I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up

I have gotten considerable “feedback” regarding my last post that it was more whiney than previous posts. There is a reason for that; I’m broken.

When I first arrived at Wonderland, my manager would ask me every day if I was broken. “Did we break you yet”, she would ask. I never really understood what she meant by that. I get it now.

When you first arrive here, you are filled with ambition and optimism. You want to show everyone that you were the best choice for the position. You jump in and start swinging for the fences. You have enough experience to know what the best practices are for you line of work. Your first course of action is to attempt to change the way things are done as to utilize those practices. Sure, you will get some resistance, but they will see it is well worth it.

As the days pass, you start to realize that the “resistance” isn’t them changing to your methods, it is actually you trying not to be sucked into the daily grind. Oh sure, try as you must, but eventually you will snap. That grind is actually a grinding wheel on your head, buffing away the shinny optimism, revealing the cynicism hidden beneath. Sure, it’s painful at first. However, after the drugs kick in, you actually start enjoying the hum of the grinding tool.

Congratulations, you are now broken.

If you want to identify how far someone has been ground down and broken, look to see how big the bottle of pain reliever they have in their desk.
No bottle? Then they just started.
50 count? A couple of months.
Some people have been here so long they have the industrial size 50-gallon drum which needs refilling once a month.
You also have those who mooch off their neighbor. They are measured by the number of trips they take to steal some from a coworkers supply. I once saw a Dilbert cartoon where they attached pellet dispensers to the cubes that contain Prozac. These should be required by law.

The funny part is this doesn’t apply to consultants and contractors. These groups of people seem to have superhuman powers. Don’t believe me? Then riddle me this Batman; why is it you can say something for over a year about what needs to get done and upper managers won’t do a thing about it? A consultant walks in and says the same thing for $125 an hour and upper managers are jumping up and down wanting immediate action? This has happened in every place I have worked. I have actually seen it where employees have quit only to return a few months later as contractors. They are paid more money and their opinion is now valued.

Can I acquire these powers? Is there some school I can attend that will teach me the fine art mental telepathy? Can these skills be obtained before the grinder removes the last drop of my humanity and all I can utter is “By your command”?

Ow. I think it’s time for another Prozac.

You Want The Truth? You Can’t Handle The Truth!

Let’s face it; I never claimed to be savvy in the area of office politics. I do my job as best as I can and hope that my work speaks for itself. Of course, if you read any of my previous postings, it becomes apparent that I have a tenancy to speak my mind. The problem with that is usually the recipient(s) don’t usually enjoy this type of honesty. The people I work with seem to prefer the touchy feely passive aggressive method.

Case in point is a recent conversation I had with Dudley. Since our manager left, he has been more “engaged” (read: attended a few meetings) with our team. He provided “feedback” (read: criticism) that my style is too aggressive. Now I admit, saying my style is aggressive is a little like saying Mussolini had a little bit of an ego problem. But, being direct shouldn't be a negative, it should be the norm.

This is the example he used.

First, this is what I actually said:
“In order to insure production stability, you must develop in the DEV environment and fully test it there. Then, put in a change control notification and install it into production.”

What he feels I should have said was:
“Does everyone agree that we should utilize the DEV environment?”
Now, wait for responses from everyone, in which he feels everyone must agree. Then respond:
“Good, so we are in agreement that starting on (insert arbitrary date here) we will all use the DEV environment”.

From my perspective, the issue with this method is the message becomes clouded in the feel-good speak and you are never really sure if they are getting the true message. I always felt that the direct approach removes any ambiguity. It also takes a 20-minute conversation and compresses it to 5 min. (This presents other issues regarding actually doing your job, but I'll save that for another rant.)

I originally thought that this was a Midwestern thing and my east coast attitude didn’t blend well. However, I am starting to realize that it is a little more universal than that. It has to be a manager thing.

Enter Slick. Slick has been with the company for about six months and has recently been promoted to manager. He always wears a tie and is always on his cell phone. I have yet to attend a meeting with him where he hasn’t gotten a phone call (we know this because his ringer volume is set to max) and had to leave, jabbering away as he walked out of the room. I can only assume this is to let all of us peons know that he and his call are way more important than anything we could be talking about in this meeting. In a small meeting of four people, he actually started to check his voice mail in the middle of a conversation. If that doesn't scream "You are boring me and this can in no way advance my career", I don't know what does.

Slick also has the manager speak down to a science. He has yet to attend a meeting where he hasn’t began to ramble about something incoherent and very loosely associated to the topic. His speeches always have the same elements:

Perspective: He explains how each topic we are discussing impacts each perspective. We know this because he tells us “From this perspective…” This is to give the illusion (not to us lower life forms, but the upper managers in the meeting) that he has carefully considered all aspects. The funny part is he wasn’t in the meeting because he stepped out for most of it to take a phone call.

Hand Gestures: These seem to be in direct correlation to the amount of people in the room. The more people, the bigger the gestures. Mostly circles and waves. I am convinced that if I wore my headset and mp3 player to a team meeting and it would actually look like he was conducting the Boston Philharmonic. Hmm, I think he is wearing a headset…

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I would rather be myself than to pretend to be something I am not for a promotion. I realize that this will keep me back in the rank and file. However, I need to look in the mirror every morning and I just couldn’t do that by sticking my head up someone’s butt. I’ll just have to settle for actually performing WORK and getting things accomplished.

Keep in mind I don’t begrudge people getting promoted. I just wish the criteria were based more upon work ethic and accomplishments. Instead, it seems to be based upon smooth talk and how proficient you are at PowerPoint.

I wonder if there is a company in the Caribbean that needs a DBA. At least I can get umbrella drinks by the pool at lunch.

See! Now Do You Believe me?

I have found that the problem with ranting over and over about the same crap is that people have a tendency to start ignoring you. “Oh, it’s just him going off again.” They stop listening as soon as my lips start moving. Unfortunately, a large number of my proclamations of doom come true and I end up feeling like the hypochondriac who eventually dies and has “I told you I was sick” carved on his tombstone.

One of those situations occurred this weekend…

I need to preface this ditty with two things.
First, this post will make a lot more sense if you read the post just prior.

Next, I need to explain a little about how our alerting process works here. Some Einstein designed the load process to page when things are working. That’s right, when the load process works correctly, I get paged at least 6 times through out the weekend. The theory is that if I do not get a page at the correct time, something is wrong and I have to go run and log on to try and figure out what it is.

Let me put that into perspective, picture yourself driving down the road for a weekend get away. You have your significant other beside you, the tunes are cranked up and all is right with the world. Now continue to imagine this while every 15 minutes, red lights are coming on and bells are emitting from the dashboard declaring, “Everything is good, the engine is still running. Just keep driving”. Get the picture?

So, it is 7am on Saturday morning and I am lying in bed. This is really my only day to sleep in and I am enjoying it. Suddenly, the calm morning is interrupted by the screeching of the on call pager.

My first reaction is to ignore it. After all, it is probably just the load process telling me it finished a step. However, you know that the one time you ignore it, it is really an alert telling me the process stopped. As I waver whether I should do something about it, the rest of my family wakes from their slumber from the sound of this electronic leash.

I roll out of bed, grab the pager and read the message: “Load stopped with return code 12”. Here is another tip from your friendly DBA; give your error messages cryptic codes that have little meaning. And while your are at it, use the same error code sporadically through out your code for different reasons. After all, why would you want to give the person any idea what has happened. Oh, and make sure there is no documentations to any of this. After all, nothing says "Job Security" like everyone needing to call you about this crap.

As I jump on the system, I discover that the process is trying to process a file that has already been processed. Hmm, this smells like the work of Peabody. I call him and ask him if he is on the system. He says he isn’t, but when I explain what the log says, he remembers that he was working on that an may have inadvertently left a file in the processing directory.

I check and sure enough, he did. I delete the old files and restart the process. It dies again. As I look further, it is a command in one of the scripts that is failing. There seems to be a syntax error in the script. Gee, how do you think that got there?

I tell Peabody this and he suddenly remembers that he was working on that script last week. I make the comment that it obviously wasn’t tested, because there is no way it could have ran like this. He agrees and says that I am correct that it should have been done in the dev environment first. Not that this incident will stop him from doing this in production again.

I fix the syntax and fire it off. It works to completion. I know this because it paged me when it was done telling me that it worked.

I have decided I am going to modify a pager so it gives off electrical shocks. Then every time Peabody does this, he will receive 12 volts to the base of his skull. It won’t help, but it should be quite amusing watching each Monday morning as he twitches.

Hello! Hello! Think McFly, Think!

When it comes to IT, the best thing you can do when developing a new process or application is to keep in mind how it will need to be supported when it has been deployed. This can save you (or more to the point, me), a lot of time and frustration. It really doesn’t matter if you app has fancy bells and whistles and wipes your butt after you go to the bathroom, if it is consistently down and not usable, or worse, needs to be baby sat 24/7, then you might as well just keep it to yourself.

That does not seem to be the policy around here. It appears that we operate on the philosophy of “get it in on time and we will fix it later”. This is followed up with the policy of “spend all night putting a hack in to fix it” and adding the finishing touch; “drinking heavily”.

Regardless of the fact that there are a bazillion studies out there that prove building it right the first time save time and money. Hitting the project deadline is more important. After all, that is where things are judged at bonus time. This causes needless sleepless nights for administrators trying to keep these systems up and running with a promise from the designers and developers that they will go back and stabilize it in the next release. Yeah, and there is a bridge in N.Y. I would like to sell you.

As Admins, all we ask is this; “TEST THE DAMN THING”. It is a novel concept to be sure. You develop in the dev environment, you test the thing, and then you deploy it. It really isn’t brain surgery. We are not asking for your first born. We just want something that WORKS and doesn’t require resuscitation every night at 2am.

I will say this, we are getting better. As a matter of process, there is a group of us that review all the changes before they go into production. It certainly has helped. Of course, that doesn’t stop people from trying to get one past us.

As an example, let us take our old friend, Mr. Peabody. The Pea came to the group with a change to a major load process we run every week. The basis for the change is valid. The problem was he hasn’t developed it and wants to change the code directly on the production server before the next load.

“It is one four lines of code” he states. Uh huh, and it only takes one command to completely delete everything on the server. He proceeds to argue that the dev environment doesn’t match production anymore and he can’t accomplish his work there. This digs his hole deeper. It doesn’t match because he has made changes in production directly. It doesn’t seem to matter what I say at this point, he insists that the changes should go in. His voice is now starting to resonate in my inner ear to the point where I feel like someone just shoved a Ginsu in my forehead. Please, just make it stop!!!

Normally at this point I struggle to resist the urge to throw something heavy at him. The nice thing is that I now have a room full of people agreeing with me. I get to sit back at watch others get annoyed. The people running the meeting state the verdict: The change is denied.

Maybe now I can get through a weekend without getting paged or called. Nahh, that's just crazy talk.

What is it you say you do here?

I have to wonder sometimes what the true purpose is of my co-workers employment.

Mr. Peabody assessed our main database today. He found that some of the objects (tables, indexes and such) were consuming over 1000 extents. Let me put that in non-geek terms. Let’s say you have $100. Would it be easier for you to keep track of five $20 bills, or 100,000 pennies? It was a good catch on his part and it does need to be fixed.

However…

Here is how Peabody handled it. Keeping in mind that he has been doing this for at least 20 years:

Peabody: I found that there are numerous objects that have over 1000 extents.
Me: OK
Peabody: How should we handle this?
Me: The tables need to be moved to the correct place and the indexes need to be rebuilt.
Peabody: But we didn’t create them.
Me: OK, then the owners need to be contacted and told that they are creating things in the wrong tablespace. We still have to move them. They shouldn’t care, because moving them is in the background.
Peabody: So I will send you the list…
Me: Why? You are a DBA, right?
Peabody: OK, so I should contact the users and have them move the tables.

Hello. Hello. Think McFly, Think.

Me: No, you move the objects.
Peabody: OK, I move the objects. Where should I move them?

It is at this point, where I feel like I am talking to Sigourney Weaver’s character in Galaxy Quest. The only function this person seems to have is to repeat everything I say back to me, only slightly different. He is actually wanting me to tell min exactly what to do. This conversation would be a lot less painful if I just took a pair of vise grips and ripped my molars out.

I proceed to give him detailed instructions.

Sloth sent this comment and it fully sums up how I feel:

“Some people are like a Slinky. They have no real purpose in life, but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs.”

Stupid is as Stupid does

I know it has been a while since this was updated, but quite a bit has occurred here in wonderland. I’ll break up the news into several posts over the next few days.

Let us start here:

My manager left the company. While I can’t really blame her based upon what was going on here, I will say this; She forgot the golden rule. What is that rule? It is all about ME and MY needs. How can she leave me with this collection of psychosis patients? These people would make Freud say, “I give up”. Now I have no one to whine to that truly understands. The worst part is that she was the buffer between the DBA’s and the business groups requesting resources. Since she left, everyone and their Grandmother seems to think they can waltz up and demand that their work be performed now.

As if the previous postings weren’t enough, let me give you an example…

Another character to this comedy/tragedy is Sloth. He received this title from a co-worker in another group who has pointed out the similarities between him and the two-toed sloth. Both seem to be very slow moving and have the same expression permanently tattooed on their faces. We will get back to him in a minute.

We have our weekly DBA meeting where we discuss our priorities. Our Director, let us call him Dudley, rattling off a list of projects that are deemed our priority. “If someone comes to you and asks you to work on something that is not on this list, then push back and send them to me.” Everyone nods in agreement. The room looks like a truck full of bobble head dolls on a dirt road.

The very next day, Sloth meanders up to my cube, asking for my advice. It is really more like “I’m going to spew my thoughts and I just want you to agree with them”. He proceeds to tell me that he had a meeting with a business group that wants him to “enhance” an Access database. If you have read my previous posts, you know I am now going into epileptic seizures. He explains that they requested that an application they use be enhanced and that they were told by the app group that wrote it, that it would take 18 months to perform that work, due to other priorities and commitments.

No to be discouraged, the business group decided to “write their own application in Access”. Never the less, they are now complaining that it has bad data. And they are surprised by this? Look “Access” has “Ass” in it and we all know what that produces; crap.

I proceed to explain to Sloth the following:
1) This is not on the priority list. If they have issues with that, they need to send this to Dudley and have him explain it.
2) We are DBA’s not application developers. If they want something enhanced (read: fix their crap), then they need to sent it to the application development team.

Sloth then proceeds to ask me to attend a meeting in 15 minutes so I can explain that to them. Why, do I speak a different language? Do I have psychic abilities to overwhelm them with? I shake my head and go with him. He takes me to a cube where we meet a very nice woman who seems pretty bright. I explain the two points to her and she is in full agreement. She asks what her next steps should be and I tell her.

Sloth then utters words which makes my head almost implode:
“I’m going to stick around and take a look at this application.” You have got to be frickin’ kidding me. If I would have known we were playing “good DBA, bad DBA”, I would have requested that the bad DBA be allowed to smack the good DBA.

The chaos that is my career continues…

Homer Was Right

“If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike. You just go in everyday and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way.”

These words spoke by Homer Simpson must be the secret corporate mission statement around here. I mentioned in a previous post (see “What part of "Day Off" don't you get?”) that I suspected the systems around here were put together with paper clips and scotch tape. It appears that was not too far from the truth. I am astounded by the number of temporary hacks that this company implements for one reason or another. I would like to review the various reasons people have for using their solutions, and I use the word “solutions” loosely.

“It is only temporary. We will go back and fix it later.”
Yeah, right. Like Hitler only wanted to temporarily occupy Poland. Look, if you don’t have a plan to fix it all the way, you need one. If the process requires someone to touch it everyday (namely me), then it is still broken. All you did was move the monkey from your back to mine. Just fix it right and we will all be happy.

“The project team needed it done quickly and this is all we could do in that timeframe.”
This is a classic. The Project Manager puts together a plan, but doesn’t understand the level of effort involved. Why? Because these masters of communication don’t go and talk to the people that actually do the work. Let’s face it, why would you want a PM that can actually communicate with people when they can pull guesses out of their ass and force others to meet them? The scary part is that PMs are more likely to become a group manager than the people in the groups they end up being managers over.

“We would prefer a solution that doesn’t require outside resources.”
I love this one. What they are really saying is that they have pissed off the other development groups that have the expertise they need. Instead, they will slam together a solution that requires three times the level of effort and resources. This one also applies to those trying to sneak some development under the radar. They knew they couldn’t get official approval, so they quietly do it on the side. If it works, they look like a hero. If it fails, then it was because they couldn’t get the right resources. Either way, they look like a “go getter”.

There seems to be a unifying theme in all of these “solutions”. For some bizarre reason they all involve Microsoft Access. Now I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I have to believe Bill Gates is using some type of mind control on our business users. This company has over 3,000 Access database they consider “critical” to the business. Are you on CRACK? Access is about as stable as an epileptic carrying a tray of china across a tightrope. It’s possible, but do you really want to chance it? Yet everyday, someone in this company creates a new one and pats them self on the back for it. Then when it has issues, they run to the DBA’s for help. We then get the classic response: “What do you mean you don’t support it? It is a database, isn’t it? You guys support databases.”

Grasp a concept; Access is not a database. It is Excel on steroids. I don’t care if you link the tables to SQL Server or Oracle, it is still just a fancy spreadsheet with macros. We don’t support that. Though your misery does provide us with some valuable material to mock and ridicule you. For that, we thank you.