Today is a very green day. Not like the band you numpty, but like the color. Though come to think of it, some Green Day music turned way down would be nice…
Err, back to point… I am sitting upstairs in my palatial mansion (LOL – if 1800 sq ft is palatial) sitting at my laptop which is sitting on a table I keep here in my master bedroom in front of two really big windows looking out over my back yard. It is a nice back yard, I only have about 3/4 acre of property (32670 sq ft) but it is my 3/4 acre[1], well a big nod to the bank there too… but the bank rarely comes over and mows so I will call it my property for the time being…
Err again back to point… I have some nice big green trees in the back yard and I tend to keep the grass on the longer rather than the shorter side. You walk in it, you know you are walking on grass versus say, Astroturf or that cheap looking green patio carpeting. So that means the grass is very green too.
We also have sort of a gray and rainy out as well so that just enhances the general greenness and means I will likely be mowing again in two days because this is the kind of weather that the grass really likes to grow in.
I am basking in this greenness, I really like the color green. No clue why, don’t care why, I just like it. I also like blue a lot, the darker the better. I am also a fan of the various purples and combinations of all three of those colors.
I am also basking in the sounds of the rain falling and birds chirping and my keyboard keys clicking and the occasional vocalization from Trouble the black cat from the suburbs of Hell (about 13.4 miles from downtown Hell she assures me).
I am relaxing today because the last few days of this week at work were trying. Trying, I think, to make me go insane or burst a blood vessel. I was having fun in that I was learning stuff I didn’t know technically, but there were some things that MSFT did in some implementations that were just pissing me off to no end which I may write about later when I am more sedate and have less emotional attachment to the stupidity.
Also, there was a ton of pain being experienced due to management morons. Briefly one or more managers made stupid decisions last December which I and others told them was stupid then and every month we had the opportunity since. The problems that I and others forecast were all coming true and things were getting worse and worse. Management chose to ignore the problems until this week where things escalated into VP levels, etc and then all of a sudden it was all hands on deck oh my god we have to fix this with managers on con calls everywhere discussing how critical it all was but no one mentioning how the techies said months ago we were on a stupid path.
Of course, had we done things properly in the first place (as defined by what I and others said we should have done in the first place), this wouldn’t have become an issue ever let alone a 5 alarm fire issue. To be honest, it really wasn’t my issue and I very likely could have said and gotten away with… “Go away, you made your bed, now try to sleep on the spikes”. But that isn’t me, unfortunately. So this last week had me writing lots of scripts and figuring out various command line tools to make sure we fixed things properly instead of writing up documentation to hand over to a bunch of button pushers who could then inconsistently do the work so we had other issues to deal with. This resulted in little sleep and lots of time working. The fire is still going on but I gave thrown enough water in the air that it should be able to be controllable by the others involved now.
On the one side it was pretty fun, I am an adrenaline junky at heart and enjoy trying to pull off miracles to see how far I can push myself and still deliver. Also my mind comes up with interesting solutions to problems in cases like that, stuff I may not have come up with previously under normal circumstances. It felt very much like I was back in the fire doing operations (prior to the last operations job that was done properly because I got to help define what we did) because honestly, it was an operational fire drill based on management stupidity. Not my closest direct report to management, but other higher up management.
Unfortunately, I don’t get nothing near to what I got paid when I really did operations support which means I really shouldn’t be doing anything involved with OPs that I don’t like. You don’t want to hire me for an ops guy unless you are very serious about ops and you have the money to spend on it. Ops is hard to do right and I won’t do it wrong which means you need to pay me. 🙂 There are much easier ways to make the money (at least for me) that most people make doing ops so it makes no sense for me to do ops – unless I am paid properly.
So the good side was the adrenaline and fun. The bad side was the same issue that tended to occur to me when I did ops… I become single focused, everything else in life stops… I wake up at 6:45AM on a Friday (after going to bed at 3-3:30AM) and I sit down at my laptop and besides grabbing occasional peanut M&Ms and sips of Coca Cola sprinkled with restroom visits I don’t really stop until after 10PM and then I pass out. The house could collapse around me at any point in that cycle and I likely wouldn’t notice it. I don’t spend time looking out the window, I don’t spend time appreciating the singing of the birds, I don’t even get to appreciate my cat whapping at my leg because if she is, I don’t notice it. If someone asked me to summarize everything I did yesterday including phone/con calls, emails, and other stuff I couldn’t even begin. I just know this morning that just one of the scripts I put together quickly in the afternoon yesterday is just under 500 lines of code because it was sitting on my desktop when I sat down at my laptop. That is one of several scripts I put together and doesn’t include any of the testing and working out of other things which were simply me indicating how to get a command line tool to do something for us versus having to write a script. Hmm I just looked at email, I sent something like 53 emails as well. And many aren’t short, they are detailed technical brain dumps with opinion about where we are and how we got there and where we need to go sprinkled generously throughout and I wasn’t being gentle… LOL.
Yep, I am now missing 2-3 days but at least today is nice and green. 🙂
joe
[1] I have a leads on 13 acres (566280 sq ft) and 21 acres (914760 sq ft) nearby that I need to dig into though…
One thing that sucks being on the tech side of the house is that many managers don’t want to listen and even when they have someone of your caliber on staff this is still true. They still ignore the big red flares that their top guys are shooting at them. Sometimes I wonder if it even matters; is it better to just let them run with their ideas then eventually they will not work and then the tech team will get a stab at the problem.
Do you include the non-technical managers on your long emails when you discuss technical issues? If they are anywhere as in-depth as some of your AD posts then these guys probably have no idea what you are even talking about.
Unfortunately the tech team has to deal with the decisions all along and when they finally get to “fix” the problem it is usually under the gun with VPs watching and waiting to can someone.
As for non-tech managers getting my long emails… It depends. Sometimes they will get them, but a in that case I tailor the note in a special way, usually with an exec summary of the whole thing at the top of the note and then I include all of the detail to let them know that I am not makning it all up or it isn’t just a personal feeling. Sort of like, here, take this info, give it to some techy you trust and ask them to determine how valid the points are.
Then there are other times you don’t want to give detail even to other techies because you know the response will be to try and pick at and break down each of the individual points in a bid to wear you down or wear the process down. There are a lot of people that I have run into that know they have no legs to stand on from a intelligent technical standpoint so they will try to burn your time until you can’t afford it anymore and just give in. Those folks often are surprised to learn that that tactic doesn’t work well with me unless they can get some management above me to cave and even still I usually refuse to give in. Bad ideas are bad ideas and tend to hurt. If there is no chance of pain for anyone but the person making the bad decision I will warn but I won’t burn up time fighting to prevent them from hurting themselves. It is when the pain will cause me or innocent bystanders pain that I really toss it up.