Murphy's Law Applied To IT

When you're on call, there's large swathes of time – literally hours and hours that go by, where no one calls. Nothing's broken, and the business is chugging away at full steam.

However, if that burrito you ate for lunch suddenly needs to make an exit, you can guarantee there will be a network outage at that exact moment.

When you need ten minutes to get your child to the school bus stop by 7am, your servers will sense this and burst into flames.

If you run to the shop for milk - only five minutes down the road - the database will eat itself.

On the other hand, maybe you've had an extremely busy on call week. Maybe you've been awake for 48 hours straight, and those fluffy, bunny-like spiders crawling up your arm don't want to listen to Kylie Minogue on their very tiny iPods anymore. You need sleep.

Five minutes after settling into a cozy cocoon on the couch for a power nap, your cell phone rings. It will be the crisis team informing you that every user on the East Coast can't log in.

!@#$%&

Got to work around 9am, had meeting, left at 1pm.

Then, a much needed three hour nap.

As a side note: I've noticed that most of the people I work with behave like big babies. Temper tantrums all around. I also noticed the only thing that makes management take notice is no-nonsense straight talk, sprinkled with well placed expletives.

In recent years, when I get handed some real crap, and the frustration overwhelms me - I don't want to cry or scream. I just get really, really angry.

Two points for not being a pushover, but minus a squillion for potentially getting myself into trouble.

3 am

Yeah, it's 3:00am and I'm writing a blog post.

Why, you might ask? Because I'm working, of course! ...but I'll get to that in a moment.

Got up this morning at 5:00am – nearly 24 hours ago, got the teen off to school, then headed to NJ for eight hours of slamming my head against a brick wall.

No project requirements? No design documents? Got a project that was mishandled from the beginning, and need someone to make it look like it works?

That's me. It's what I do.

Currently, my boss is upset that the most recent turd rolled onto my desk isn't ready for install.

It also helpful when he pokes his head into my cube every five minutes to ask: "Is it done yet?".

"Is it done yet?"

"Is it done yet?"

"Is it done yet?"

Is there an echo in here?

We're re-writing an entire business process as a "bug fix" instead of a fully funded project, so there's no actual instructions or direction on to how this needs to work. So it will be fudged together into something closely resembling what the business needs, in an insanely short time frame.

Left NJ at 5:00pm, no traffic issues, thank God. Made dinner, cleaned up, laundry, checked email, spent some quality time with teen and hubby, then caught an hour of sleep between 11:00pm and midnight.

Got up again at midnight to run off-hour testing. We all have to take turns doing this, since there's no night shift team.

So I'll be awake for the remainder of tonight, periodically running tests when needed. Hopefully this will wrap up by 7:00am, because that's when I'll need to leave again to drive to NJ for a "mandatory" meeting.

WoooHooo! Livin' on the edge!

One hour of sleep in 24......I can feel the buzzzzzz. Zzzzzzz.

Got Lemur?

It pissed down rain today. Black skies, no daylight til at least 8:00am. Took three cups of coffee just to get out of the house.

No accidents on the way to New Jersey. The first time in a month without a jam up. I'll take it where I can get it.

Key card. Parkade. Elevator. Home Sweet Cubicle.

Boot pc. Hit the ladies.

Aaaaargh....the bathroom smells like crotch rot.

Not that I have any experience with that – it's what I expect it to smell like: BO and barnyard - with a hint of rotting flesh. Usually it's just pooey, but this was definitely not last night's chicken vindaloo.

Spent an HOUR on the phone with our business people, deciding how to make a screen more user friendly. Bear in mind that our users are also our employees, so they're supposed to be trained, reasonable people with more than just space between their ears.

The offending item causing all the fuss? The “save” button. It was confusing people.

My suggestion was that, at some point, you have to let people make mistakes and they should be held accountable for them. Why are we treating them like idiots?

Or we can make the system completely self sufficient. We wont need humans then.

Maybe we'll just hire lemurs. Evil lemurs.

In Summer-y

So yeah. Just a bit of blog neglect there.

I guess I slid into a funk. For a while there, I didn't even log in to my home laptop when I came home from work. Too tired, too bored, too depressed. Just didn't feel like it.

One problem though - I need the diversion. Poking around on the internet is better than flopping on the sofa for an evening of House re-runs.

So let's see.....what's been going on?

We had one of the hottest summers on record. More days over 90 than since... FOREVER. Well, maybe. I don't know - but it was a total stinkfest.

Don’t get me wrong, heat is lovely. In Hawaii.

Here in Pennsylvania, the air becomes a sponge. A thick, sweaty, smelly, damp sponge. And it never ends. Just this past week, we had two more days in the nineties. Last Thursday it hit 93 degrees. I'm sorry, but that's just stupid hot for late September.

Anyway, school started. Yay!

To recap, we decided the local, public school was woefully unqualified to impart a reasonable education. The teaching staff was filled with an inordinate number of inexperienced teachers (owing to the population growth in the area), and way too many liberal educators. No dissenting opinions – even politely presented - would be heard. And yes, they had no qualms penalizing any student who didn't think the same.

The school refuses to separate children that want to learn, from the ones that don't give a shit. So they have classrooms they can't control, and end up teaching to the lowest common denominator.

Instead of book reports, they had collages of crayons and glue, representing the theme of a story. Almost all the required reading for the “advanced” Lit class involved only stories of victims – they're the real heroes! No classic literature whatsoever.

What's worse is, every other day I'd see something in the news about gang violence, or kids getting knifed because someone didn't like the way they looked.

So The Teen is going to a different school. This was preceded by several months of hemming and hawing about what a mistake this was, that the uniforms suck, and what if her old friends forget her, and she doesn’t make new ones? What if there's no cute, swooshie-haired boys? What if the girls are bitchy?

So far, the hope of a more serious education looks promising: they had a required summer reading list. Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, To Kill A MockingBird and Pride and Prejudice to start. All must be read by the time school began, and there will be tests. Hooo-boy!

Sure, I would've hated that when I was her age - but hey, as an adult I can see the benefits of having been forced to read the classics. Some kids grow up and “get it”. Others blow it off and never pick up anything other than teen angst novels.

And they're reading Orwell. ORWELL. How awesome is that?

Thankfully, now that we're a month into the new school, my daughter's adjusting, friends have been made, and things are finally settling in nicely. Unfortunately, I am told there are no swooshie-haired, Justin Bieber wanna-bees. Sadness.

In other news, work continues to suck loudly and powerfully. I was moved to a failed project that somebody, somewhere up the food chain is attempting to resurrect. It's horrible, and nothing works right. The IT department decided this doesn’t matter, they intend to cram it in anyway.

It's my job to help fix it, with no documentation or resources. Departmental politics prevent me from actually interacting with the other members of my team, because they're technically still tied to other projects. It's a bit of a spy game communicating with one another on bug fixes.

Which leads me to another thing about fixing other people's crap. I'm burnt out on it. I'm not talking about fixing little oddball scenarios where the user right-clicked a field, on a Wednesday, during a full moon, and the web page failed. I'm speaking of the large, gaping holes where someone overlooked an entire business process. I'm tired of trolling through thousands and thousands of lines of code, Scotch-taped together by at least 200 other people, trying to find the mystery exception. Or, in this case, finding whole sections that were apparently not finished – made obvious by all the “add such-n-such here” notations.

I used to think I wanted to just do development work, creating applications from the ground up. Too boring, and a huge personal sacrifice. Our developers put in an average of 60-80 hours a week. Maybe ten years ago I would've had the patience, interest, and extra time, but now I just want to do the best job I can, go home, and take care of my family.