Piece Of Me

Or as Norm was fond of saying, "It is a dog eat dog world and I am wearing Milk Bone underwear."

My work day started well enough. I had my Esc Mgmt meeting at 8 AM CDT as planned, but there was not much to discuss. I informed my old dotted line mgr (who facilitated the meeting) about what the new mgr said about Esc Mgmt being a full time job and said she would talk to him about that. I know that I need other job duties to fill in the gap, but I do not like being on call 24 x 7 with no back-up. She said that I was on my own on finding that person. I guess getting out of Esc Mgmt will not be very easy.

About an hour before lunch, I got an e-mail from a colleague in Canada asking me if my boss (in the US) had spoken to me regarding a project she was heading up. I told her that I had not see my boss in 3-4 days and she then told me that he appointed me her resource on the project and she would be sending the documentation to me. A little while later I get a 5 meg e-mail with all the documentation on the project. The want me to install (READ: install, configure, test, troubleshoot, maintain, and support) a piece of software that I have never seen before on a couple of Unix boxes that are going live in a couple of months. The Oracle expert has been reserved and the OS is already installed. Once before they asked me to "install" some software ("it is easy, just run the scripts") and it turned into a full time support job. I knew nothing of the software so it was a "learn as you go" deal. now to be fair, after a few months I was familiar with it (support, troubleshooting, installing, and configuring). The only problem I ran into was that it would not run on some of the really old Solaris boxes we had and that was a requirement of the project.

All that was right before the layoffs. I was moved into my current role but I still did a little of the old role (ticket maintenance, reports, quick response dispatch) but none of the project or support work. That means the projects I was working on were dropped and someone (I have no idea who) picked them up.

Now that we are getting more work than we have people for, they are giving people more and more project stuff to do on top of their primary job. I understand that the work needs done, but if we have this much, why can't we get resources to do it...resources who are experts instead of, "whoever is available".

I guess what really bothered me the most was that I have already offered to do one big project that will take a lot of my "spare" work time to complete. Now my boss volunteers me for this.

It gets better. My boss, who I have not seen in 3-4 days asks me to work on yet another project this time dealing with a server inventory at each of our US sites. Sure no problem. Should I run and pick up up your dry cleaning while I am at it? Care for some coffee? Need a lift to the airport.

The funny thing about this is that one of my closest colleagues has been asking our boss to enforce the server tracking policy for months. Teams add and remove servers but never remove them from the database. Reason? The "process" for adding and removing servers is so convoluted that it takes forever to use.

With all the work that is piling up and given the large number of people who qualify for early retirement, this is going to get ugly.

Well, that was my morning. After lunch I got a call from my wife asking me how to do something on MS Vista. It seems her boss bought a new laptop (A Fujitsu Lifebook) and not only does it have Vista on it, it has a biometric log on feature. The laptop locked and she cannot get back in because he is gone for the day. Before it locked though, she was trying to get it to connect to the wireless router so she could access the Internet. She was having trouble connecting it and I do not know enough about Vista to be much help. Now if it was in front of me, I would have been able to get it working (I was able to do that Monday night when he was showing it off), but trying to talk someone over the phone who is not computer literate on an OS you are not familiar with is not fun.

After that phone call I received several more calls from colleagues needing help and from our associate pastor wanting some info about Sunday school. Then my pastor calls and tells me that he needs some help moving dat from his laptop to another machine. He cannot get networking to work, he only has a 64 meg thumb drive and he does not have any blank CD-ROMS. I told him that I had an external hard drive that we could use but it is small (12 gig). I told him to give the thumb drive a try and get as far as he could and if he needed me to come over with my external hard drive to let him know.

I cannot wait until quitting time. It seems like Monday with everyone wanting a piece of me.