When I worked at Biosphere 2 one of the engineers had that over her desk. A crudely drawn bit of pre-net copier spam with a sketch of a guy tearing his hair out. It shold have been the company motto but I have learned that it is appropriate anywhere.
I’m working as a vendor consultant for a multinational corporation. It’s a frenzy and we’re a month behing schedule but we’re getting by. Just yesterday we installed the backup system but haven’t really started doing backups. Project manager asks me to restore a critical database because someone screwed up a load. I say I can probably do it but can’t estimate a time. Well it’s going poorly. Problems we can deal with but I’m on my third pass trying to restore. Then we find out that we never needed to do this at all, they just need to reexecute the load correctly. Unfortunately the first step of the restiore is to wipe all the tables I have to complete this task. I am so glad it’s Friday, or I will be if I can get this done before three.
Well I did this one as a sincere attempt to help. Unfortunately it’s turned into a total cockup after adjusting parameters. Instead of getting intermittant communication failures it doesn’t work at all. I can live with the fact that I’m not having a cold beer with my co-workers right now but the problem won’t be solved by Monday and I’m afraid it will turn into a finger pointing war since part of the system was installed by the customer and part by us.
I once received a request at work to delete roughly 75 users from a system. I did exactly that, and was almost immediately rewarded for my efforts by screams from the requester saying they didn’t expect us to delete the users quite so soon. :smack: They thought we wouldn’t get to the request for a week or so. :wally
I used to work for an Auto Drivaway, both driving cars and in the office. I once gave someone directions from a point where they’d pick up a car. They needed to take a highway from there, to a beltway that would get them to another highway (for KC people, I-35 north to I-435 south to I-70 east). It only occured to me later that where they were picking up the car was NORTH of the I-435 junction (I should have said I-35 south). They very well could have taken I-35 north to the Iowa border before they realized I messed them up and they were going the wrong way. They never called to complain but I’m sure they were very upset. That was 20 years ago and I still feel bad about it.
I had a new supervisor call up and request that I delete a series of records. I explained that end users with the privileges of the person whose desk he was calling from could delete them themselves. He asked me to walk him through the process, so I did so.
Turns out he simply wanted to omit them from the current selection (found set).
White Mutiny. Wonderful invention. You follow orders to the letter without using any common sense whatsoever. Even when there are inferred directions which most people would automatically take for granted. In other words; I’m too stoopid to figger it out fer myself, boss, so if you didn’t say it, I didn’t do it.
