I'm filling out a self assessment form for my Organizational Design class. The form asks questions with two possible answers and asks you to "score" the two answers by assigning them a number such that the two responses add up to five. You're supposed to give the higher number to the choice you prefer.
So if the question is
Which do you prefer?
Vanilla 1
Chocolate 4
You are clearly all about the chocolate. I think this questionnaire is supposed to tell you how comfortable you are with change (since this weeks reading was all about being a change agent, and it asks questions like "It is harder to adjust to 1) Standard Procedures 2) Frequent Changes.")
I noticed a few things while filling out this questionnaire. As background, part of what I do for a living is implement new software-and I love doing it-but at the same time I can sympathize with the users' frustration when they discover that whatever new system I've just imposed on them isn't as comfortable as the old one. All of this is to say I've done a decent amount of thinking about change. In fact, part of *why* I do what I do for a living is that change is scary and one of the best ways to deal with scary things is to gain some measure of control over them.
This brings me to the main point of what is missing from this questionnaire about change. One of the most important indicators of whether or not any given person is going to be comfortable with change is how much control they have over the situation. I am much more comfortable with a change that I have helped shape than with one that is imposed on me from above and I bet I'm not the only one who feels that way. It's true that I cause changes to happen for a living, so perhaps my perspective is a little different than that of most people. But with the exception of the hard core, heels in the mud "No change is acceptable at all" position, it seems to me that most people are more receptive to change they helped design and that ultimately, people's preference for their own ideas is much more important than how they feel about change.
Less important, but also interesting to me was that context matters. For example, one of the questions asked whether I preferred people who were visionaries to people who were hard-nosed realists. Another (really the starting point for this blog post) asked if I preferred people with vivid imaginations or people with good common sense. Now I realize that this questionnaire is from a textbook for an MBA program, so there is an implication that when it asks about your preferences for people it means coworkers-not friends. But the answer I'd give to that one question is widely different in the personal realm than it is in the professional realm. I want my friends to be creative. And so long as I don't have to split the electric bill with them, I mostly don't care how practical they are. NB-This is not to say that I want my friends to be impractical-it just means that I would prefer that they had good imaginations (and in fact, if you examine my friends you will find a host of imaginative humans-many of them with the letters MFA after their names.)
What I'd want in a business partner is not what I'd want in a friend. In a business partner (or, even just a coworker) I'm much more interested in someone who is a member of the reality based community than someone who has five new business plans a week.
On another note, I have noticed positive changes in myself since I last filled out one of these silly questionnaires (A Myers Briggs assessment in 2008.) I am much less afraid of other people than I was at the time. I can think of a couple of reasons for this. For one, I no longer live with someone who tells me what a bad job I do talking to other people. For another, I have had to learn to stand on my own two feet professionally this past year and while I'm not crazy about the environment in which I work (although, as I have noted in other posts 1) I'm pretty sure that I have the respect of everyone but my boss-which is comforting and 2) it's really not such a bad place to work when the owners are absent.) Being accepted into the MBA program probably helped as well. But while I'm still nervous and shy, I'm not as afraid of other people any more. Which is a good thing-possibly the only good thing this annoying little questionnaire will do for me.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Friday, February 19, 2010
Let me tell you about my day
Really, I like the place I work an awful lot-when my boss is absent.
Today was Friday and I had nothing on fire and half the staff was out. I have been feeling kind of squished for the past few days, so instead of aggressively going after the stuff that needed to be done (and there were things that today was perfect for-like updating software.) I just wanted to sit and stare at the Internet.
Half way through the morning one of my coworkers reminded me that she had a problem with her signature file (in spite of the fact that it's based on exactly the same html file as every other sig file in the office, all the rest of them show our logo and hers just shows a red, broken jpg x.) So I screwed around with it for a while. I deleted the signatures folder from the application data file for her user account and recreated it, and re-copied the files from somewhere else on the network (this has always done the trick in the past) all with no joy. And with her and another co-worker offering suggestions. To be fair, these are some of the more tech savvy coworkers I have, but I have come to the conclusion that geek cred is not straightforward and universal. What do I mean by that? Well...my job is to keep the desktops and their software happy. As such, I know a great deal about the documents and settings folder and I've become more comfortable with the command line and regedit*, but this doesn't mean that I can write Excel Macros or Perl scripts. Conversely, neither my coworker who writes nice Excel macros nor my coworker who used to write software for a living were being particularly helpful with their suggestions. ("Maybe the problem is that it's a gif not a jpg." "are you sure it's pointing to the right directory?")
Which doesn't mean I particularly minded them making suggestions. No that's not quite right-in hindsight I don't mind them trying to second guess me, because being able to answer their questions meant I was doing a thorough job and understood what I was dealing with. Either way it beats having to help the technically incompetent and I was pleased to see that I could explain the problem to them (more or less) instead of saying "look it's supposed to work but it just doesn't okay?"
I tried a few things off the interwebs to try to fix the problem (including the one that involved the regedit), but none of them worked. So I called back the software vendor who was supposed to help me re-integrate our document management system and our crm and attempted to restore another piece of software to its "pre-server 2008" state, and listened to a coworker bitch about the state of the trading policy (sympathetically, I might add. My vision may be a bit skewed by the political analysis paper I wrote, but when I think about the place I work I think about Aesop's fable about how the most powerful person is always right.)
And then the office manager sent out a request for help stuffing envelopes. I started as the office manager and I've stuffed plenty of envelopes in my life and I know how much it sucks to have to deal with a giant pile of papers to be folded and stickers to be attached all by yourself, so when my help at envelope stuffing is requested, I try to offer it if I can. (On the other hand, when it is imposed on me from above I avoid it. Envelope Stuffing is no longer part of my job description.) In fact, I judge my coworkers (especially those on the "support staff" side of the house) on how willing they are to respond to such requests and I have to say they all show up to help when they can.
So. We're sending a letter to all our clients telling them that we will donate funds to our Donor Advised Fund if they refer people who become clients to us (we had planned to donate money to the charity of their choice, but our compliance attorney said that wouldn't fly. So instead we're essentially offering to put some money aside for future donations to charitable organizations of our choice if clients refer people to us.) We have a letter explaining all this and a pretty flier that our marketing people produced along with a CD from the Boston Children's Chorus (one of our charities of choice) to send out.
Unfortunately, the envelopes that we have don't fit all of this comfortably. Plus, someone insisted that this letter be mail merged-even though we can't send it out in windowed envelopes. So someone has to make sure that the sticker that goes on the bubble envelope (bubble because of the CD) matches the name on the letter inserted. To do otherwise would be Very Bad because our privacy policy states that we do not disclose the names of our clients. So if you are Jenny Smith and you get a letter that has Bob Smith's name on it we have failed. For the most part we've managed this by buying windowed envelopes and stopping printing clients names on things, but someone (my boss) decided that we needed to print client names on this letter.
I spent an hour or so folding and stapling letters. I was pleasantly surprised to see my coworkers show up and ask to help. First Em-a financial planning associate who always tries to help out (partly because she is friends with the other young ladies who do the envelope stuffing) but also Er, the financial analyst dude who sits behind me. When I went back to my desk to see if the software vendor I had left a message for had gotten back to me (she had) I kicked another coworker off of her computer but she said it was all good because she had planned to help with the envelope stuffing anyhow.
So, all good people. All willing to lend a hand (while discussing what pranks we'd played on the owners and all sorts of amusing internal-non-bitchy gossip).
Why can't it be like this all the time anymore?
*although I still maintain that any day that involves a visit to regedit is a bad day. In part because it means someone whose software you need has screwed up.
Today was Friday and I had nothing on fire and half the staff was out. I have been feeling kind of squished for the past few days, so instead of aggressively going after the stuff that needed to be done (and there were things that today was perfect for-like updating software.) I just wanted to sit and stare at the Internet.
Half way through the morning one of my coworkers reminded me that she had a problem with her signature file (in spite of the fact that it's based on exactly the same html file as every other sig file in the office, all the rest of them show our logo and hers just shows a red, broken jpg x.) So I screwed around with it for a while. I deleted the signatures folder from the application data file for her user account and recreated it, and re-copied the files from somewhere else on the network (this has always done the trick in the past) all with no joy. And with her and another co-worker offering suggestions. To be fair, these are some of the more tech savvy coworkers I have, but I have come to the conclusion that geek cred is not straightforward and universal. What do I mean by that? Well...my job is to keep the desktops and their software happy. As such, I know a great deal about the documents and settings folder and I've become more comfortable with the command line and regedit*, but this doesn't mean that I can write Excel Macros or Perl scripts. Conversely, neither my coworker who writes nice Excel macros nor my coworker who used to write software for a living were being particularly helpful with their suggestions. ("Maybe the problem is that it's a gif not a jpg." "are you sure it's pointing to the right directory?")
Which doesn't mean I particularly minded them making suggestions. No that's not quite right-in hindsight I don't mind them trying to second guess me, because being able to answer their questions meant I was doing a thorough job and understood what I was dealing with. Either way it beats having to help the technically incompetent and I was pleased to see that I could explain the problem to them (more or less) instead of saying "look it's supposed to work but it just doesn't okay?"
I tried a few things off the interwebs to try to fix the problem (including the one that involved the regedit), but none of them worked. So I called back the software vendor who was supposed to help me re-integrate our document management system and our crm and attempted to restore another piece of software to its "pre-server 2008" state, and listened to a coworker bitch about the state of the trading policy (sympathetically, I might add. My vision may be a bit skewed by the political analysis paper I wrote, but when I think about the place I work I think about Aesop's fable about how the most powerful person is always right.)
And then the office manager sent out a request for help stuffing envelopes. I started as the office manager and I've stuffed plenty of envelopes in my life and I know how much it sucks to have to deal with a giant pile of papers to be folded and stickers to be attached all by yourself, so when my help at envelope stuffing is requested, I try to offer it if I can. (On the other hand, when it is imposed on me from above I avoid it. Envelope Stuffing is no longer part of my job description.) In fact, I judge my coworkers (especially those on the "support staff" side of the house) on how willing they are to respond to such requests and I have to say they all show up to help when they can.
So. We're sending a letter to all our clients telling them that we will donate funds to our Donor Advised Fund if they refer people who become clients to us (we had planned to donate money to the charity of their choice, but our compliance attorney said that wouldn't fly. So instead we're essentially offering to put some money aside for future donations to charitable organizations of our choice if clients refer people to us.) We have a letter explaining all this and a pretty flier that our marketing people produced along with a CD from the Boston Children's Chorus (one of our charities of choice) to send out.
Unfortunately, the envelopes that we have don't fit all of this comfortably. Plus, someone insisted that this letter be mail merged-even though we can't send it out in windowed envelopes. So someone has to make sure that the sticker that goes on the bubble envelope (bubble because of the CD) matches the name on the letter inserted. To do otherwise would be Very Bad because our privacy policy states that we do not disclose the names of our clients. So if you are Jenny Smith and you get a letter that has Bob Smith's name on it we have failed. For the most part we've managed this by buying windowed envelopes and stopping printing clients names on things, but someone (my boss) decided that we needed to print client names on this letter.
I spent an hour or so folding and stapling letters. I was pleasantly surprised to see my coworkers show up and ask to help. First Em-a financial planning associate who always tries to help out (partly because she is friends with the other young ladies who do the envelope stuffing) but also Er, the financial analyst dude who sits behind me. When I went back to my desk to see if the software vendor I had left a message for had gotten back to me (she had) I kicked another coworker off of her computer but she said it was all good because she had planned to help with the envelope stuffing anyhow.
So, all good people. All willing to lend a hand (while discussing what pranks we'd played on the owners and all sorts of amusing internal-non-bitchy gossip).
Why can't it be like this all the time anymore?
*although I still maintain that any day that involves a visit to regedit is a bad day. In part because it means someone whose software you need has screwed up.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Personal observations about study
I am sitting in my apartment in Beverly at my kitchen counter. In my lap is a copy of Managing_For_The_Future_Organizational_Behavior_and _Processes. I am reading a case study of a fictional MA business called Dynacorp and typing notes for the paper on this case study on my Macbook as I read.
And this is all a bit weird. For several reasons. I spent most of my undergrad career writing papers on a computer that made Strong Bad's first PC look good. I couldn't type while staring at the textbook and until October 2009, I had roommates. So this is all a set of relatively new developments. Hopefully, it will be enough to get me through this class.
I graduated from college in 1997. That was the last time I wrote a paper. I've taken classes since then, but they were classes in Access or Linux or SQL. I had problem sets for those classes-not papers. I have written things for business since 1997, but those were password policies or marketing pieces (Dear Client- here's why you should use this great new service of ours) not papers. And of course, I've written a thing or two on this blog I have, but none of it's been about Organizational Design (me bitching about work doesn't count.)
Through most of my college career I was an indifferent student. I did reasonably well in my major (French literature) because I liked it and I was good at reading things and analyzing them to extract meaning. And because I enjoyed speaking and reading French. But I didn't really apply myself. When a course I took became boring or hard I stopped paying attention and relied on my native intelligence to produce papers or problem sets that were "good enough." In terms of passing classes this worked-most of the time. I wasn't particularly worried about getting enough credits to graduate, and I didn't particularly care about my GPA.
All of my education since then has been different. In 2004 I started taking classes at Bunker Hill Community College. I did this because there were things I wanted to learn, and my employer was willing to pay for them because they fell in line with things that would make me better at my job (Computer Hardware, Access, Operating Systems, etc.) But I also knew I was taking these classes to see if I could get my mind back into academia so that I could apply for some sort of post-graduate education.
I could see the difference in myself as a student immediately-starting with the first course I took (Operating Systems in 2004 for the record). In spite of the fact that I was attending class after working a full day I was often the only one in the room taking notes (and much better notes than I'd have taken at age 18-21). Some of my friends pointed out that I was spending too much time in the "kiddie pool" (Taking undergrad classes) when really I should apply to grad school already, but I don't regret anything I learned at Bunker Hill-even the classes I sat through where I knew as much as the professor on the subject matter because I still learned something in those classes (I learned that I knew something other people were willing to sit through a class to learn-that has value.)
So now here I am in my first graduate school course. It's at U Mass Boston. It's a class that's about teamwork and organizational design. I thought this was going to be a piece of cake. I'm not 22 and starting my first desk job-I've worked in small businesses through my whole career (by choice.) I've been on task forces and long standing committees and I've learned to work with people who work in different "departments." I've learned how to get buy-in for a project from the people who might object before presenting said project to the entire staff. Surely this is going to be a class in Stuff I Already Know.
Wrong!
This class is kicking my ass a bit. Although I read the way most people breathe, and I'm pretty sure that if I had to I still have the skills to put together a decent, short paper on Anna_Karenina or Kristen_Lavrensdatter if I felt like it, reading the textbook for this class makes me feel like I'm dyslexic. Putting together a paper on what I've read feels like I'm working in a second language that I don't know very well. And my classmates are all pretty smart. I'm on a team with two guys who are both taking more than one class and working full time. And in spite of this I feel like I'm playing catch up ball when we meet (some of this might have to do with the 12 day work week I had last week, but still.)
When I left class with one of them I mumbled something like "oy vey so much homework!" and he replied "You knew what you were getting into when you signed up for this." Well no, I had no idea what I'd signed up for. I only knew that it was Necessary. And that's the difference between the undergraduate degree I got in 1997 and the graduate degree I am starting out in 2010. I am not just doing this because it is what one does between the ages of 18 and 21 (along with Learning to Live with Other People and the occasional alcohol poisoning.) I am doing it because I really want to put the letters MBA after my name.
Unlike my undergrad experience, I do care about my GPA. Unfortunately, also unlike my undergrad experience, I can't just take classes in subjects that come easily to me. I am at U Mass Boston to learn things that I do not yet know, not (as I had previously thought) to certify things I already knew. In spite of the fact that this makes things harder, I'm actually okay with this (although I'm awfully glad I'm only taking one class this term.)
Why am I okay with this? (In spite of the fact that as I was getting coffee this morning and talking to two of my coworkers who have MBAs I said "this is harder than undergrad work and one of them said "no it isn't." Oh dear.) Well for one, being surrounded by smart people is always a good thing. It makes you try to be smarter. For another, academia is different from real life in that it is more open and accepting and as such produces confidence. People in my class talk to each other and to me in a way they would not at a staff meeting or a Fidelity conference. In this class, as there was in my undergraduate education, there's the assumption of an even footing-we're all MBA candidates and we all met the criteria to be accepted. As opposed to the business world, where XYZ with a CFP's word is more important than Cantabridgienne's (even if the subject is a piece of software that I have spent 5 years with and XYZ has just bought.
So apparently my social life looks dim and I'm going to ave to work my ass off for class number one of 18 (I'm going to spend Valentine's Day writing a paper) but as I said, I'm okay with this because I'm surrounded by smart people who like me, desire above all else to put the letters MBA after their names.
And this is all a bit weird. For several reasons. I spent most of my undergrad career writing papers on a computer that made Strong Bad's first PC look good. I couldn't type while staring at the textbook and until October 2009, I had roommates. So this is all a set of relatively new developments. Hopefully, it will be enough to get me through this class.
I graduated from college in 1997. That was the last time I wrote a paper. I've taken classes since then, but they were classes in Access or Linux or SQL. I had problem sets for those classes-not papers. I have written things for business since 1997, but those were password policies or marketing pieces (Dear Client- here's why you should use this great new service of ours) not papers. And of course, I've written a thing or two on this blog I have, but none of it's been about Organizational Design (me bitching about work doesn't count.)
Through most of my college career I was an indifferent student. I did reasonably well in my major (French literature) because I liked it and I was good at reading things and analyzing them to extract meaning. And because I enjoyed speaking and reading French. But I didn't really apply myself. When a course I took became boring or hard I stopped paying attention and relied on my native intelligence to produce papers or problem sets that were "good enough." In terms of passing classes this worked-most of the time. I wasn't particularly worried about getting enough credits to graduate, and I didn't particularly care about my GPA.
All of my education since then has been different. In 2004 I started taking classes at Bunker Hill Community College. I did this because there were things I wanted to learn, and my employer was willing to pay for them because they fell in line with things that would make me better at my job (Computer Hardware, Access, Operating Systems, etc.) But I also knew I was taking these classes to see if I could get my mind back into academia so that I could apply for some sort of post-graduate education.
I could see the difference in myself as a student immediately-starting with the first course I took (Operating Systems in 2004 for the record). In spite of the fact that I was attending class after working a full day I was often the only one in the room taking notes (and much better notes than I'd have taken at age 18-21). Some of my friends pointed out that I was spending too much time in the "kiddie pool" (Taking undergrad classes) when really I should apply to grad school already, but I don't regret anything I learned at Bunker Hill-even the classes I sat through where I knew as much as the professor on the subject matter because I still learned something in those classes (I learned that I knew something other people were willing to sit through a class to learn-that has value.)
So now here I am in my first graduate school course. It's at U Mass Boston. It's a class that's about teamwork and organizational design. I thought this was going to be a piece of cake. I'm not 22 and starting my first desk job-I've worked in small businesses through my whole career (by choice.) I've been on task forces and long standing committees and I've learned to work with people who work in different "departments." I've learned how to get buy-in for a project from the people who might object before presenting said project to the entire staff. Surely this is going to be a class in Stuff I Already Know.
Wrong!
This class is kicking my ass a bit. Although I read the way most people breathe, and I'm pretty sure that if I had to I still have the skills to put together a decent, short paper on Anna_Karenina or Kristen_Lavrensdatter if I felt like it, reading the textbook for this class makes me feel like I'm dyslexic. Putting together a paper on what I've read feels like I'm working in a second language that I don't know very well. And my classmates are all pretty smart. I'm on a team with two guys who are both taking more than one class and working full time. And in spite of this I feel like I'm playing catch up ball when we meet (some of this might have to do with the 12 day work week I had last week, but still.)
When I left class with one of them I mumbled something like "oy vey so much homework!" and he replied "You knew what you were getting into when you signed up for this." Well no, I had no idea what I'd signed up for. I only knew that it was Necessary. And that's the difference between the undergraduate degree I got in 1997 and the graduate degree I am starting out in 2010. I am not just doing this because it is what one does between the ages of 18 and 21 (along with Learning to Live with Other People and the occasional alcohol poisoning.) I am doing it because I really want to put the letters MBA after my name.
Unlike my undergrad experience, I do care about my GPA. Unfortunately, also unlike my undergrad experience, I can't just take classes in subjects that come easily to me. I am at U Mass Boston to learn things that I do not yet know, not (as I had previously thought) to certify things I already knew. In spite of the fact that this makes things harder, I'm actually okay with this (although I'm awfully glad I'm only taking one class this term.)
Why am I okay with this? (In spite of the fact that as I was getting coffee this morning and talking to two of my coworkers who have MBAs I said "this is harder than undergrad work and one of them said "no it isn't." Oh dear.) Well for one, being surrounded by smart people is always a good thing. It makes you try to be smarter. For another, academia is different from real life in that it is more open and accepting and as such produces confidence. People in my class talk to each other and to me in a way they would not at a staff meeting or a Fidelity conference. In this class, as there was in my undergraduate education, there's the assumption of an even footing-we're all MBA candidates and we all met the criteria to be accepted. As opposed to the business world, where XYZ with a CFP's word is more important than Cantabridgienne's (even if the subject is a piece of software that I have spent 5 years with and XYZ has just bought.
So apparently my social life looks dim and I'm going to ave to work my ass off for class number one of 18 (I'm going to spend Valentine's Day writing a paper) but as I said, I'm okay with this because I'm surrounded by smart people who like me, desire above all else to put the letters MBA after their names.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Server Replacement Project
Day 1
This is going to fail and I'm going to be blamed. Competent guys are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Why do all my vendors lie to me about whether or not their software will run in a new environment? I hate IT and I want to go work at Starbucks. I hate feeling like I am Responsible for things that are out of my control.
Day 2
My team is wicked awesome! These guys can spin straw into gold. My vendors are awesome! One guy stayed late to help me sort out a problem and get his company's application up and running. I am awesome (and competent.) Two SQL applications down and one more to go! Who cares if I have to work late or come in on Saturday, I can't imagine doing anything else for a living.
There's nothing like feeling like a competent member of a competent team.
Day 3
Spent 4.5 hours reinstalling and restoring the most annoying SQL based app in the house. Unlike the others, I did almost all of the heavy lifting-with help from tech support. I had the IT Contractor sit with me and go through the documentation and install with me because this application is Difficult and I had done the previous upgrade myself-with terrible results. This came in handy when the application on the (test environment) client couldn't see the server and the vendor's tech support was stumped. The nice, patient, tech support guy consulted with his colleagues. By the time he came back with "Something about DNS Flush?" it had occurred to one of my technical contractors that the DNS was screwed up and we resolved the problem.
And really, even *I* know that it's flushdns-not DNS Flush.
Working on this project is interesting-not just because we're starting with 1 SBS 2003 server and ending with 1) Server 2008 Domain Controller and document vault repository, 2) 64 bit SQL Server 2008 SQL fish tank for some of our SQL apps 3) Server 2003 with SQL 2000 machine as a fish tank for those applications that just aren't up to playing in a SQL 2008 environment (including the one that took 4.5 hours of my time this afternoon.) But also because I'm working with the person who taught me most of what I know about IT. He and I no longer work as closely as we did in earlier days, and I've learned a decent amount in his (for lack of a better word) absence. Because of the way the company has changed, he hasn't been around as much (we couldn't afford his services and my Boss pissed him off so he's been (understandably) disinclined to work for free.) Because I couldn't just call him any time I got scared-because of an Excel Bug or a Worldox glitch-that's a document management system-I've learned to do a thing or two by myself.
So while I don't claim to understand how SQL apps work (I don't even know what exactly an instance is) and all I know about their backups is that you have to use their native agents to make it work (unlike Access-it's not like you can just copy yesterday's .MDB over and make it work) and while I don't have the knowledge to keep our servers up and running, I know more about what it takes to make my company's apps run than anyone. And the knowledge that I'm missing is just knowledge-it's not that I'm not smart enough to be a proper Sys Admin-it's just that other people have devoted their time to knowing more about That Sort of Thing, whereas I have devoted time to knowing how to reinstall our own weird apps that no one else-outside of the fee-only wealth management environment-is likely to use.
So, my mentor underestimates my IT cred a bit. I can live with that. It's not like I plan on making a living installing and supporting these applications anymore (See also-MBA Program)so I'm not offended that he didn't notice I could do it without him to hold my hand. It was also interesting to see the point at which my mentor decided to call in tech support. It reaffirmed my belief that there is no shame in doing so.
You did what the documentation told you to do, and it didn't work. Not your fault.
There's a lot of work to be done tomorrow, but I'm confident that by the end of the day everything that is within our control will be taken care of.
Day 4-ow
Our "Technology Area" (the room outside the server room that we're allowed to keep locked) finally has the requisite amount and of IT clutter. There's a stack of cardboard boxes from Dell as tall as I am in one corner. In another corner, two non-working Dell towers are stacked on top of each other with the switch that's tying our "test environment" subnet together perched precariously on top of them. Multi-colored Ethernet cables snake out of the back of the switch and connect up various servers and test-client machines. On top of *that* is a box that once held an NAS and the plastic front grate for some server or other.
While I find the clutter respectable, I have to admit that it's a Bad Sign as one of my contractor colleagues is one of the neatest humans I know, and the fact that things have degraded to such an extent means that he must be seriously distracted. Two brand new rack-mountable servers (total value $25,000) sit one on top of the other on one of the desks. I can tell that they were set up in a less frantic stage of the project because my neat-freak colleague (let's call him E) used a few hard drive cages to keep them off of the desk surface to allow air to circulate and also managed to tie up the cables that connect them both to a KVM switch.
By way of contrast, the desk at which I spent most of the day was clearly a later development. Underneath it sits one server (not the server we plan to use in the long run-just the one that's subbing because the server we planned to use needs a new power supply which no-one has had time to install yet) and a desktop. There's a a KVM switch on the desk, but it's just for decoration since one of the devices has PS2 ports and the other has USB ports. So there are two monitors and two sets of keyboards and mice. Oh and a netbook (which has something dreadfully wrong with it-so it's not really a good test client and which I spent most of today threatening to throw out the window.)
I got up at 6:30 this morning and walked to the commuter rail station. It was 3 degrees Fahrenheit out. But I was okay with this all because today we were going to Get 'Er Done. Maybe we'd finish by 4 and we'd all go out for coffee or drinks and sit around congratulating each other and telling stupid stories about the project ("Yeah-I was really scared for a minute when you said that Application X wouldn't come up, but then I slapped you upside the head and we fixed the mapping and it was all good!")
This is not what happened. I got there at 8:30 and the computer genius contractors got there at 9. The three of us worked like fiends all day long. The head contractor went off to Microcenter to pick up a cable and a power supply that couldn't be found in our giant pile of cables, E and I worked on restoring databases, writing a script that would map all of the logical drives in the new environment and making sure we could restore all of the users' desktop shortcuts and background pictures of their pets.
The heat in the building went off at 3 PM. By then we had shut off the AC in the server room and were making nervous jokes about warming our hands over the server when it got too cold. Sometime around 3, the head contractor suggested that we might just have to stick with the old environment and come back again next Saturday to do this again. "Anything but that!" I thought. Our credibility will be ruined. I pared the list of workstations that needed to be operational back to the list of people that would actually be in the office on Monday.
The head contractor went out to get E a tuna melt and me an espresso. I was leaning against things and yawning (I did get up at what can be considered Fuck You o'clock in the morning since it was Saturday)I had made noises suggesting I needed an espresso (and E badly needed to be fed) but when E said "why don't you go get one now?" I explained that it only works for a little while-so I needed to wait for just the right moment. When the double espresso arrived I wished I'd ordered a triple. I was suddenly awake and useful again.
Progress was made. We restored two databases successfully with all of Friday's data and managed to get the logon script to work (this maps all the logical drives for the users) in the test environment.
The head contractor left at 5 because he had to get home to his wife. we all agreed on the steps that needed to be taken to bring everything up and E and I were sure that we could be done by 6 ("What Could Possibly Go Wrong?")
We did everything that we were supposed to do. We still had epic flailure with our CRM. We called the head contractor (as he left he did say "Call me.") and we tried things that he suggested for half an hour or so (I think we managed to piss his wife off too.) And in the end we failed. Things that worked in the test environment didn't work in the real one-no matter how much we replicated the real environment. No matter that we'd tested them two days ago-when the vendors could be gotten on the phone before trying them out in reality and no matter that I was working with the two biggest computer geniuses I know.
Worse, even though it's still not working (and won't be until we can talk to the vendors on Monday), I *still* have to go into work tomorrow. Because there are still things that need to be done before the users show up, and I left at 7 because the next commuter whale train to take me home was at 8:30 and there was more than an hour's worth of work to be done.
I really don't know what the lesson to be learned from today is. I'm going to have a wicked hard time explaining all of this to my Boss (who knows as little about computers as I do about astro-physics) but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to explain it to my computer-savvy colleagues either. We really did bust our asses for several days running. We really did everything we could to try out all the applications in a test environment before trying it for real in the place they have to work. And still it failed.
When we left E asked me "is there anything else that we have to be worried about?" I assume he meant "did we leave any doors unlocked" or "are we going to be able to get out of the building?" but I responded "You mean aside from the fact that our CRM won't work?!" We laughed big, punchy, "we just busted our asses for 9 hours and it is still not working" laughs.
We got on the orange line together. I said "I still need to call the owner who came in today to tell him that the network isn't up and running yet." E said "Well, he can use the internet?" "yeah" I said that's great. He can log in from home and use the internet here. Why would he do that?" More punchy laughs.
I don't understand.
Day 5
There really isn't a lot to say about today. Last night I texted a friend who lives locally and begged her to let me know if she and her boy (and her dog) were going out for breakfast this morning, because I needed to talk to people about something other than DNS problems or cables or SQL. The friend (who I'm recommending for canonization) didn't get my text until this morning but called me twice-until I woke up to say that she and the boy were going out for breakfast and would I join them for brekkie and time with the dog on the beach? I said yes of course-just let me put some clothes on. At breakfast, when I started to ramble on about how badly this project was going the boy said "Cantabridgienne! Cntrl Alt Delete! Start, Run, Cmd, CD..Change conversation!" And then after that I said "oh yeah right". And he sat back and looked pleased with himself and said "I told you I speak geek." That was all much kinder (and probably more effective) than saying "shut up Cantabridgienne!" because I had in fact been spending quality time with the command line-using language that I could have sworn went out of style sometime around Windows 95 (but hey apparently it's still useful to know how to Change Directory.)
The nice friends then took me to the beach with their dog.
And then they took me to the commuter rail and I went back to work. It takes a special type of masochist to go back and do work that needs to be done-even though you know the project as a whole is still not a go. But even though the network applications were still fubarred, I had to at the very least, go in and make all of the client machines join the domain and then run the "files and settings" wizard so that they'd all get their desktops and all the files and shortcuts (and all their IE favorites) back. To do anything else would have been irresponsible.
I arrived to discover an e-note from the head contractor asking for a status update. I responded that I was in house and ready to try out any brilliant ideas he had. He called my cell (he interrupted Shane McGowen singing about some situation that was *much* worse than joining the domain on 15 different computers) I got onto the SQL server and he logged in remotely to try a few things out, and then again on the domain server. And then he had to go somewhere and it was just me with 15 deskktops and 2 databases that didn't work.
While he was on the phone with me I had a foolish hope that he would come up with a solution that I could implement. I looked at the servers and thought about the train home that I'd planned to catch and realized that if he said "go change the DNS settings on all the computers in the office and everything will work" I would have done it-even if it meant that I was there til now (9:00 PM.)
Perhaps it's the result of my exposure to Catholicism at an early age or maybe my parents just raised me this way-if you give me a project and say that 15 people are counting on it being done I will happily stay late, come in on Saturday, sacrifice a chicken or give a pint of my own blood to make it happen. But that's not the way the world functions. Willingness to work hard is not enough.
In this particular instance I have no idea what "enough" is, because I and my colleagues planned, tested, and worked hard. While I was at breakfast this morning, my friend's geeky boyfriend said "I really don't understand why Dell doesn't send people out for server migrations." and then I explained to him that in fact, we had ordered a technician from Dell, but unfortunately, he was an idiot and that the end result of us paying for a technician to come out and install things was that my colleague E got to baby sit the "technician" to make him do his job.
On Friday I remarked to one of my friends at work that I really wished it was Tuesday next. Another friend said "why? isn't it going to be fun?" It's only fun if it works.
Day 6
There is a light at the end of the tunnel-let's hope it's not a train. When I got to work this morning I was as tired as I'd ever been in the past 10 years. I felt like I was an undergrad who had pulled an all-nighter. By 9:10 the document management system was (supposedly) running. I spoke with a tech from the CRM company at 9:30. In spite of the fact that he spoke very softly (and could barely be heard over the noise of two servers) he gave me a list of steps to take on every single workstation to make the software work. I took screen shots, and then proceeded to go through the routine on every single computer with a regular user. This took a long time. People told me the Document Management System wasn't working after all. I told them I'd deal with it next. It's a very special feeling-being dead tired and having a very long list of very important things to do. I told myself, that at least I'd surely get to leave by 5 today (hah!)
By the time I left at 6:15 the list for tomorrow had been reduced to a mostly manageable number of things. But damn. I'm getting awfully tired of stumbling home at 7:40 too brain dead to care what I eat for dinner or do more than sit in front of the computer going "duuuuuh."
Of course tomorrow I can't stay beyond 5 because I have class. But on the other hand I have class-which means getting home at 10:30 feeling brain dead.
Day 7
What day is it? Have I really only been doing this for a week? I was appallingly tired this morning. I briefly considered postponing tomorrow's social engagement because I am running out of things to wear to work and I have less than 5 pairs of clean underwear. But this is one of exactly 2 social engagements I've had in the past week, so I won't postpone it.
I arrived late to class after having failed to do the reading, because I have devoted every spare minute of quality brain time (now doesn't count) to this project for the past week. Literally. It's been a week. I can't remember the last time I devoted this much effort to something. I didn't work like this the week before I took the GMAT, and I certainly didn't put this much effort into getting into grad school.
What am I getting out of this project that is worth the sacrifice of so much time? There's the joy of competence I suppose. My mentor is no longer anywhere near under-estimating me. And I love working as part of this team and just doing pure technical work-no bullshit task-force meetings or phony "book report" presentations in staff meetings or silly projects that really ought to go to the administrative staff.
The most valuable is the knowledge that yes, in fact I can do all of this. I'm not quite sure it's worth the price I've paid so far.
Day 9
Make it stop-oh please make it stop! Yesterday one of the brand new servers crashed. Today I went into work thinking (not for the first time) that I just had a few more calls to make to software vendors and then it would all be over.
Alas no. The Difficult SQL app that we installed in a separate, Server 2003 environment on the C drive (like the vendor insisted we do) died repeatedly. I spent all morning on the phone with them getting it to work. I hadn't planned on giving them that much time, but hey (I told myself) that application is important. We're a Financial Services shop and we need it to place trades-it's not the first time I've suddenly had to spend several hours on this particular application.
But this afternoon I noticed a bug and I called tech support to see if they could help me. While I was on the phone with the rep from tech support, I recognized the problem-we'd had the same issue with the software two releases ago. So 1) apparently no one other than us is using this feature-otherwise they would have fixed it. 2) once again I was in a position where I called a vendor for tech support and discovered that I knew more about how his product was supposed to function than the guy I'd called. I tried to explain the issue to the guy in tech support. I am willing to admit that my "people skills" were not at a high point at 4 PM this afternoon. But for the love of all that's holy-I called about a bug in their software that had been present for two years and at least as many releases. And the guy with whom I spoke had no clue what I was talking about and just assumed that I'd installed it wrong. While he had me on hold, I opened up regedit and found the place I needed to make an edit. When he picked up the phone again I gave him a "K Thanx Bai" Since he hadn't really helped me.
It still isn't done yet, and people are getting a bit grouchy about a few things. I understand that and I've tried to make it clear that I'm working on all of it. I've started polling the users and asking them to keep lists.
It's still not done and it's still kinda painful. But I remind myself-it's more fun to spend time at the command line than it is to spend time in meetings.
This is going to fail and I'm going to be blamed. Competent guys are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Why do all my vendors lie to me about whether or not their software will run in a new environment? I hate IT and I want to go work at Starbucks. I hate feeling like I am Responsible for things that are out of my control.
Day 2
My team is wicked awesome! These guys can spin straw into gold. My vendors are awesome! One guy stayed late to help me sort out a problem and get his company's application up and running. I am awesome (and competent.) Two SQL applications down and one more to go! Who cares if I have to work late or come in on Saturday, I can't imagine doing anything else for a living.
There's nothing like feeling like a competent member of a competent team.
Day 3
Spent 4.5 hours reinstalling and restoring the most annoying SQL based app in the house. Unlike the others, I did almost all of the heavy lifting-with help from tech support. I had the IT Contractor sit with me and go through the documentation and install with me because this application is Difficult and I had done the previous upgrade myself-with terrible results. This came in handy when the application on the (test environment) client couldn't see the server and the vendor's tech support was stumped. The nice, patient, tech support guy consulted with his colleagues. By the time he came back with "Something about DNS Flush?" it had occurred to one of my technical contractors that the DNS was screwed up and we resolved the problem.
And really, even *I* know that it's flushdns-not DNS Flush.
Working on this project is interesting-not just because we're starting with 1 SBS 2003 server and ending with 1) Server 2008 Domain Controller and document vault repository, 2) 64 bit SQL Server 2008 SQL fish tank for some of our SQL apps 3) Server 2003 with SQL 2000 machine as a fish tank for those applications that just aren't up to playing in a SQL 2008 environment (including the one that took 4.5 hours of my time this afternoon.) But also because I'm working with the person who taught me most of what I know about IT. He and I no longer work as closely as we did in earlier days, and I've learned a decent amount in his (for lack of a better word) absence. Because of the way the company has changed, he hasn't been around as much (we couldn't afford his services and my Boss pissed him off so he's been (understandably) disinclined to work for free.) Because I couldn't just call him any time I got scared-because of an Excel Bug or a Worldox glitch-that's a document management system-I've learned to do a thing or two by myself.
So while I don't claim to understand how SQL apps work (I don't even know what exactly an instance is) and all I know about their backups is that you have to use their native agents to make it work (unlike Access-it's not like you can just copy yesterday's .MDB over and make it work) and while I don't have the knowledge to keep our servers up and running, I know more about what it takes to make my company's apps run than anyone. And the knowledge that I'm missing is just knowledge-it's not that I'm not smart enough to be a proper Sys Admin-it's just that other people have devoted their time to knowing more about That Sort of Thing, whereas I have devoted time to knowing how to reinstall our own weird apps that no one else-outside of the fee-only wealth management environment-is likely to use.
So, my mentor underestimates my IT cred a bit. I can live with that. It's not like I plan on making a living installing and supporting these applications anymore (See also-MBA Program)so I'm not offended that he didn't notice I could do it without him to hold my hand. It was also interesting to see the point at which my mentor decided to call in tech support. It reaffirmed my belief that there is no shame in doing so.
You did what the documentation told you to do, and it didn't work. Not your fault.
There's a lot of work to be done tomorrow, but I'm confident that by the end of the day everything that is within our control will be taken care of.
Day 4-ow
Our "Technology Area" (the room outside the server room that we're allowed to keep locked) finally has the requisite amount and of IT clutter. There's a stack of cardboard boxes from Dell as tall as I am in one corner. In another corner, two non-working Dell towers are stacked on top of each other with the switch that's tying our "test environment" subnet together perched precariously on top of them. Multi-colored Ethernet cables snake out of the back of the switch and connect up various servers and test-client machines. On top of *that* is a box that once held an NAS and the plastic front grate for some server or other.
While I find the clutter respectable, I have to admit that it's a Bad Sign as one of my contractor colleagues is one of the neatest humans I know, and the fact that things have degraded to such an extent means that he must be seriously distracted. Two brand new rack-mountable servers (total value $25,000) sit one on top of the other on one of the desks. I can tell that they were set up in a less frantic stage of the project because my neat-freak colleague (let's call him E) used a few hard drive cages to keep them off of the desk surface to allow air to circulate and also managed to tie up the cables that connect them both to a KVM switch.
By way of contrast, the desk at which I spent most of the day was clearly a later development. Underneath it sits one server (not the server we plan to use in the long run-just the one that's subbing because the server we planned to use needs a new power supply which no-one has had time to install yet) and a desktop. There's a a KVM switch on the desk, but it's just for decoration since one of the devices has PS2 ports and the other has USB ports. So there are two monitors and two sets of keyboards and mice. Oh and a netbook (which has something dreadfully wrong with it-so it's not really a good test client and which I spent most of today threatening to throw out the window.)
I got up at 6:30 this morning and walked to the commuter rail station. It was 3 degrees Fahrenheit out. But I was okay with this all because today we were going to Get 'Er Done. Maybe we'd finish by 4 and we'd all go out for coffee or drinks and sit around congratulating each other and telling stupid stories about the project ("Yeah-I was really scared for a minute when you said that Application X wouldn't come up, but then I slapped you upside the head and we fixed the mapping and it was all good!")
This is not what happened. I got there at 8:30 and the computer genius contractors got there at 9. The three of us worked like fiends all day long. The head contractor went off to Microcenter to pick up a cable and a power supply that couldn't be found in our giant pile of cables, E and I worked on restoring databases, writing a script that would map all of the logical drives in the new environment and making sure we could restore all of the users' desktop shortcuts and background pictures of their pets.
The heat in the building went off at 3 PM. By then we had shut off the AC in the server room and were making nervous jokes about warming our hands over the server when it got too cold. Sometime around 3, the head contractor suggested that we might just have to stick with the old environment and come back again next Saturday to do this again. "Anything but that!" I thought. Our credibility will be ruined. I pared the list of workstations that needed to be operational back to the list of people that would actually be in the office on Monday.
The head contractor went out to get E a tuna melt and me an espresso. I was leaning against things and yawning (I did get up at what can be considered Fuck You o'clock in the morning since it was Saturday)I had made noises suggesting I needed an espresso (and E badly needed to be fed) but when E said "why don't you go get one now?" I explained that it only works for a little while-so I needed to wait for just the right moment. When the double espresso arrived I wished I'd ordered a triple. I was suddenly awake and useful again.
Progress was made. We restored two databases successfully with all of Friday's data and managed to get the logon script to work (this maps all the logical drives for the users) in the test environment.
The head contractor left at 5 because he had to get home to his wife. we all agreed on the steps that needed to be taken to bring everything up and E and I were sure that we could be done by 6 ("What Could Possibly Go Wrong?")
We did everything that we were supposed to do. We still had epic flailure with our CRM. We called the head contractor (as he left he did say "Call me.") and we tried things that he suggested for half an hour or so (I think we managed to piss his wife off too.) And in the end we failed. Things that worked in the test environment didn't work in the real one-no matter how much we replicated the real environment. No matter that we'd tested them two days ago-when the vendors could be gotten on the phone before trying them out in reality and no matter that I was working with the two biggest computer geniuses I know.
Worse, even though it's still not working (and won't be until we can talk to the vendors on Monday), I *still* have to go into work tomorrow. Because there are still things that need to be done before the users show up, and I left at 7 because the next commuter whale train to take me home was at 8:30 and there was more than an hour's worth of work to be done.
I really don't know what the lesson to be learned from today is. I'm going to have a wicked hard time explaining all of this to my Boss (who knows as little about computers as I do about astro-physics) but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to explain it to my computer-savvy colleagues either. We really did bust our asses for several days running. We really did everything we could to try out all the applications in a test environment before trying it for real in the place they have to work. And still it failed.
When we left E asked me "is there anything else that we have to be worried about?" I assume he meant "did we leave any doors unlocked" or "are we going to be able to get out of the building?" but I responded "You mean aside from the fact that our CRM won't work?!" We laughed big, punchy, "we just busted our asses for 9 hours and it is still not working" laughs.
We got on the orange line together. I said "I still need to call the owner who came in today to tell him that the network isn't up and running yet." E said "Well, he can use the internet?" "yeah" I said that's great. He can log in from home and use the internet here. Why would he do that?" More punchy laughs.
I don't understand.
Day 5
There really isn't a lot to say about today. Last night I texted a friend who lives locally and begged her to let me know if she and her boy (and her dog) were going out for breakfast this morning, because I needed to talk to people about something other than DNS problems or cables or SQL. The friend (who I'm recommending for canonization) didn't get my text until this morning but called me twice-until I woke up to say that she and the boy were going out for breakfast and would I join them for brekkie and time with the dog on the beach? I said yes of course-just let me put some clothes on. At breakfast, when I started to ramble on about how badly this project was going the boy said "Cantabridgienne! Cntrl Alt Delete! Start, Run, Cmd, CD..Change conversation!" And then after that I said "oh yeah right". And he sat back and looked pleased with himself and said "I told you I speak geek." That was all much kinder (and probably more effective) than saying "shut up Cantabridgienne!" because I had in fact been spending quality time with the command line-using language that I could have sworn went out of style sometime around Windows 95 (but hey apparently it's still useful to know how to Change Directory.)
The nice friends then took me to the beach with their dog.
And then they took me to the commuter rail and I went back to work. It takes a special type of masochist to go back and do work that needs to be done-even though you know the project as a whole is still not a go. But even though the network applications were still fubarred, I had to at the very least, go in and make all of the client machines join the domain and then run the "files and settings" wizard so that they'd all get their desktops and all the files and shortcuts (and all their IE favorites) back. To do anything else would have been irresponsible.
I arrived to discover an e-note from the head contractor asking for a status update. I responded that I was in house and ready to try out any brilliant ideas he had. He called my cell (he interrupted Shane McGowen singing about some situation that was *much* worse than joining the domain on 15 different computers) I got onto the SQL server and he logged in remotely to try a few things out, and then again on the domain server. And then he had to go somewhere and it was just me with 15 deskktops and 2 databases that didn't work.
While he was on the phone with me I had a foolish hope that he would come up with a solution that I could implement. I looked at the servers and thought about the train home that I'd planned to catch and realized that if he said "go change the DNS settings on all the computers in the office and everything will work" I would have done it-even if it meant that I was there til now (9:00 PM.)
Perhaps it's the result of my exposure to Catholicism at an early age or maybe my parents just raised me this way-if you give me a project and say that 15 people are counting on it being done I will happily stay late, come in on Saturday, sacrifice a chicken or give a pint of my own blood to make it happen. But that's not the way the world functions. Willingness to work hard is not enough.
In this particular instance I have no idea what "enough" is, because I and my colleagues planned, tested, and worked hard. While I was at breakfast this morning, my friend's geeky boyfriend said "I really don't understand why Dell doesn't send people out for server migrations." and then I explained to him that in fact, we had ordered a technician from Dell, but unfortunately, he was an idiot and that the end result of us paying for a technician to come out and install things was that my colleague E got to baby sit the "technician" to make him do his job.
On Friday I remarked to one of my friends at work that I really wished it was Tuesday next. Another friend said "why? isn't it going to be fun?" It's only fun if it works.
Day 6
There is a light at the end of the tunnel-let's hope it's not a train. When I got to work this morning I was as tired as I'd ever been in the past 10 years. I felt like I was an undergrad who had pulled an all-nighter. By 9:10 the document management system was (supposedly) running. I spoke with a tech from the CRM company at 9:30. In spite of the fact that he spoke very softly (and could barely be heard over the noise of two servers) he gave me a list of steps to take on every single workstation to make the software work. I took screen shots, and then proceeded to go through the routine on every single computer with a regular user. This took a long time. People told me the Document Management System wasn't working after all. I told them I'd deal with it next. It's a very special feeling-being dead tired and having a very long list of very important things to do. I told myself, that at least I'd surely get to leave by 5 today (hah!)
By the time I left at 6:15 the list for tomorrow had been reduced to a mostly manageable number of things. But damn. I'm getting awfully tired of stumbling home at 7:40 too brain dead to care what I eat for dinner or do more than sit in front of the computer going "duuuuuh."
Of course tomorrow I can't stay beyond 5 because I have class. But on the other hand I have class-which means getting home at 10:30 feeling brain dead.
Day 7
What day is it? Have I really only been doing this for a week? I was appallingly tired this morning. I briefly considered postponing tomorrow's social engagement because I am running out of things to wear to work and I have less than 5 pairs of clean underwear. But this is one of exactly 2 social engagements I've had in the past week, so I won't postpone it.
I arrived late to class after having failed to do the reading, because I have devoted every spare minute of quality brain time (now doesn't count) to this project for the past week. Literally. It's been a week. I can't remember the last time I devoted this much effort to something. I didn't work like this the week before I took the GMAT, and I certainly didn't put this much effort into getting into grad school.
What am I getting out of this project that is worth the sacrifice of so much time? There's the joy of competence I suppose. My mentor is no longer anywhere near under-estimating me. And I love working as part of this team and just doing pure technical work-no bullshit task-force meetings or phony "book report" presentations in staff meetings or silly projects that really ought to go to the administrative staff.
The most valuable is the knowledge that yes, in fact I can do all of this. I'm not quite sure it's worth the price I've paid so far.
Day 9
Make it stop-oh please make it stop! Yesterday one of the brand new servers crashed. Today I went into work thinking (not for the first time) that I just had a few more calls to make to software vendors and then it would all be over.
Alas no. The Difficult SQL app that we installed in a separate, Server 2003 environment on the C drive (like the vendor insisted we do) died repeatedly. I spent all morning on the phone with them getting it to work. I hadn't planned on giving them that much time, but hey (I told myself) that application is important. We're a Financial Services shop and we need it to place trades-it's not the first time I've suddenly had to spend several hours on this particular application.
But this afternoon I noticed a bug and I called tech support to see if they could help me. While I was on the phone with the rep from tech support, I recognized the problem-we'd had the same issue with the software two releases ago. So 1) apparently no one other than us is using this feature-otherwise they would have fixed it. 2) once again I was in a position where I called a vendor for tech support and discovered that I knew more about how his product was supposed to function than the guy I'd called. I tried to explain the issue to the guy in tech support. I am willing to admit that my "people skills" were not at a high point at 4 PM this afternoon. But for the love of all that's holy-I called about a bug in their software that had been present for two years and at least as many releases. And the guy with whom I spoke had no clue what I was talking about and just assumed that I'd installed it wrong. While he had me on hold, I opened up regedit and found the place I needed to make an edit. When he picked up the phone again I gave him a "K Thanx Bai" Since he hadn't really helped me.
It still isn't done yet, and people are getting a bit grouchy about a few things. I understand that and I've tried to make it clear that I'm working on all of it. I've started polling the users and asking them to keep lists.
It's still not done and it's still kinda painful. But I remind myself-it's more fun to spend time at the command line than it is to spend time in meetings.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Four Verbals Sit Down to Brunch, or The Joy of Admitting Your Weaknesses
This morning I went to breakfast at Sugar Magnolia's in Gloucester with three good friends. Sugar Magnolia's is one of the best places to have breakfast-ever. We made bad puns, insulted each other, discussed Cohen brothers movies and stuffed our faces. And then the bill came.
We all had twenties and worse, we were all Verbals. I suggested that we just split the bill and was surprised to see one of my friends (who's appallingly smart about languages) jump on the solution with alacrity. (As did everyone else.) All of the people at the table were smart-I'm not even doing myself a disservice to say that they were all smarter than me. But we were all Verbal people-not Math people.
It didn't matter (and I admit I've been scratching my head about this for a while because, no pun intended, it doesn't add up) that two of us were Techies. That just meant that we were smart enough to put a shortcut to the calculator on our task bars.
Why am I bothering to write this up? Well It's a long standing tradition than when my friend E and I eat dinner, we have a lovely time and then..we have to figure out the bill. Brows are wrinkled. Suddenly we feel 75% less smart than we did two minutes ago. I had always figured that part of that was the befuddlement of good food and the fact that we both can be a bit ditzy.
But today I got confirmation of something that I had begun to suspect. It isn't that the two of us were too flaky to deal with the bill-It's just that well, we're verbal people. She's a poet and I read slightly less than I breathe. Our brains are designed to parse words-not numbers.
And that's okay. It's okay to admit a weakness if it really shows a strength. It's okay to admit that I/we "can't do x because we can do y." So although I am laughing at the four of us a little, I don't mind the fact that two MFAs, an MBA candidate and appallingly good linguist couldn't figure out how to split the bill.
For the record, it was the MBA candidate who chose the appropriate, practical response (let's just split it four ways). That bodes well for my future.
We all had twenties and worse, we were all Verbals. I suggested that we just split the bill and was surprised to see one of my friends (who's appallingly smart about languages) jump on the solution with alacrity. (As did everyone else.) All of the people at the table were smart-I'm not even doing myself a disservice to say that they were all smarter than me. But we were all Verbal people-not Math people.
It didn't matter (and I admit I've been scratching my head about this for a while because, no pun intended, it doesn't add up) that two of us were Techies. That just meant that we were smart enough to put a shortcut to the calculator on our task bars.
Why am I bothering to write this up? Well It's a long standing tradition than when my friend E and I eat dinner, we have a lovely time and then..we have to figure out the bill. Brows are wrinkled. Suddenly we feel 75% less smart than we did two minutes ago. I had always figured that part of that was the befuddlement of good food and the fact that we both can be a bit ditzy.
But today I got confirmation of something that I had begun to suspect. It isn't that the two of us were too flaky to deal with the bill-It's just that well, we're verbal people. She's a poet and I read slightly less than I breathe. Our brains are designed to parse words-not numbers.
And that's okay. It's okay to admit a weakness if it really shows a strength. It's okay to admit that I/we "can't do x because we can do y." So although I am laughing at the four of us a little, I don't mind the fact that two MFAs, an MBA candidate and appallingly good linguist couldn't figure out how to split the bill.
For the record, it was the MBA candidate who chose the appropriate, practical response (let's just split it four ways). That bodes well for my future.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
“I’d just as soon kiss a wookie” Or My Sister is marinating her kids in a broth of Star Wars
My sister Susie showed my niece and nephew Jack and Juliet Star Wars for the first time a few months ago. Jack is 4.5 and Juliet is 2 and change. On Christmas Eve we watched The Empire Strikes Back with them. Or rather, we watched the movie and Jack just asked “why” every few minutes-because he’s at the “Why?” stage of development. I have no idea what Juliet got out of the experience, but she sat still quietly through the whole thing, which has to be regarded as a plus. (anything short of heroin that can get my niece to sit still and be good for a few hours is a *good thing*.)
Jack seems to have picked up on some of the Star Wars plots (Susie claims he loved it and he’s started making X wing fighters with his Legos instead of airplanes.) He knows who most of the major characters are-even if he can’t stop asking “why?” long enough for Luke to kill the abdominal snowman. Even if it kept them amused-were these kids old enough to understand how special Star Wars is (I asked myself) or is my sister just priming them to love it (without knowing why) from a young age?
Susie and I both love Star Wars (who in our generation didn’t?) When I was a senior in college the movies were re-released with extra footage. For each one, my college rented out a movie theatre the day after the films came out and bussed us all to go see them. My sister happened to be visiting me when they re-released the first one so of course we went to see it together (“they were cheering for the sound system.” She said. It was true.)
But I was a bit surprised that she was already showing her kids the movies. Aren’t they too young? And isn’t she just conditioning them to like Star Wars? Shouldn’t there be something as culturally significant and more modern that she can show them? Sadly, No.
While I was down for Christmas, we went to Costco. Susie took me and Juliet and Giovanni (aged 2 months-so everywhere Susie goes he goes) and dropped Jack off at Grandma and Grandpa’s for the afternoon. As we were driving around Juliet got fussy. To keep her quiet I pulled the youtube video for Manamana up on my iPhone and handed it to her. About 12 times. Susie noting Juliet’s interest said “I don’t think they’d like the Muppet Movie though.”
“Well if you just showed them a few episodes of the Muppet Show they’d get it.” I answered.
“But that would just be showing them one thing, so that they’d like another thing.” She replied.
Instead of saying “Isn’t that kind of what you’re doing to them with Star Wars?” I just pointed out that the Muppets are quality children's television.
I don’t remember when I first heard of Star Wars. I was too young for the first movie so my parents went to see it without me. Even though I had not yet seen the first movie, by the time I saw the second movie in the theatre, I knew who Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker were. I couldn’t have been that much older than Jack when my parents took me to see it, and I can’t tell you how much I understood of the plot (although I remember being a bit annoyed that Princess Leia never wore a dress.) But when I was 5 it was showing in the theatres-not in your living room.
Still, it’s not like there’s anything similar on offer right now. I mean, Avatar was fun, but Star Wars is on par with The Ring Cycle or The Lord of the Rings or the Sandman Comics. It’s an epic tale, with a bit of a silly name. So I’m not surprised Susie wants to teach her children to appreciate the story and grow up with this mythology in their heads.
And thinking about it, it’s not like my parents didn’t do something similar to me. My dad took me to see a community theatre production of Die Fleidermaus when I was in second grade (what 7 year old doesn’t love Strauss?) And I certainly wouldn’t have discovered Mozart or Gilbert and Sullivan (I measured my achievements in life by The Modern Major General’s song-Learnt some differential calculus-check that one off) without his enthusiastic help-although when he introduced me to G &S I don’t think he had any idea how well I would take to it.
So perhaps Susie is just showing her children what Good is-the same way other young parents I know are taking their young children to have Sushi for the first time when they’re two or three.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
2009-Things that Sucked
I started to write this column because some of my facebook friends were listing the 10 most significant things that had happened to them this decade and I realized that a good portion of the things on that list had happened to me in the past six months.
I've often said that the older you get the worse your definition of "really bad things" gets. (in 6th grade it's a pantsing or a bad grade, in 12th grade it's getting dumped by your SO of 3 months, in your 20s it includes death of family members, etc.) If you're lucky you don't get hit with the heavy stuff until you're ready for it. I've also occasionally observed that grief is something we get an apprenticeship in.
In 2009 a whole bunch of sucky things happened to me and around me. A friend of mine got laid off, another one got arrested and another one died. Some good things happened too-most of them the results of the bad things that happened (which makes it hard to think about them.)
In the Spring of 2009 my friend and partner/mentor was laid off. Despite the fact that she assured me that she was going to A Better Place, I was angry at the powers that be for laying her off and terrified from my own point of view-how would I survive without her. Surely there would be challenges that were beyond my skill set-how would I face them and, just as bad, there would be no one to talk to who understood what I was saying. In the long run she really *is* in a better place, and I'm more confident in my ability to stand on my own two feet.
Not every cloud has a silver lining-or at least one that makes up for the cloud's existence. I mentioned about that (if we're lucky) we get an apprenticeship at grief-first we see grandparents and great uncles and aunts die and we're more sad that our parents are sad than we are that Great Aunt So and So (who we'd only seen twice) died. This year someone more important to me died. Irving Liss, proprietor of Hilton's Tent City; a man who'd been *wicked old* as long as I'd known him and a man we all thought would live forever, was hospitalized in the beginning of June and died the day after Labor Day.
His illness and death were not entirely without small blessings (we saw him more and talked to him more than we would have otherwise-we got a small chance to give back for the many things he'd given us, the Hilton's Family grew closer as a result, etc), but nothing quite makes up for the fact that he's not walking around in the world anymore. I know he went quickly enough that that it wasn't too bad for him and slowly enough to let everyone who needed to say good bye could show up and do so (and an awful lot of people saw him in the last few months of his life), but it still sucks.
And of course, lets not forget the part where my boyfriend of nine years decided he couldn't live with me anymore-a week after my birthday and the day before Ted Kennedy died. I had felt it coming all summer. I don't remember when I first noticed that the glue that stuck us together had come undone, but I had been noticing it for months and still I was shocked and hurt. It was one of the worst things, if not *the* worst thing that has happened to me in my 34 years on this planet*.
Yes, I'm much happier now than I was hiding from people in my apartment in Cambridge but that doesn't mean that it didn't/doesn't suck a whole lot.
But now let's move on to the good things that happened this year; many of which are blessings unalloyed.
At the beginning of 2009 I made several resolutions (I may have even put a blog post listing them.) I resolved to fold 10 paper cranes a day, learn to drive, get into business school and wear heels more often. I don't feel too bad about failing to do some of these things (there's always next year to start my crane collection) since I managed to achieve one of the big things. Even though I procrastinated and didn't work as hard as I could at it, I got into UMass Boston's MBA program (now all I have to figure out is how to pay for it!)
Accomplishing this meant taking a GMAT, getting recommendations and writing two essays. Each of these things was a challenge and I am proud of myself for accomplishing them. Taking the GMAT meant relearning geometry. As strange as it may seem this was probably the highest barrier to me achieving post-graduate education. I really, really didn't want to relearn junior high school math. I was sure it would be an exercise in mortification. I was right. It turns out I still really suck at geometry and arithmetic-even with an adult's study habits, I couldn't make a go of them-my brain is just wired wrong.
The verbal on the other hand... I won't lie and say it was a piece of cake or that it was fun, but I came away from the verbal instruction with better grammar and with confidence in my ability to write coherently.
The recommendations were a different challenge. I know you might find this hard to believe, but I really don't have much self-confidence. I couldn't possibly imagine anyone would be willing to sit down and write a letter of recommendation for me (It's one thing to ask people to serve as references-then they only have to answer a phone call-but to ask someone to sit down and *write* good things about you requires a certain amount of chutzpah-more than I'd have thought I had.) But the very nice people I work with wrote me recommendations, for which I am very grateful.
I've whined at great length on this blog (and on facebook) about how little fun writing the two essays (for a grand total of three pages) was. But having gone through the GMAT experience and posting more often to this blog I no longer assume my difficulties with the essays were due to an inability to write properly. I was willing to take my copy editrix's word that no-one is any good at writing That Sort of Essay (kind of like writing two cover letters for the same job.)
So I forced myself to do something difficult and I succeeded-in spite of all the less than stellar things that were happening in the mean time and I feel proud of myself for that.
Other things that have happened to me include the discovery of cheese that I can eat, and the birth of my new nephew G (he's a jolly, tubby fellow and weighs in at 15 pounds at age two months.) Some of you are laughing at me for putting cheese and the birth of a child in the same paragraph. Go ahead-laugh-you have no idea how I feel about cheese.
A few years ago I came to the conclusion that not only was I severely lactose intolerant, but that the over the counter pills that I was using to help digest cheese were not working either. I very sadly gave up dairy entirely (and started losing weight-by the time I moved out of Cambridge I had passed "thin" and was on my way to "malnourished"). A foodie friend of mine kept pushing the idea of sheep or goats milk cheese. Because he was also the guy who drives me to the grocery store, he pulled me over to the cheese collection and grabbed a block of sheep-cheese and put it in my hand. I couldn't put it back without losing face, so I took it home and ate it. Rediscovering the ability to enjoy cheese has been one of the bright spots in my existence in the last quarter of 2009 and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
In the final category, wonderful things that have happened to me because of getting dumped there's Sugar Magnolia's, my lovely apartment (centipedes and all) and the friends who helped me duct tape myself back together, convinced me I wasn't crazy (well not any more than I had been previously) and especially the ones who help me keep my appointments with my poodle therapist. You all know who you are.
And then there's me. I came out of this mess broken, miserable and pissed, but never unsure that I was human because I was sans-boy. I am not invincible and I am not made of steel, but I'm coming out of 2009 with more confidence in myself and my abilities and that is certainly a good thing.
That said, can we have a boring year starting tomorrow?
*Before you roll your eyes at me and say "well if being dumped is the worst thing that's ever happened to you, honey you've had it easy" please keep in mind that I haven't chosen to share all of the bad things that have happened to me.
I've often said that the older you get the worse your definition of "really bad things" gets. (in 6th grade it's a pantsing or a bad grade, in 12th grade it's getting dumped by your SO of 3 months, in your 20s it includes death of family members, etc.) If you're lucky you don't get hit with the heavy stuff until you're ready for it. I've also occasionally observed that grief is something we get an apprenticeship in.
In 2009 a whole bunch of sucky things happened to me and around me. A friend of mine got laid off, another one got arrested and another one died. Some good things happened too-most of them the results of the bad things that happened (which makes it hard to think about them.)
In the Spring of 2009 my friend and partner/mentor was laid off. Despite the fact that she assured me that she was going to A Better Place, I was angry at the powers that be for laying her off and terrified from my own point of view-how would I survive without her. Surely there would be challenges that were beyond my skill set-how would I face them and, just as bad, there would be no one to talk to who understood what I was saying. In the long run she really *is* in a better place, and I'm more confident in my ability to stand on my own two feet.
Not every cloud has a silver lining-or at least one that makes up for the cloud's existence. I mentioned about that (if we're lucky) we get an apprenticeship at grief-first we see grandparents and great uncles and aunts die and we're more sad that our parents are sad than we are that Great Aunt So and So (who we'd only seen twice) died. This year someone more important to me died. Irving Liss, proprietor of Hilton's Tent City; a man who'd been *wicked old* as long as I'd known him and a man we all thought would live forever, was hospitalized in the beginning of June and died the day after Labor Day.
His illness and death were not entirely without small blessings (we saw him more and talked to him more than we would have otherwise-we got a small chance to give back for the many things he'd given us, the Hilton's Family grew closer as a result, etc), but nothing quite makes up for the fact that he's not walking around in the world anymore. I know he went quickly enough that that it wasn't too bad for him and slowly enough to let everyone who needed to say good bye could show up and do so (and an awful lot of people saw him in the last few months of his life), but it still sucks.
And of course, lets not forget the part where my boyfriend of nine years decided he couldn't live with me anymore-a week after my birthday and the day before Ted Kennedy died. I had felt it coming all summer. I don't remember when I first noticed that the glue that stuck us together had come undone, but I had been noticing it for months and still I was shocked and hurt. It was one of the worst things, if not *the* worst thing that has happened to me in my 34 years on this planet*.
Yes, I'm much happier now than I was hiding from people in my apartment in Cambridge but that doesn't mean that it didn't/doesn't suck a whole lot.
But now let's move on to the good things that happened this year; many of which are blessings unalloyed.
At the beginning of 2009 I made several resolutions (I may have even put a blog post listing them.) I resolved to fold 10 paper cranes a day, learn to drive, get into business school and wear heels more often. I don't feel too bad about failing to do some of these things (there's always next year to start my crane collection) since I managed to achieve one of the big things. Even though I procrastinated and didn't work as hard as I could at it, I got into UMass Boston's MBA program (now all I have to figure out is how to pay for it!)
Accomplishing this meant taking a GMAT, getting recommendations and writing two essays. Each of these things was a challenge and I am proud of myself for accomplishing them. Taking the GMAT meant relearning geometry. As strange as it may seem this was probably the highest barrier to me achieving post-graduate education. I really, really didn't want to relearn junior high school math. I was sure it would be an exercise in mortification. I was right. It turns out I still really suck at geometry and arithmetic-even with an adult's study habits, I couldn't make a go of them-my brain is just wired wrong.
The verbal on the other hand... I won't lie and say it was a piece of cake or that it was fun, but I came away from the verbal instruction with better grammar and with confidence in my ability to write coherently.
The recommendations were a different challenge. I know you might find this hard to believe, but I really don't have much self-confidence. I couldn't possibly imagine anyone would be willing to sit down and write a letter of recommendation for me (It's one thing to ask people to serve as references-then they only have to answer a phone call-but to ask someone to sit down and *write* good things about you requires a certain amount of chutzpah-more than I'd have thought I had.) But the very nice people I work with wrote me recommendations, for which I am very grateful.
I've whined at great length on this blog (and on facebook) about how little fun writing the two essays (for a grand total of three pages) was. But having gone through the GMAT experience and posting more often to this blog I no longer assume my difficulties with the essays were due to an inability to write properly. I was willing to take my copy editrix's word that no-one is any good at writing That Sort of Essay (kind of like writing two cover letters for the same job.)
So I forced myself to do something difficult and I succeeded-in spite of all the less than stellar things that were happening in the mean time and I feel proud of myself for that.
Other things that have happened to me include the discovery of cheese that I can eat, and the birth of my new nephew G (he's a jolly, tubby fellow and weighs in at 15 pounds at age two months.) Some of you are laughing at me for putting cheese and the birth of a child in the same paragraph. Go ahead-laugh-you have no idea how I feel about cheese.
A few years ago I came to the conclusion that not only was I severely lactose intolerant, but that the over the counter pills that I was using to help digest cheese were not working either. I very sadly gave up dairy entirely (and started losing weight-by the time I moved out of Cambridge I had passed "thin" and was on my way to "malnourished"). A foodie friend of mine kept pushing the idea of sheep or goats milk cheese. Because he was also the guy who drives me to the grocery store, he pulled me over to the cheese collection and grabbed a block of sheep-cheese and put it in my hand. I couldn't put it back without losing face, so I took it home and ate it. Rediscovering the ability to enjoy cheese has been one of the bright spots in my existence in the last quarter of 2009 and I'm not ashamed to admit it.
In the final category, wonderful things that have happened to me because of getting dumped there's Sugar Magnolia's, my lovely apartment (centipedes and all) and the friends who helped me duct tape myself back together, convinced me I wasn't crazy (well not any more than I had been previously) and especially the ones who help me keep my appointments with my poodle therapist. You all know who you are.
And then there's me. I came out of this mess broken, miserable and pissed, but never unsure that I was human because I was sans-boy. I am not invincible and I am not made of steel, but I'm coming out of 2009 with more confidence in myself and my abilities and that is certainly a good thing.
That said, can we have a boring year starting tomorrow?
*Before you roll your eyes at me and say "well if being dumped is the worst thing that's ever happened to you, honey you've had it easy" please keep in mind that I haven't chosen to share all of the bad things that have happened to me.
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