Friday Report

[bjarvis]

Hideous.


The team with which I work numbers about 20 bodies. Six of us work in our Maryland data center. Of those six, five were on vacation, on training or out sick so I was running a solo shop and extended work hours to provide coverage. So far, not too bad... instead of working 7 AM to 4 PM, I worked until 6.

Then my manager called at 11 AM to say that the regular Unix Primary was off sick that day and needed me to take pager support too, which extended my shift to 11 PM.

One does not want to be Unix Primary on a Friday afternoon (or a Monday morning, but that's another issue).

Friday afternoons, half of our staff are rushing to complete projects which should have been wrapped up days earlier, so they can go into the weekend with a clean slate. This typically requires me then to rush from service call to service call to support their poor planning and I get to be the bad guy, telling them they have to wait in line and they should have gotten their act together earlier. This is further complicated by the absence of people who did do their jobs correctly and left early on Friday as a personal reward, who I now have to page to get them to perform tasks on behalf of the people who weren't so good at planning and I become the bad guy for interrupting their time away from work (presuming they answer their pagers at all).

This is, for the most part, a no-win situation for anyone. I would typically share the joy with others on my team so we could all have a moderate workload but with so many of my group away, my options were limited.

The good news is that there were no pages at all after 7 PM, although it still prevented me from joining our Happy Hour Gang at Larry's Lounge that night, the first time in a month I had the option. Grrrr.

Comments

[rticboy.livejournal.com]

Definitely a Grrrrrrrrrrr! I have days like that sometimes too, but mine mostly stem from disagreements with my manager (we have these from time to time).

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I should count my blessings... I do like my manager and my teammates. We do work well together but sometimes it feels like we're the only island of sanity in the firm. Of course, we are a stable unit inside a large company undergoing a major restructuring right now so view from my cube is a bit more distorted than usual.