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.