I was involved in a project in Yorkshire yesterday, headed up by one of our better project managers. Do I hear you ask how it all went – I bloody hope not, it’s less than 24 hours since it finished and I’ve already had a nightmare about it! The work started well enough, in fact it was quite therapeutic installing the new fibre cards in the servers and distributing the resources of the servers over multiple busses where it could be done. We decided that it was an opportunity to look at some other problems that we had floating around, however it would have been better had we concentrated in the project in hand and pointed out to the project manager that it was unlikely that he could hit a Cow on the Arse with a Banjo! During the course of the day we made several important discoveries, first one was that CAT 5 cable doesn’t stretch – well not very much. Followed by the “When you are moving servers from one type of rack system to a different rack system it is good to have a spare mounting kit”, this is especially true if the rack systems are from different vendors.
Oh! aren’t we the grumpy one I hear you all say, well I probably am when it comes to this sort of thing – but it comes from years of experience with muppets. Still suffice to say that the day was mostly a debacle, almost fifteen hours of it if you must know – my input was about two hours worth on project related work. However at the end of the day there was a lighter moment – although I didn’t laugh too much, when the Project Manager suggested that it would be better if he took care of informing people of the way that things had gone by saying. “It would be better if we didn’t air our dirty laundry in public, leave it to me to tell everyone how it went”.
Still when you have to prove that the world is in fact flat, when we all know otherwise it may be advantageous to ignore some of the facts. I guess that it may be the same when you have to report on how things went during a total disaster, but then again I only have to keep the systems running after a fashion. On a more positive note I manages to get something that I have been working on for a few days implemented, after a bit of work it even worked as it was supposed to! So stick that in your pipe and smoke it all you members of the Flat Earth Society.