[geeks] WTF Stories

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Brooke Gravitt wrote:

> Ok, I just read this
> <http://thedailywtf.com/forums/thread/101329.aspx> and was wondering,
> anyone have any stories like this?

(note: this didn't start out as a rant, but got there somehow)

My last job started off like that.  I was ready to Make A Difference.  I
was working in the public sector; I wanted to make things run smooth as
glass and as efficiently as a well-tuned machine.  I knew that every
dollar I saved was a dollar saved for the taxpayers of my state.

I was developing a pretty serious guilt complex about a month or two in
when I'd been asked to do nearly nothing except listen in on meetings
and "learn the system".  So, I took initiative and hammered out parallel
solutions (without approval of management--until they saw both systems
side-by-side) to problems that vendors were solving badly, got things
swung over, and generally kicked a bunch of ass and never stopped.

Fast forward two years, and I hadn't taken a day of vacation time in
nearly 18 months, had -months- of compensatory time stacked up, and was
pulling 85-hour weeks.  The state was deep in a hiring freeze, so no one
who left or was fired got replaced; I'd taken on the work of three
additional people.  I thought back to 2003 and being worried that there
was nothing to do and just laughed.

Along the way, I also learned the gut-wrenching, sickening truth of
working in the public sector: every dollar I saved was a dollar that
some moron got to waste on stupid crap at the end of the fiscal year.

If I went back through all my email from that job, and all my meeting
minutes, and all my project notes, I could probably justify having
"saved" the taxpayers of the State of Texas over $100M.  I know I was
into the $30M range in mid-2004 just by saying "hey, we don't need to
buy $software; the OS and software we're already running have that
feature built in!" and "hey, we don't need to bring in overpaid
consultants for that; we have that expertise in-house!" over and over
again.

Guess how much of that money was returned to the taxpayers in any way?
$0.  But lots of executives got new chairs, new desks, new offices, new
teleconferencing junk, etc.

I believe everyone in the US should spend at least a year working for
government at a local, state, or Federal level if only so that they may
BURN WITH RAGE every time they pay a tax and realize how little of it
actually goes to the goals that government claims to accomplish.  I
suspect that if the electorate were, by the large, quiety furious about
the degree of government waste, we'd have more than a thirty-percent
turnout at the polls, and the people we have in office wouldn't last
nearly as long before being shown the door.

I guess my point is that if I had another job where I was asked to do
nothing, I'd buy a handheld computer and either write code for my own
projects or play video games, or maybe bring my trumpet and a practice-
mute to work for at least a little while before making work for myself.
Getting paid to do nothing[0] is nearly as rare as getting recognition
for a job well done.  And, if that money isn't spent on accomplishing
the goal the organization has in front of it, it's going to go to waste
anyway, so it might as well go into my pocket for warming a chair, if
said organization is going to actively oppose my productivity every step
of the way.

As far as WTF stories in general go, I could literally fill a book with
stories from that place, like they[1] time they reimplemented lpr/lpd in
TCL because they were -convinced- that the AIX spooler wouldn't DTRT in
the case of the printer going unavailable or a power outage, yet they
called lpr/lpd from inside their replacement....

Or possibly the time they migrated mainframe print jobs from the S/390
to a Windows 98 box (which backfed the jobs into the S/390 for the final
route to the channel-attached printers) to "improve performance and
reliability"....


[0] Without having "earned" the privilege the suitly way, of course.
[1] "They" being a newly-minted IBM Global Services idi^Wemployee who
     only remains nameless here because I'm too much of a gentleman for
     my own good.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke  ) "Some people grow out of the petty theft of
Elgin, TX         (   childhood.  Others grow up to be CEOs and
USA                )  politicians."              --Forrest Black