The summer of 2003 was a ridiculous time. My girlfriend was moving in with me – not that it made a huge difference, because she was back to California for work for weeks at a time. Meanwhile, work was undergoing a seismic shift with the coming of Mac OS X. My six-month rollout project got crushed down to three days, and my imaging solution (using Carbon Copy Cloner and a firewire drive) saved my ass. Then Apple Network Assistant (and then Apple Remote Desktop) came along and saved my ass again. And then there was the PC meltdown.
See, we were supposed to spend the summer deploying Lotus Notes 6 to all the machines in the company by Labor Day. And since we were ass-backward, that meant about 2000 workstation visits. Only problem is, before we could get going, one of the incompetents in the infrastructure group killed the primary domain controller in mid-July. Since they didn’t have clue one how to restore it, we ended up doing about 1200 workstation visits to put PCs back on the domain. And management wouldn’t let us kill two birds and put Notes on at the same time.
And then, just under a month later, a massive virus outbreak forced us to go around and touch all those PCs again. And once again, virus first, no Notes rollouts.
So when the time came, we were on a short schedule – and thanks to the various tools afforded us by ANA/ARD, we were able to hit up the Macs quickly, while the PCs were done one at a time by hand. And of course, through all this, the usual array of help calls was coming in. No extra manpower, of course; we got “assistance” from help desk operators and infrastructure staff who could have been more help if they’d gone home sick and not tried to assist OR do their regular jobs.
It was my MVP year. In my memory, it’s down as one of the Heroic Age years, like 1989 or 1994. But I burned bright and fast. I think I quit twice, and by September I’d been pulled off the regular help-ticket rotation and moved to new-machine-rollout duty with occasional Winston Wolf action. Those were the days when I would flip out in IM to my girlfriend and storm out the door…and by the time I’d gotten to the cigar shop, she’d already called in an order for me so that I’d have a couple of sticks ready to light.
Because for whatever reason, I was out there saving the world and being proven right over and over again – but once you got above my immediate boss, the rest of management was taking anyone else’s advice over mine. That is, when they weren’t flagrantly undermining policies and procedures we’d already agreed on. And it was driving me insane. Actual quote, September 16 2003: “Here’s the way work should go: if I’m not doing my job, fire me. No prob. If I am doing my job, then quit trying to find reasons why other people should be allowed to do it.”
I think that’s a big part of the reason why I’m having the flashbacks this week. Once again, somebody has gone outside the rules and outside the process, things have gone badly, and now they are having the ass with us and insisting that we owe them immediate satisfaction. And it happened on a day where lying nauseous on a gurney with a nurse missing the vein in my arm for the fourth time was the high point of my workday, other than my wife’s safe-arrival call from her vacation flight. And once we agreed to help them – once we threw out the rules and the process and capitulated completely – the person has made herself unavailable for two days in a row, working from home on the very computer she insisted was so non-functional as to require immediate response.
I have gone to great lengths not to be like I used to be. The black-glass bottle with the rage genie trapped in it sits on the mantlepiece of my mind these days, usually, and I do sometimes look at it and take a long breath before turning away and going back to work. But last week, confronted with half a dozen foes at once, I didn’t hesitate and I smashed the son of a bitch right open. At least this time, I have reasonable confidence that I will put it back on the shelf.
When I’m through, that is.