Monday and Tuesday were busy and chaotic. My TL told me to go home and get some rest (I had worked almost 16 hours on Monday) but I could not in good faith leave him to deal with the madness. I have never in my life had so much trouble dealing with a group of people or seeing so much "pass the buck" syndrome. We had one problem and multiple tickets open for it, all from different people, all offering a slightly different spin on the same problem...a failure to deliver EDI messages either to or from vendors. It appears, that the issue is finally resolved, if the notes o the tickets are correct. I hope they are. The post postmortem report is going to be a doozy...the thrid party provider is gonna get a new one ripped over it.
My evening on call started off okay, moved to chaos, then mysteriously died off. That allowed me to only have to work for two hours OT instead of eight...muchas gracias Lord. That also allowed me to get some sleep and sleep mostly straight through the night. What a blessing.
We had a meeting at work in the mid afternoon (which I missed part of due to customer calls forwarded to my mobile phone...a necessary evil) that left me scratching my head a little. The meeting was not for all the people on the account, only those who were retained as specific customer support and not put in with the"shared" support the rest of the people (mostly techs) were.
In the meeting they talked about the direction of our group and what we could expect. Early on in the meeting I got the feeling they were telling us that our jobs would be off shored, but it became clearer later on that the roles many of us are doing are in the "critical" areas. Pay adjustments were talked about, but not in a specific manner. They were very general and told us that more information would be forthcoming during one to one meetings. they did say that they hoped to be able to attract people fresh out of college (Read: educated, heap labor) to add some fresh blood to a company that has more than its share of "old folk".
I left the meeting about the same as I did when I arrived...more questions than answers. That is the way it is in corporate America, especially in I/T. Corporate America can be a harsh mistress.
The other item that was brought up was career paths. I have been in IT for 11 years and I have performed a myriad of jobs ranging from basic customer service, people management, to some technical support and process management. If I had to chose what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I am not sure I would find it here. That is not an insult, just an observation. I have been pushed into so many jobs over the past 6 years, I think I have lost my desire to strive for something better. Like a slave that was hard to break, I am here to do what I am told.
Sad.
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