On arrival at the office this morning I was informed the one of our German colleagues had refused to respond to a call out, however after a little while we found out that he’d been instructed not to respond to calls from the United Kingdom. The politics of international business seems to be creeping into the systems support arena, still “Our’s is not to reason why!”
Now I’m sure that the Germans want this work to go as smoothly as possible, because I know that they don’t like to apologise. So why a fairly senior manager would determine that systems operated from the United Kingdom and hosted in Germany would be excluded from out of hours support in Germany, I have absolutely no idea. Seemingly neither did he, as the instruction was revoked first thing in the morning. At first when I was informed that the systems admin had refused the call because they were in dispute over money, I thought that it was some kind of practical joke. Then I remembered the German sense of humour, it’s just not what they find funny – is it?
Still tomorrow is an other day, in fact it’s Friday. Perhaps this will just be a storm in a tea cup, we’ll just have to wait and see. It probably would have been less trouble if someone had told the person initiating the call out to “just bugger off”, or maybe it wouldn’t!