Chris Meller

To kinda follow up on my last post about slowly making my way all the way around the internet, I also found in that same line of surfing this post about wasting time at work.

I quote you the last paragraph:

And how does your state perform? The laziest states in the poll Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin and Nevada, whereas the hardest working states included South Carolina, Rhode Island, Hawaii, West Virginia and North Carolina.

Wow… South Carolina is actually the hardest working state? I’m assuming this is only because there’s no kind of adjustment for industry composition. As they state earlier in the cited survey, industries vary greatly (Insurance is the worst at 2.5 hours wasted each day, while Shipping and Receiving is the best at only 1.7 hours wasted each day).

I guess I’m not doing that badly, considering Insurance is the #1 worst time waster (2.5 hours / day), and Software & Internet is the #5 worst time waster (2.2 hours / day). Since I work in the IT department of an Insurance-related business that writes all its own Software and has a quickly growing Internet-based business, I was pretty much screwed from the get-go… Ahh well…

People often comment on my totally random changes and updates and complain about my lack of announcements beforehand. Unbeknownst to them, there is a very logical and reasonable explanation for my silence, which was demonstrated admirably this week.

Earlier this week, we finally made plans to deploy Windows XP Service Pack 2. After a couple of months, I finally was able to set up some Group Policies on our domain controller to properly tone down some of the over-protective “features” we didn’t need, and we were ready to go.

Monday afternoon we sent out an announcement about the changes.

Monday night, I approved the patch on our Systems Update Server (a centralized local Windows Update, if you will). Due to the configuration, clients should download the update Tuesday morning when they started up, it should get installed in the background, and by Wednesday morning, everyone should be running the new service pack.

Tuesday morning I get to work after class and it all starts. My boss has looked at several machines, people who are complaining about a problem with one of our home-brewed applications that the entire company uses. Apparently when the screen saver comes up (they’ve been bitching about the screen savers ever since I implemented a Group Policy to enforce them a few weeks ago), their machines were locking up and they couldn’t do *anything*. I tell my boss that I think they’re lying, that they can do anything except use that one application, and that it’s just because Windows has thrown an error dialogue that’s just gotten hidden behind the actual app window. I explain to him that if he just switches to another application and then back to the one with the problem, that the error should pop up and they should be able to clear it and move on.

Wednesday morning, apparently it becomes a big issue. My boss calls me (on speaker phone, as usual), and tells me that it’s got to be that “thing we just released” (referring to Service Pack 2). I tell him it has nothing to do with our applications, and he tells me yeah, it shouldn’t, but obviously does.

I get a call later that morning from someone who has the error message up. I tell them to wait and not touch anything and I’ll be over as soon as I can. By the time I get there, they’ve given up and restarted anyway, content to complain. I tell them screw it and I leave for lunch. Not 10 minutes later, I get a call on my cell phone, while we’re in the car, from that person’s manager. She says the problem’s back. I tell her there’s nothing I can do over the phone, that I have to see it, and that she wasn’t patient enough to wait earlier and we’d have to wait for the next occurrence. She goes on a rant about how this is taking way too much time to have to shut down and restart every time the screen saver comes up and that if she has to get a new computer, that’s what has to happen, because they can’t keep doing this.

First off, she’d just gotten a new computer 2 weeks prior. Secondly, every single machine we have is exactly identical. A new one would make absolutely 100% NO DIFFERENCE. Why does everyone think a new computer will fix absolutely everything? Thirdly, just because you say she needs a new computer in no way makes it so, nor does it put another Dell shipping box on the UPS truck.

I finally get off the phone with her and try to enjoy what’s left of my lunch. After lunch, I get a call from her again, saying that she’s got the error on her screen again and to come look at it. I run over, tired of playing this game.

You’ll never guess what happened… Turns out I was right. The error box was just thrown behind the application window, and if they’d bothered to follow my instructions and flip back and forth to it, they could have cleared the error and moved right along. On top of all that, after talking to our developer, it’s a known error relating to a bug in one of the components he’s using, and it has existed for OVER TWO MOTHER F’ING YEARS!

If this doesn’t conclusively prove my point and give me 100% support for not informing users of jack shit, then nothing ever will. If they can randomly start blaming shit on a service pack update when the bug has existed for over two years, that’s far enough… I will never release an announcement again, ever!

OK, so some people have been wondering what the hell I do on a daily basis while I’m at work. I know I probably get way too much personal stuff accomplished (code wise, mainly) while I’m at work, but on the whole, I’m really very productive. Although it varies percentage wise from day to day and week to week, I’m probably somewhere along the lines of Google’s 20% time (not that I work for Google), which I consider pretty above board and more than acceptable.

I’ve also been known to be here until 9:30 at night after everyone else leaves working to meet a deadline, particularly during major projects. There was also that weekend where I was here for 24 hours straight trying desperately to get our internet back up. My boss also calls me random nights of the week asking technical questions about his own personal network, etc. All-in-all, the company gets more than their money’s worth out of me.

So, down to business… Here’s a brief outline of what I actually did today:

8:15 am - Follow up with our Manager of Company Operations about the demo I’m supposed to do for her department describing the process for loading Electronic Claims (claim data received from vendors such as WebMD in electronic format).

8:20 am - Demo gets pushed off until this afternoon, since the manager is incredibly busy this morning. Fine by me…

8:30 am - Pick up where I left off on Friday with a new computer I’m setting up. It’s got a base Windows XP Professional installation on it, and now I have to install Microsoft Office, Outlook, Oracle, Borland’s Delphi Engine (BDE), along with a custom build of Mozilla 1.7 we put together and our Phone System’s client.

9:00 am - While chatting with our Web Guy, whom I go out to lunch with every day, he mentions he found a kick ass RSS feed generator class for PHP. I have him email it to me, since I too had been looking for one for about a week. I sit down and spend a while integrating it into my Lyrics website’s code. After having some weird problems with it, I get pissed off and decide to ignore it for the rest of the day.

9:35 am - Get an Email from one of our Customer Service Representatives. Since their Manager is off today, and I’m the Phone System “dude” here, I get the question. The two people in the department that normally get distributed voicemails left after hours are going to be off for the rest of the week, and someone else needs to be able to check them. I don’t have any clue right off how this is done, so I delve into the Phone System’s Handlers to find some answers.

10:15 am - I determine after following endless call flows through our phone system that after hours voicemails are simply distributed to another ACD queue that only includes these two CSRs. No problem, I can just add the 3rd person to the queue and she’ll get them when no one else is available.

10:20 am - Swap a series of emails with the first CSR, trying to decide who should get the voicemails until they return. It’s not my place to decide, and their manager is off, so I make her pick someone.

10:30 am - Catch up on my RSS feeds, since I’ve let them slip a little over the weekend.

10:45 am - Return to setting up the new computer I was working on earlier.

11:05 am - Come back to my desk so I can VNC into our “Updates” server — the one that hosts our Norton AntiVirus Corporate server, our Norton Packager, and our Windows Server Update Services (SUS).

11:07 am - Deploy our custom version of Mozilla 1.7, Norton AntiVirus scanning engine, and a COM object one of our custom apps uses.

11:15 am - After remembering how to do all this, since it’s been a while since I’ve done it, I quickly write up some documentation with 10 basic steps, including a key part: which username and password to use as authentication to the machine.

11:30 am - Matt decides he’s not going home at lunch, so we run to Mutt’s in Mauldin for lunch.

12:30 pm - Stop by Lava Java on our way back to work, since it’s on our way back to 385 from Mutts and we’ve never been there before.

12:45 pm - Back at the office, I check my emails and voicemails from lunch.

1:10 pm - Boss comes by and we have a little chat with two of the other developers in the department about moving our weekly conference call for a special project up a day.

1:30 pm - Approve Outlook meeting invitation rescheduling conference call.

1:32 pm - Go give demo of Electronic Claims loading program to Operations department.

2:30 pm - Answer cell phone call from a client I do some contract work for. The latest phase in their networking / internet problems is ready to go. I tell them I’m in the middle of something and that I’ll call them back in a few minutes.

2:45 pm - Finish demo and return to my desk to wrap up the machine I was setting up. I totally forget about calling client back.

3:20 pm - Finished with desktop, go to find out when employee who’s getting it will be back. Turns out the manager isn’t there, but the employee is, so I set up a time tomorrow to replace her existing desktop.

3:30 pm - Return to my desk and remember to call client. I make multiple apologies for forgetting and we decide I need to stop by on my way home from work. No biggy, as it’s on the way and I was planning on ducking out a few minutes early anyway, particularly since they’re friends of my boss.

3:40 pm - Read RSS feeds and just generally goof around for a while. It’s been a busy day…

4:25 pm - Run over to our accounting department to borrow a CD that the bank sends us check images on, so I have it on hand for software installation on the new computer tomorrow.

4:30 pm - Return to previous goofing. Half our department has left by this point, so there’s no much to do.

4:55 pm - That’s it, time for me to head out… Off I go to the client.

So there you have it… My day in a nutshell. I go from Project Manager to Computer Technician to Web Developer to Phone System Administrator to Systems Administrator back to Project Manager to Training Specialist to Network Administrator to Bum…

In a single day, I wear many (many!) hats, and this wasn’t even one of my more varied days. Throw in the HIPAA Security hat and the Exchange Email administrator hat and we’ve got a party…

I know that some flip flopping is somewhat typical of a small company, but I still think this is a bit excessive. And you guys wonder why I get stressed out sometimes… Imagine all those hats being forced on your head at once while you’re already trying to solve a problem…

Well, not that we all really had any idea what he did in the first place, Mark Jen appears to have moved into advertising? or is that more Human Resources?

My question is? Do you have a job opening for a total bum? See, I’m not really into the whole work “thing”. I’ve tried it for a couple years now, and decided it’s just not worth it. I’m looking for a career move that involves sitting on my ass and collecting a very large check every few weeks…

I’m thinking Plaxo might be for me!

How about this “Internet QA Engineer” job? It says I have to be self-directed, which I’ve so got down! I can direct myself to the couch for some soap operas or the computer chair for a little mid-morning UT2004 all on my own, and all without a safety net! It also says I have to “know and care what the customer wants from our service.” Well, that’s easy. If working closely with end users for the past 5 years has taught me anything, it’s what the customer wants from a service. That’s right, I have the answer. Want me to tell you? Ok, here’s what the customer wants from a service: nothing? and everything? and things totally unrelated to your product. That’s right, they really don’t have a CLUE what they want, but they want it, and they want it now.

Oh, but those aren’t all my glowing skills. “You should like to break things, be exhilarated when you discover that really complicated bug, and be detail-oriented.” Are you kidding me? You have to be? I mean, give me a sledge hammer and let me go to town on that b**ch! When I’m done, your own programmers won’t recognize their app’s. And you can’t even begin to describe the kind of orgasmic rush I get when I stump a programmer with an obscure bug, or when I insist he move a box 2 pixels to the left because the gradient behind it is covered up too much.

So what do you think Mark? Am I perfect for this job or what? I mean, I don’t think we even need to go through that whole resume THING, do you? Go talk to your boss, have him send me a huge check, and I’ll hop on the next flight to California!

Wow, it?s been one hell of a day.

I think I took my meds too late last night, so I couldn?t get up this morning when my alarm went off. About 8:00, I finally rolled out of bed and into a cup of coffee. Needless to say, this didn?t exactly start my morning off on the right foot.

Less than 10 minutes after I got to work, the manager of our claims department (and wife to the President of the company) came over asking what we were doing with Hospital claims that were electronically received, because one of our clients had called us wondering why their hospital claim payouts for April had dropped like a rock.

Since this was a fairly new thing, we haven?t actually finished implementing the program that loads the received files from WebMD. Our lead programmer, who had been working on the program for weeks, just happens to be on a cruise this week, and therefore inaccessible. The responsibility somehow fell to me. I got a call from the President of the company 5 minutes later asking me why we weren?t running them. I explained to him that supposedly the program for loading them hadn?t been completed yet, and I was waiting for the go-ahead before I started importing them on a regular basis. The conversation went something like this:

Boss: So why aren?t we importing Hospital claims? Me: Because <programmer> hasn?t finished writing the program yet. Boss: Run them anyway. Me: What if it breaks something? Boss: I don?t care, do it anyway. Me: Uhh, ok… If you say so?

Now, just by the grace of god, the program seems to be 99% complete. The only problem I?ve found is that it prints a few things out of order, and it?s missed 30 or so pages out of the approximately 3,000 claims I?ve imported thus far. Simple enough problems, since the actual images of the claims are generated and I can go in and manually print them.

It does make me wonder though? What would have my boss done if I?d run the import and it?d corrupted our database? Honestly, if the programmer who?s designing this program says it?s not done yet, I?m inclined to take his word for it, since we can?t even look at the source code of the program (not that we?d have a clue what all that code meant or did anyway). With an ordinary client-side application that simply rehashes data stored in the database, I wouldn?t care so much if it weren?t yet complete. Chances are it?s not going to do anything that will disturb data on the server anyway. However, since we?re not simply looking at data, we?re inserting it into the database for the entire company to use, and to pay claims off of, I?m significantly more cautious.

In the end, it appears to have worked out alright, but that wasn?t necessarily so. It?s thinking like this that can get people into serious trouble. If this had somehow blown up our database, no one here would have had the specialized expertise to know what it had done to our data. If you ask me, this was a bad call. We?d waited 3 weeks for these things, what?s another couple of days until the programmer got back?

Maybe it?s ?play-it-safe? thinking like that that is the reason I?m not a manager. When it comes down to matters like that, I?m not willing to make the ballsy (stupid?) moves that can either perfectly make or totally break a situation.

It?s just another day in ?paradise??