Today started out as a normal day in the office, the drive in was clear, the dawn was beautiful, there were no major problems awaiting my arrival. How good is this job I quietly thought to myself, my colleagues arrived from one of the other offices. There was a minor problem in getting them sorted out, but it was resolved in just a few minutes. Today would be just some run of the mill systems admin work, the morning only got better as I completed a couple of outstanding tasks without incident and all was joy and happiness in the mechanical garden. Then the innocuous email arrived from one of the consultants, you know the one that I mean – the email that throws your whole world right back on it’s arse and makes you realise that there were some plus points in some right wing facists point of view. Now by way of some explanation here I feel that I should say that most of the work that a systems admin does is planning and research, of course there is quite a lot of run of the mill stuff thrown in, the day to day stuff is in actual fact quite simple – you know the things I’m sure, locked accounts, buggered printers and lost print jobs, file systems filling and some other odds and sods. Just the normal things that you would expect to do as a systems admin, this is the bread and butter stuff of the systems admin world.
Where things become more interesting is the investigation and planning for project work, currently this work involves the planning and equipment acquisition for the relocation of two or three hundred production, development and test environments to an other data center in an other country. Now although not directly involved in the actual work, I have been involved in the research and planning stages – which were almost complete and here we come to the crux of the aforementioned email. This person, who if you read his multiple CV’s found on the Internet – has a brain the size of a planet. Manages to add the value of a “Lucky Bag” to the planning and implementation process, ensuring that the captive cutomer base that we have will throw every possible obstruction in the path of the project.
- Our last project was brilliant!
You may think that I’m being a little harsh here, but if you have an understanding of the logistics behind the planning and execution of a task like this, you’d appreciate the sudden and irresistible desire to choke the living shit out of the arsehole type person who would undo all the work with a simple (and rather stupid) email. The main thing about the email was the reference to a blog entry that was some three and a half years old, not that that was a big issue – the big issue was that the format of the email indicated that this was the way that things were at the moment. Now as most people will be aware, little or nothing stands still in the world of IT. So quoting information that is that old is like requesting a purchase order signed by three serving Popes, possible – but in reality highly unlikely. If I consider the plus and minus points that this person has managed to accrue, I find that it is not unreasonable to add him and his boss to the hit list and although he’s not at the top of the list – he’s certainly not anywhere near the bottom of the list either.