring with a magnetic brake managed by a quartz oscillator to balance the time. Neat.
Right now, I’m just wearing a Seiko 5 military watch, with the 7S26 movement in it. Simple, and bulletproof. The picture is a slightly different model that doesn’t have the glass back.
No thoughts
I am on a plane to Austin tomorrow. Unfortunately, it leaves at entirely too early an hour, but it was the best itinerary that I had available—especially with first class seats. If there’s to be any benefit to the amount of travel I do, it’s that I manage to snag upgrades more easily. My mom’s house has no Internet connection, so any blogging will be light. It will, however, give me time to read, catch up on some writing, and otherwise be disconnected.
A happy holiday to everyone.
No thoughts
So, in addition to my RAID-1 array dying, the 160GB drive in my iMac G5 died as well. I don’t know when, since I hadn’t used it in a while, but when I went to try and recover some stuff off of it, it wouldn’t boot. After acquiring Disk Warrior, I figured out that the drive itself was failing quickly. Disk Warrior managed to recover the disk, for a period, and I managed to get about 40GB of stuff off the machine before it died. Fortunately, this included most of my photography prior to the middle of this year.
2 thoughts
I’ve not written much lately. Mostly, it’s a reaction to the intense pressure of my job right now, along with an over-riding malaise derived from too much time at 30,000ft with the legal minimum of oxygen in the cabin. It’s not that I don’t have things to write about, but instead that I simply haven’t got the energy to spill those words onto virtual paper. Having said that, I just returned home from spending the holiday with my family in Austin, and it was a wonderful time.
My sister has been married a couple years now, and her husband is a fine man—although sometimes I think his sense of humor might be a bit much for my sister—and his family is all good, and so far things have merged relatively unscathed with my own. This was the first year, in a while, that I didn’t have a hand in most of the cooking, and my sister and her husband did a yeoman’s job of getting everything ready, on the table, and tasty. I contributed only a few small side dishes, and a coconut cake.
Last night, I returned home, and it was good to be back in my own bed, if only for a few days.
1 thought
John Scalzi summarizes the insanity of the Creation Museum better than I ever could:
Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas.
[ ... ]
And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum. $27 million has purchased the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see. I enjoyed my visit, admired the craft with which the whole thing was put together, and was never once convinced that what I was seeing celebrated was anything more or less than horseshit. Popular horseshit? Undoubtedly. Horseshit hallowed by tradition and consecrated by time? Just so. Horseshit of the finest possible quality? I would not argue the point. And yet, even so: Horseshit. Complete horseshit. Utter horseshit. Total horseshit. Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit, horseshit. I pity the people who swallow it whole.
I have to admit, I’ll probably go—for the same reason I stop to look at a car wreck. The gigantic bloodshed of stupidity is unbelievable.
1 thought
Saturday night, I went to a concert at the Black Cat, and it only reminded me how old I’m getting. I was along for the ride with Jenny, James, and Jenny’s husband Gary. It was a triple bill, although I have to say, I had assumed it would be a normal double bill. Some observations:
- Too damned loud. Seriously, 105dB+ is just not right. When my shirt and jeans are blown around by the speakers, it’s simply too damned loud. Yes, I’m old, but I also value my hearing a wee bit. We moved further and further back through the night.
- If you’re going to start 30+ minutes late, let’s try and say something to people.
- The opening act, The Start sucked. Let me rephrase that, the lead singer sucks. Channeling who knows how many better singers mixed together just muddles the waters, and the wig has to go. Add to that a sound balance that was atrociously bad. Having said that, the last 40 seconds, when she left, was pretty rocking.
- The second opening act, Kenna was a lot better. His vocals were crisp, and intelligible, and the whole group seemed to hold together like an actual band. His dancing was… energetic. Jenny and I looked at each-other and agreed, he dances like a white boy.
- Finally, at nearly midnight, She Wants Revenge came on. They rock. Very much in the spirit of Joy Division, Bauhaus and the rest of the dark wave movement. I hadn’t heard them before, but I now own both albums.
Alas, we all agreed it was time to leave before the last set, and it’s for the best. I’m simply old.
No thoughts
Lately I’ve noticed something, new and different, with my metabolism and how it impacts my sleep. It seems that if I have anything with a lot of sugar in it (such as last night’s chocolate truffle), I find myself unable to sleep soundly, and waking up constantly. While this is annoying, it’s also a good incentive not to do things which are bad for my blood sugar level. Odd, though.
No thoughts
For the past three years, or so, I’ve not ridden my motorcycle. The pivotal moment was after one accident and three near accidents in a one month period. The accident was arguably my fault—at least legally—as I was following a little too close, and was unable to read the mind of the woman in the Corolla1 in front of me who decided to slam on the brakes at 35 because of a squirrel crossing the road. I hit the back of the car, over the bike and helmet slammed into her trunk. Fortunately, there was no major damage to me, the bike or the car, but it certainly bruised my ego, and the bike had to be towed away to be repaired (about $300 in work, actually).
Literally, on the return ride from the dealer two weeks later, a woman in a Cadillac Escalade nearly ran over me in her eagerness to cross two lanes of traffic to turn left from the right hand lane. Only by slamming the brakes hard on my bike, and as a result, performing a stoppie, was I able to avoid being run over by her faux-phallus. That freaked me out.
Not two days later, I was riding on the beltway, in the right lane, getting ready to get back on I-66 heading west, when a Lincoln Navigator came careening over multiple lanes without looking and I was forced off on the shoulder in order to avoid being crushed. Again, I don’t think the driver ever noticed anyone else around, but isn’t that typical?
So, after that, I became a somewhat petrified rider, even after all the miles I’d accumulated. Constantly riding beyond defensively, when the only safe way for a motorcyclist to ride is effectively on constant offense. I realized then that I was becoming a hazard to myself, and those around me, and so I parked the bike. For the next year I rode my bike perhaps once or twice, but it sat.
Finally, when I moved 2 years ago, I parked my bike permanently, un-ridden for almost two years. When I finally decided to move again, I was faced with a decision: keep the bike, and get it back in roadworthy shape, or sell it. As I thought about it, I realized that I might finally have the distance I need to start riding again, and so I have decided to undertake getting the bike back roadworthy.
Before the bike was “put up”, I changed the oil, put preservative in the tank, and tried to make sure, overall, that it was ready for an extended stay. Today, I had the bike moved, via flat-bed, to the dealer, who will be bringing it back to life. Fortunately, with a tiny bit of a jump, the bike turned over, and seems to be healthy, other than dirty and in need of a general service.
So, the road beckons again…
1 This is a new definition of “that Toyota feeling”.
1 thought
One of the more difficult aspects of moving is the opportunity it presents for both self-examination and the filtering of ones life. I won’t say that I’ve ever been an overly materialistic person, but I have always been someone who hoards bits of paper—whether they be books, magazines, or just a research paper I read once—with the intent that they will one day be useful again. With this last move, from a shared house, back into an apartment, I have taken a long step back at all the bits and pieces I have accumulated over the years and am trying to reconsider every item’s worth and value to me.
It is amazing that after 35 years, I have accumulated so many things that I really don’t need. Eliminating that excess heft from my life is a cleansing experience, and have tried to take a critical eye to anything that I do choose to bring with me. How many computers does one need? How many CDs once listened, but never returned to?
Moving forward, I intend to examine every new purchase with that same eye for the future, and weigh it against the future impact. It’s a harsh mistress, this reductionism, but it is a necessary thing moving forward.
No thoughts
As many people know, Iv’e been traveling back and forth between my home in Arlington and a client in the midwest. That, unfortunately, has now tripped the requirement to file taxes in both states this year. My company, thoughtfully, sent me an email today, entitled “Noncompliance with state tax withholding requirements”. It’s charming in it’s blandness, and basically it means that I have to file a bunch of forms internally and start splitting my time 60/40 between two state tax agencies.
The question now, and something I can’t answer accurately without some assistance, is whether I have to declare it retroactively and have a huge chunk taken out of my next paycheck, or if I can just do it moving forward. I’m hoping that I can just do it from this phase of the project forward, as this is 99% of the project.
Joy!
1 thought
Here I sit, in a canyon of boxes, wondering how in the world I’ve managed to accumulate so much stuff over the years, and yet amazed, in some unreal way, that there isn’t even more. Seriously, when do you have too many books? When do you have too many kitchen “things,” and when is enough, enough? Regardless, I’m trying to thin my life down; simplification is the rule of the day.
No thoughts
Today, I spent 7 hours helping a friend out with a short film he was shooting. My role, such that it was, was as an extra to fill out the background of the room. While the film is less than 10 minutes, we spent nearly 6 hours just shooting 1/2 of it. Overall, it was an interesting insight into the process, and a lot of the tedium that goes into working through continuity problems. I can now understand why most movies have entire teams dedicated to dealing with those sort of things. Just remembering exactly what you were doing at specific moments is nearly impossible.
It was a lot of fun, though.
No thoughts
I don’t know what it is, but there are people in the world who are completely incapable of confrontation. The Internet has given those same people the perfect opportunity to take their passive-aggressive behavior to a whole new level, sociopathic in nature. It occurs to me that many of the “new modes” of communication, such as Twitter allow for the kind of insight into the mind-numbing tedium of people’s lives, while at the same time providing illumination into the thoughts they are simply incapable of expressing in a more productive method, or to a more appropriate party.
The thing to always remember on the Internet is that there is forever a record of your writings, and that something dashed off in the heat-of-the-moment can sometime come back to hurt later when others do a simple Google search.
4 thoughts
Life is a constantly changing organic thing. Mine, of late, has been especially so. Today, I moved back into my own place, and ended the experiment of having a roommate. It’s not that I’m somehow religiously opposed to the concept, it’s simply that over the past 15+ years, I’ve developed a certain pattern that I don’t care to change that much. Regardless of who I had decided to share a house with, it was doomed from the start to be a frustrating experience for me, and likely for them as well; that I chose someone who has very different social behaviors only amplified the situation, creating an echo chamber of discomfort for me.
All of that ended today, with a simple check for a few hundred dollars to a moving company. Now begins my life without the television.
No thoughts
So, at work, we use Lotus Notes for everything, and I do mean everything. While I’m not a huge fan of it, it does work well since I’m often disconnected from our network and can keep replicas of a lot of databases and information locally. For the project I’m working on, the client uses Exchange—of course—and is insistent that we use it as well.
Now, I’m not one to like checking multiple emails, so both myself and my coworkers forward all our emails to our Notes accounts, which works fine, except for meeting invitations. Now we’re being lectured that we absolutely must use Outlook for everything, which means I can’t have one calendar for everything, or one mailbox for all my work email.
This, combined with being told that even if a meeting room is empty all day, we can’t use it for 5 minutes for an impromptu meeting without reserving it, is making me think of the kind of passive-aggressive control freaks that drive me insane.
No thoughts
So, after much consideration, I’ve decided to “pull up” my move date to the 20th of this month. It had been a week later. That leaves me approximately 3 1/2 days to finish packing before the show, and less than I had planned. I know myself, however, and know that I would simply put it off to the last second anyway. Now that second has arrived.
No thoughts
