new lows in ineptness

Wow, the level of incompetence in the IT industry sometimes scares me. To think, these guys all needed just 50% to pass their exams, and with a lot of them, it really shows. This week I was drawn in to assisting in the installation of a new application, which the client had paid the software vendor to send a team (possibly of one, I'm not sure) to install.

First they asserted - repeatedly - that they needed system administrator rights to install it, and that the application would not function without those rights. This would mean they, and their application, would have rights to change anything & everything on the server without notice or control by men, including all the other databases on that server, which violates about four different precepts of security, not to mention client policies and the SOX law.

When I flatly said they couldn't have that permanently, they tried to bully me into it, and when I dug in my heels, they grudgingly agreed to find out(!) exactly what rights they did need: and I agreed to permit them temporary rights til the install was completed (and privately turned on all the auditing and monitoring I could, so I could track what they were doing*). It only took a day and the involvement of their Chief Software Engineer (!!) to find out this trivial piece of information (and I'm not entirely happy with what they still need, but so be it - if it causes disk blowouts, it'll get shut down - this is the farthest possible thing from a priority application you can imagine).

Then, they complained that there was insufficient disk space. I checked & assured them that the default disks set up each had over 100GB free. After several failed attempts, and a fairly complete lack of information and insight from the vendors, I tracked their actions (being remote from them) and found that the installer they had written compels the installation to occur on the system disk, in a fairly unusual location for any database to ever be installed, and there was insufficient space on the system disk.

This is just ... well, I don't have words for it. It's the sort of crap I encountered in the 80s when software installers were brand new, before people realised the need to conform to customer requirements. The idea that someone in 2009 could be so ham-handed and generally clueless as to compel this, just staggers me. It's like buying a new Ford, and finding the designer didnt include a keystart, but required you to use a crank to start the engine.

Having finally found that, I cleared enough space temporarily to allow the install, then shut it down (which was another amazingly difficult operation I'm told, tho I wasn't doing that bit, the Windows support guy onsite did: it certainly took half an hour, ridiculous amount of time to simply close down an application). Once that was done I could transfer the database to the appropriate disk and restart it, but this has really gone down in the annals of incompetence as a shining example.

Obviously they haven't sold this to many customers yet, or the volume of complaints would have drowned them, I think. I would also have to say that whatever the client paid to have vendor-supplied 'experts' onsite was money just pissed down the drain.

* * * * * * * * *

*I would leave this turned on all the time but the drag on performance and price in terms of disk space is excessive to indulge that concept

* * * * * * * * *

These all seemed massively appropriate for our workplace or our client.

LEADERS

Leaders are like eagles. We don't have either of them here.

APATHY
If we don't take care of the customer,maybe they'll stop bugging us.

CONSULTING
If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem.

CUSTOMER DISSERVICE
Because we're not satisfied until you're not satisfied.

CUSTOMER CARE
If we really care for the customer we'd send them somewhere better

INSPIRATION
Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99% perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.

MEETINGS
None of us is as dumb as all of us.

PRESSURE
It can turn a lump of coal into a flawless diamond, or an average person into a perfect basketcase

PROBLEMS
No matter how great and destructive your problems may seem now, remember, you've probably only seen the tip of them

SANITY

Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can borrow mine.

SERVICE
View all customers as beautiful buds that must be cultivated, watered, and periodically buried under manure.

WISHES
When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it's really a meteorite hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then you're pretty much hosed no matter what you wish for. Unless it's death by meteor.

Lifted from Demotivators(TM)

Third World Plumbing in a First World country

Cat actually asked me to write this one, as she's fairly terminally disgusted with the plumbing here, and I can see her point.

Of course, it's not Third World, we aren't talking holes in the ground, it's just kinda ... Second World, well intentioned, badly designed, appallingly constructed, which is how Russia has been described to me (often).

What really appalled her, in our last place, was having the toilets back up into the shower stall, while she was trying to have a shower. The underlying cause of that one was tree roots gradually crushing/lifting the combined outlet pipe, but she - well both of us really - were appalled that the toilet outlet pipe and the shower drain would be combined, rather than separately piped into the sewer mains.

Quite a bit of the plumbing, electrical and other basic infrastructure seems to be like that: just not well-thought-out, and often poorly implemented. For instance, some dimwit in the 60s thought it would be a good idea to wire houses with aluminium (sorry, aluminum haha) wire, which was cheaper, but has caused endless problems.

Another, and this still appalls me, is that the electrical plugs are largely just 2-prong, i.e. there is no earth! This is gradually being phased out (bad pun) but this stuff is still being sold and still installed in houses, despite the minimal savings and the truly lamentable lack of safety. Aside of anything else, it also means any appliances you have which have 3-prong power points, requires a converter plug in order to even fit (the plugs & sockets are also disastrously designed so that plugs are forever falling out of the wall - I have had it seriously recommended to me by electricians that you need to bend the prongs in order to alleviate this!)

Part of this is, I'm sure, because there are few or no regulations compared to NZ, England, or ... well, the civilised world*: and of course that varies state by state, as there are essentially NO federal regulations on anything like this. Part of it - and I'm sure a lot of Americans would say all of it - is that we're in Arkansas, which is regarded as relatively backward & third-worldish by most of the USA**. But a lot of it is just the cut-the-corners, minimise-everything attitude that has become more and more prevalent with the last 5 decades or so.

Bah, youngsters today! Standards are falling! Everything is worse!!

But seriously, I've had people I work with, supposedly educated and intelligent, tell me that many houses*** are, and should be, built to only last 30 years because they'll get pulled down and replaced after that anyway. Which (a) I doubt, and (b) results in insta-slums, because they look like crap after one year, and start literally falling apart after 2. Cost-efficient for the builder, I'm sure, not so much for the owner.

That, again, is a kind of tangent though, because the plumbing, electrical & stuff I am ranting about is in middle-class housing - pretty much all the houses we looked at buying, and at least the next tranche above, i.e. the ones we looked at but couldnt have afforded, all had these afflictions. I am assuming that the really affluent houses don't ... but when I stop to think about it, I'm probably wrong about that too: this is more a disease of the spirit than an absence of wealth: the shonky fly-by-night attitude of casual disregard.

Enough grumpy old rants for one day :)


*yes that's a bit harsh, I agree.
**except for Mississippi and Alabama which in the same boat
*** Many = poor peoples, i.e. black people and po' white trash

OMG you're going to put THAT in your mouth?

I found this hilarious - a plaintive complaint from Sarah, a Kiwi girl who lived in Chicago for 10 years and has just gone back home to live. I can well imagine after getting acclimated to US food, adjusting back to rill-kiwi-fuud will be a struggle: it sure is, going the other way.

Not that the food here is bad, per se - unlike England, it is much more palatable. It's just so incredibly processed, usually sweetened, and .... odd. Grits, something I was curious about, turn out to just be porridge, or a minor variant on it.

On the other hand, we had Carol & BJ (sisters) over for a cooked lunch a while ago, and did a roast of pork & roast veges - potatoes, sweet potato (no kumara duh!), roast carrot & parsnip & pumpkin, and it was like a revelation to them: apparently roasting has just disappeared from the american concepts of how to cook.

Ah, and ambushed again - more P1 tickets at work. I'll try to come back & edit this later to add to it.

UPDATE:
well, more of an addenda really :)

Eh, and Fridays used to be so peaceful - with half the client staff working flexi-fortnights and taking Fridays off, there wasn't a large volume of calls. Something however seems to have changed, and we are getting a steady stream of emergency-fix calls (rated Priority 1) on Fridays, to deploy changes to the application software. I suspect this may revolve around the turnover in developers, plus Thursday being the day for standard fix deployment, i.e. we're getting an upsurge in standard fixes that arent doing what they are meant to do, and noone wants to admit this and just roll back the fix ..... which is what they're meant to do of course, but that would blot their copybooks & make them look bad.

I sometimes think the role of perverse incentives in our management organisations is underestimated.

Well things are a bit busy here, as the other fulltime DBA ('S') is off in Florida this week, looking after his mother & father, after his Dad had a (mild) heart attack. I'm not sure what constitutes a mild heart attack - any nonfatal one? - but it can't be fun. So I'm trying to cover his work as well, making things a bit busier than usual.

Plus people seem to be having an attack of the stupids this week, as I keep getting calls referred to our team that have nothing to do with us - in some cases, wildly wide of the mark in fact. I suspect we're treated as a bit of a dumping ground for puzzle calls.

Which is nothing very new: it's always been the case that if an error or problem doesn't have a clearly identified home, everyone usually starts by blaming (a) the database, (b) the network, and (c) security, before actually thinking what might be the actual root cause. I don't mind a certain amount of this, but it seems to be getting a bit out of hand on this contract.

One thing I found both amusing and alarming, is that with the advent of our new boss a couple of months ago, the amount of stuff we are having to deal with has risen sharply, primarily because he is visibly not up to the job and has no real understanding of what we are doing, and no willingness to learn it.

He has decided that we need a 'Team Lead' to coordinate the three (or 2.5) of us, and approached the other DBA to get him to take this on. As this is unremunerated and unrewarded, I suggested he politely (or not) decline it, but as S is a lot younger and less cynical than me, he accepted it, and is now regretting it. Naturally what this has meant is that our boss has shoved all the responsibilities and reporting for our section onto S, increasing his workload.

He didn't approach me on this, which is probably wise - I'm not sure if he correctly assessed my attitude to the idea, or just prefers not to deal with me as foreign, old & cynical, or some other issue. This doesn't concern me greatly, I must say. Even if the role were official and remunerated, I wouldn't have been interested - I've been a manager a few times now, and I know that (a) I'm pretty crap at parts of it, and (b) I hate all of the role, it's not what interests me or what I enjoy in the least.

What does disturb me is that now I have (a) an unofficial Team Lead with no real authority or review, (b) A Site manager - the boss I'm referring to above - who is essentially uninterested, and (c) a Line manager in New Orleans, who is utterly and completely detached and almost unaware of my existence. The latter manager was originally instituted as an 'emergency' measure when they dismissed the New Orleans DBA manager, and drafted this guy in, as he was already manager of the Data Warehouse team, a closely related field.

In some ways I can see his problem - he's gotten a geopgraphically dispersed team* of 16 or 18 dumped in his lap, when he's already managing about a dozen direct reports (how big his overall existing team was, I dont know). This is asking an awful lot of anyone to manage. But my company, or his boss, need a firm kick up the arse about this, as it's been going on for almost 18 months, and essentially means the DBA group are completely unmanaged.

In that time, I have heard from him twice - once to remind me to put in an overdue timesheet, and once at annual review, which brought a whole new meaning to the word farce - as he has literally NO idea what I'm doing, or any of the details of my client, or indeed of my existence really, all he could do was parrot what the site manager had written. What the point of that was, other than to tick boxes for the HR department, really noone could say. None, of course.

I have no real expectation this will change in the next year, though - while our company pays loud and frequent lipservice to the notions of ethical behaviour and appropriate management, it has never shown any least sign of actual actions to back that up (having gone through the ethics process several times, I can attest to this at some and bitter length).

OH well, back to work


*using 'team' in a completely spurious fashion of course - we are in several locations, we are working on different contracts, we are performing some different functions, we never meet, we don't even share any work or techniques. How this makes a team is a mystery.

Advertising

It's funny about advertising - here in the US, most advertising seems to be

• cars, and how sexy/powerful they make you
• prescription medicines that you should badger your doctor into prescribing
• and cleaning products that cause women to have orgasms

In the UK, it seemed to be much more

• Supermarkets, and how shopping at OUR one will show your superior social status
• OTC medicines, usually to fix things wrong with your arse
• and cleaning products to eradicate all those nasty nasty gerrrmmmmsssss!!!

(I'd include a NZ comparison, but it's too long since I've seen kiwitv, and anyway our ads are pretty much dictated by the US/UK/Aussie markets).

I find it amusing, the different national obsessions (and particularly funny that the English are so obsessed with germs, when their approach to cleanliness is so casual much of the time). The different approaches to what presumably works to sell products is also interesting: the American approach is -much- more hardnosed and direct, and less about social pressures and (by and large) less about conformism, than the English approach.

Which is surprising, as America is far far more conformist than England ever was. I guess that is down to how they perceive themselves, as rugged and independant & all that pseudo-frontier nonsense, but it still astonishes me how little liberty there is in the 'land of the free', and how little that is perceived.

It's hard to put into definite terms, but so many of the simple things you'd take for granted in NZ are just, well, not here or not simple. I'd try to put in some concrete examples, but I've just had 3 more P1 tickets land on my desk, so any ponderous pontification will have to wait for tomorrow.

These guys really are crazy II

OK, off the top of my head:

• The health reform bill includes Death Panels that will cut off any older people from health care to keep them alive
• The health care bill will fund abortions! With your Tax Money!*
• Health Care reform will Bankrupt the Health Insurance Companies! (though noone explains why that is a bad thing)
  
• The health care bill means faceless bureaucrats will dictate who your doctor is
• The health care bill will introduce Socialised Medicine (whatever that is)
• The health care bill will mean rationing and you wont be able to get care that you deserve
• The health care bill means illegal immigrants will get free medical care! (not that anyone explains what is actually wrong with that concept)
• The health care bill is just like Hitler's policies (yes, seriously, that was pushed out by the NRCC)
• Health care reform will take so much money out of Medicare so old folks wont get health care because there wont be any money for it.
  
• Obama is running out on the troops in Afghanistan
• Obama is going crazy and pouring troops into Afghanistan
• Obama is betraying the country by not nuking and invading Iran (while still involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, not that that is mentioned)
• Obama is betraying civilisation by not supporting Georgia and launching an invasion of Russia, NOW!
• Cap and Trade is a TAX and will destroy business and make everyone poor
• Spending money on a depressed economy is crazy and will unbalance the budget
• (leading to) Roosevelt didnt solve the Great Depression, it would have gone away by itself and he did more damage than good
• Plus, Roosevelt didnt solve the Great Depression, it would have gone on forever except for WW2
• Oh and WW2 doesn't count as stimulus spending, because. Just because. (these 3 usually in the same paragraph).
• Obama was born in Kenya and his birth certificate was faked.
  
• Michelle Obama is a crazy vengeful radical black woman who will .... well, thats never clear
• Obama is a crazy communist vengeful black man who is going to get revenge all whites
• Women should no longer get the vote (they vote for Democrats too much)
  

I'm sure there's a lot I'm forgetting, but that was just completely off the top of my head.

The thing is, these are all complete lies. They don't have any underlying basis of facts, they are just crazy ranting. And they are all broadcast, not by crazies crouched in basements, but by prominent media personalities, and repeated and echoed by the bulk of the media - TV, newspapers and internet channels. Some of them keep getting dragged up, again and again, even though they are comprehensively refuted each time.

And about a quarter of the country sucks all these up, repeats them, screams them endlessly, and will not listen to reason.

What's more, they are hyping themselves into such a frenzy of threats, menaces, and violence, that I fear that at some point someone will start acting on it, and people will start being murdered.


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*Frankly, aside of this being a good idea, the idea that you should have a veto over how your tax money is spent is ridiculous: you dont get to withhold taxes for a war you disagree with, or for other policies you may find deeply offensive.

Success!

Well, we're in!

Of course it had to rain like Noah promised on Friday, but we made it through all that without any accidents: noone even fell over on all the slippery concrete.

Cats' friends, Carol & BJ, were amazingly great: just worked and worked and worked, I dunno where they got the energy or determination. We certainly got enormously more done because they were there, not just in cleaning but also in helping shift stuff and reorganising things.

One problem the weather caused, is that the polyurethane refinishing on the floor took twice as long to dry as expected, so the second coat didnt get put down til Saturday, and we couldn't start moving furniture onto it until yesterday. It looks amazingly good, tho, so the annoyance and extra effort was well worthwhile. We also tried to keep everything off the games room carpet (the only carpeted room left*), as that got steamcleaned yesterday, so we spent the weekend kinda camping amid a jumble of up-ended bookcases, boxes, and sundry furniture.

It's gradually getting sorted out, tho, just taking longer than expected (which is pretty predictable really). The games room lighting wont go in until Friday, and the master bedroom gets repainted then, so we've moved into one of the other bedrooms in the meantime.

Haven't had any major issues discovered since we moved in, which is reassuring, too :)

Of course there's a pile of work Yea! high now, and I better get back to that



*As it only has a plywood floor, not hardwoods. Longterm, getting it redone or replaced is on the cards, but ... eh, not for a couple of years at least.

Gearing up

Well probably not much from me this week - we're furiously packing & getting ready to move on Friday. We moved the last of the toy soldiers last night (hurrah!) - I wanted to handle all those myself for obvious reasons - and that feels like a large incubus to be rid of. The books are all packed and ready to go, the kitchen is mostly packed, the CDs & stuff are done, but it still feels like there is a ton to pack. Plus cleaning, although Cat has hired 2 of her friends to help do the cleanup, which I think is a good investment, given our lack of energy, time, and knees.

The new place is getting worked on this week, with the carpets being lifted, and the hardwood floors sanded & refinished with polyurethane, & I'm looking forward to seeing the result of that. We went and bought track lighting for the lounge - which is becoming my games room - as it has no lighting at all, just powerpoints. I guess it was lit with floor lamps previously, but it seems a very odd approach to me.

Mind you, I've noticed that all the houses I've seen in the US so far seem to be poorly lit: our current house has a massive lounge (well, 30x14 roughly) with a single light point down one end. Even with a couple of multi-bulb lamps in it, it feels dim and dingy at night. Not my idea of good living at all. I suppose this arose from the 70s when it was a way of economising on energy & cutting expenses, but it seems a needless pennypinching approach to me: simply turning off lights that you dont currently need will save more (and only having one TV would save twenty times as much energy of course).

Oh well, and today of course I'm trying to get ahead at work, to avoid being called in while I'm off doing the moving thing (as from tomorrow, through to Monday). Impossible really, but I can bash heads a bit to get ahead.

Complaints

Thank god I've got the simple cat: Brandy's demands are usually fairly straightforward -
Feed me!
Water me!
Cuddle me!
Turn the shower on for me!
Feed me yummy fish!
Lift me up there so I dont have to bother jumping!
Carry me head high in triumph!
Reorganise the world exactly as it would suit me!

Of course I draw the line partway down that list, but at least I can address her demands, if necessary by telling her to sod off.

Midnight is much brighter and less demanding, but more whining, and more existential

Why can't I go outside?
When will it stop raining?
Why does it have to rain NOW*?
What is the quality of mercy?
When will I be loved?
When will Brandy stop bullying me?

(the last I can answer but the answer is sadly, never).

Fortunately this is mostly Cat's problem, but when she's outside in the drive, smoking & covered from the rain, they devolve on me.



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*pronounced Naaaooooowwwwww of course :)