I had been warned that it would be EXTREMELY HOT – like, melt-your-flip-flops hot. “Make sure you get a house with a pool,” they said. Which we did, thank goodness, because we had to turn the HEATER on.
This whole summer has been weird on the East Coast (or in the Mid-Atlantic, anyway) – back in June the water temps in my parents’ pool was close to 90°F for like two weeks, when we had the heat wave, and then we started having nights that went down into the 60’s and it basically never stopped. I’m not going to recognize fall when it finally gets here.
Sorry your vacation is almost over. That first day back at work is THE GODDAMNED WORST.
Linux is new to our environment and the standards implementation project isn’t due to complete for 3 more months. Unfortunately that hasn’t stopped project from moving ahead in the interim, mine is the 3rd project that’s implementing with Linux.
I just spent 3 weeks performing a fucking miracle. I got our IT planning, Development and Application support teams to all agree to an interim set of standards for Linux servers. That means that I’m not spending every other day fighting about if the application will be supported and the development team can stop their god damned whining.
So I send out the email announcing this to all involved parties including a plan for making the very minor changes to the dev and qa servers for my in flight project.
The dev PM - who was invited but did not show up to the meetings to determine these standards - replied with “That’s fine but we won’t be making those changes to our servers”
After I typed and deleted 3 versions of “what makes you think you have any choice in this matter bitch” I finally managed a reasonable response which expressed the same sentiment but with more words and better ass cover.
We went through that a couple of months ago. Major upgrade, zillions of emails sent out for the better part of a year. Find three production servers that haven’t been upgraded, deadline looming before they just don’t fucking work with the environment anymore. Contact the admins. They say they have no plans to perform the upgrade until the middle of next year. :smack:
Um, NO. You have a couple of weeks before you have hundreds or perhaps thousands of users screaming at you because it doesn’t work. And the entire rest of the company is NOT backing out the change because you refused to cooperate.
I have that problem too. Part of the issue is that for the last several vacations (2010, 2011, and this year) we rented various houses at various beaches and my family stayed together: us, our kid, my parents, my sisters, their husbands, their kids. My parents and one of my sisters I see all the time – practically every weekend. The other sister lives in Illinois and we don’t get together that often – maybe 4x a year if we’re all lucky, because LIFE. She’s married to my favorite brother-in-law, and I absolutely ADORE her children. I started breaking down and going into the post-vacation funk before we even started packing up to come home. But I get like that even when it’s just the two (or three, now) of us, even if it’s a just for a weekend. I want to always be on vacation, because I hate work SO MUCH. The fact that I love the beach is a secondary issue; I just hate being in this building with the recycled air and the morons and the complete rudderlessness. (No lie: I spend at least half an hour every day wondering if Jimmy Buffett needs roadies, because that gig has got to be better than working in this bottomless shithole of angst and despair.)
I truly don’t understand this mindset. Did they simply not understand that it was happening whether they were on board or not? Or did they think that if they put their fingers in their ears and closed their eyes and said “Lalalalalalala” no one would upgrade their servers?
Totally stating the obvious here, but have you considered changing jobs?
There’s a woman here, who is a manager, who walks around talking to people and constantly has to tell stories about her children, 3, and 1. I DON’T CARRREEEE…take it somewhere else!!
It went up the chain, it came back down the chain on their end. Major stakeholders got involved. THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. On a couple of hundred other servers and the major multi-node production environment. If you don’t make it happen on your end, you bear the full responsibility for the unhappy users and impaired business functions. There was a brief talk about whether or not they needed to move key functions to servers managed by someone else and/or replace them altogether.
They got it done.
I was not directly involved in any of that, since it happened at a higher pay grade, but I caught whiffs of it.
One of the issues I’ve had with this Very Large Corporations vs other companies I’ve worked for is the diffuse structure and lack of central power figures in the IT area who can make decisions and make them stick. There are a ton of managers owning their little fiefdoms and a very few high level people who are too high level to be involved in such things.
But in this case, the combined power of a lot of angry stakeholders was more than adequate.
I re-heated some salt-and-pepper squid in the communal microwave once - I apologized profusely to my co-workers. I had no idea it would smell like that. You could weaponize microwaved fish stink.
Actually, yes. I have two semesters left until I get my M.Ed. and hypothetically become a high school English teacher. Of course, one of those semesters is student teaching, which has me in a dead panic – what if I’m terrible? – but that’s nothing that a little Xanax can’t fix. (I hope.)
I am keeping Jimmy-Buffett-roadie in my back pocket as a potential career option, just in case, though.
I hate anticipatory anxiety. That’s where you fret and fret about something you can’t change, and may not even happen.
I don’t have it-- my boss does, big time.
She’s kinda entitled to have it, for reasons I don’t care enough to type out, but it’s still annoying.
Also, I’m tired of my boss complaining about people asking for too much time off, or timing it inconveniently.
One of the few perks of a job like mine is that we do have some flexibility in scheduling.
And yes, one co-worker make take a little bit of advantage, but she’s also the only one with “young” kids, and she deserves a chance to see some of their activities.
And finally, co-worker? Would it have killed you to bring the cart full of crap for the other end of the store down to us? Or at least let us know that you had so much of it? I get really tired of your attitude that your department is the center of the universe, and there’s no difference worth knowing about between stuff which belongs to all the other departments.
Holy fuck. I can’t believe these people are this fucking stupid. Never mind yes I can. If this was a private company you jackasses would have been fired a long time ago. As it is you are pissing off everybody including your grandboss’s grandboss. It pretty pathetic how much bullshit public employees can get away with.
Substitue 4 and 2 for 3 and 1, and make it my manager not just some manager, and I could be you.
Of course, her suckups and lickspittles all eat up these stories and laugh. In loud voices. If I had any work to do (see previous rants) I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on it because of the goddamn fucking noise!
Ugh boss is away for two weeks, grandboss is not out of this office. You’d think that it would mean I could get work done, nope people trying to pull shit they should know better about so I have to kaibosh it or redirect to do it correctly.
The latest item is something we said MONTHS ago that needed to be done one way and now they are trying to push it through the wrong way. Ten minutes a couple months ago and they’d have their proper approvals and everything, so now I have to hammer on them to do it right damnit.
Plus my lungs are throwing up crud, I don’t know if its allergies (which I’m discovering that apparently in me looks like a cold until it really turns into a cold) or I’m truly trying to get sick but I hope not because I can’t get sick until mid-September. Not allowed.
Grrr. I’ve been avoiding/dreading this, but it turns out that I’m the only person in the company who can evaluate a new supplier, because I’m the expert. Despite point out for years how dumb it is that the major product line for which we’re building new facilities has only one expert. Nonetheless, I now get to fly to Shanghai (~20 hrs), hour train ride, two hour car ride, to visit… one supplier’s plant. Then, two hour car ride, hour train ride, fly back home. And this needs to be next month.
So, now get to scramble to arrange letter of invitation, itinerary, visa, immunizations, etc., and waste most of a week traveling for a one day visit.
