24 Hours in Heck

Yesterday at the office wasn't quite hell, but it was in the neighbourhood.

I spent most of the morning trying to prod people into doing their jobs. One particular project manager is keen for me to do a hardware cutover of one server, replacing a Sun V490 with a V480 so that the V490 can be deployed elsewhere. The UNIX guy who was originally working on this project is in India indefinitely and the replacement UNIX guy wants nothing to do with this project; as the secondary, it's landing on me. Not a big deal, but the project needs a work ticket to the SAN team to re-assign the disks from the old hardware to the new and the work scheduled with people who are using the server currently. All of that is the responsibility of the project manager but he keeps trying to weasel out of it, telling me how much he'd appreciate me getting this done asap. I kept punting it back. He kept ducking & swerving. Finally, I sent a terse e-mail, cc'ing his manager and mine, that until he creates and coordinates the appropriate work tickets, I will not do any cutover.

As of this morning, I still can't see any work tickets so I left him a voice-mail message. I'm expecting the entire project to be rescheduled by a week.

I'm coordinating a controlled shutdown of a few hundred servers this coming weekend for maintenance of the power grids in our data center. I've been beating various members of my own division for three weeks to get their work tickets submitted. Hell, I've given them all the scheduling information, hardware lists and a template for their tickets. Three people still haven't done anything. I'm giving them until lunchtime before I start asking their managers why their teams aren't responding.

Anyway, by the time I left work, I was in a mildly foul mood.

I tinkered with the computers in our basement for a little bit to decompress, then took a one hour nap. trulygrateful is visiting from NYC for a few days but I wasn't very good company last night.

cuyahogarvr cooked up his wonderful chili for dinner which improved my mood a lot.

All four of us went C1 square dancing to Bill Harrison last evening. I wasn't in the best frame of mind; worse, since I was still technically on call, I worried about having to drop out part way through the evening should my pager start screaming.

Mercifully, the pager gods were kind to me last night: there were no after-hours issues. And the dancing was pretty good. There were a few incidents where the 'promenade home' was more like a walk of shame, but we were 90% solid and I saw a few ideas I could borrow for my own calling.

Today is, as they say, another day. Pray for everyone who has to work with me today.

24 Hours in Heck

Yesterday at the office wasn't quite hell, but it was in the neighbourhood.

I spent most of the morning trying to prod people into doing their jobs. One particular project manager is keen for me to do a hardware cutover of one server, replacing a Sun V490 with a V480 so that the V490 can be deployed elsewhere. The UNIX guy who was originally working on this project is in India indefinitely and the replacement UNIX guy wants nothing to do with this project; as the secondary, it's landing on me. Not a big deal, but the project needs a work ticket to the SAN team to re-assign the disks from the old hardware to the new and the work scheduled with people who are using the server currently. All of that is the responsibility of the project manager but he keeps trying to weasel out of it, telling me how much he'd appreciate me getting this done asap. I kept punting it back. He kept ducking & swerving. Finally, I sent a terse e-mail, cc'ing his manager and mine, that until he creates and coordinates the appropriate work tickets, I will not do any cutover.

As of this morning, I still can't see any work tickets so I left him a voice-mail message. I'm expecting the entire project to be rescheduled by a week.

I'm coordinating a controlled shutdown of a few hundred servers this coming weekend for maintenance of the power grids in our data center. I've been beating various members of my own division for three weeks to get their work tickets submitted. Hell, I've given them all the scheduling information, hardware lists and a template for their tickets. Three people still haven't done anything. I'm giving them until lunchtime before I start asking their managers why their teams aren't responding.

Anyway, by the time I left work, I was in a mildly foul mood.

I tinkered with the computers in our basement for a little bit to decompress, then took a one hour nap. trulygrateful is visiting from NYC for a few days but I wasn't very good company last night.

cuyahogarvr cooked up his wonderful chili for dinner which improved my mood a lot.

All four of us went C1 square dancing to Bill Harrison last evening. I wasn't in the best frame of mind; worse, since I was still technically on call, I worried about having to drop out part way through the evening should my pager start screaming.

Mercifully, the pager gods were kind to me last night: there were no after-hours issues. And the dancing was pretty good. There were a few incidents where the 'promenade home' was more like a walk of shame, but we were 90% solid and I saw a few ideas I could borrow for my own calling.

Today is, as they say, another day. Pray for everyone who has to work with me today.

Huh.

Outside my office right now, it is we have both rain and a clear sunny blue sky. That's kind of my mood right now anyway.

Huh.

Outside my office right now, it is we have both rain and a clear sunny blue sky. That's kind of my mood right now anyway.