[rescue] happy new years and shit like that

[Bill Bradford]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 03:55:52PM -0500, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> > Boss said "please, take wednesday off. I'm sorry."
> Boss is a jerk.  

Actually, no.  He's the most non-PHB boss I've ever had; before he got 
bumped into management, he had *my* job.  

Anyway, I "handed off" the problem to our senior admin Monday evening.
Last night (Tuesday/Weds., midnight) he (senior admin) calls me; he'd
spent four hours working on the problem with Compaq, patched the kernel,
brought the box back up, and drove the 20 minutes home - only to get paged
as he drove into his driveway that the box had gone down *again*.  He was
out, with the flu.

I live 3 blocks from the office.  I say "well, fuck", get up, and go in.
I bring the box up, it crashes 10 minutes later, I get on the phone to 
Compaq and tell them to escalate it like they've never escalated it before.
<time passes, did stuff>
Box is back up, 5am I go home.  Amy and I go for a 6am breakfast, and I 
crash out around 7:30am.

Boss calls at 8:30am.  Box has crashed again, but instead of having me come
in, I walk him through the boot procedure over the phone, and he takes charge
of the problem *himself*, boots the box, and gets on the phone to compaq,
and tells me to go back to bed.

I finally woke up around 1pm, went to run errands, and stopped by the office
to see how things were going (our senior admin had come in and taken over
again by this point).  Box is up, *hopefully* for good.  I'm sitting in my
cube, boss walks past, does a double take.

him: "nobody paged you to come in, did they?"
me: "No, i was just out and stopped by to find out how things were going"
him: "*WHEW* good."

(he's sincerely apologized multiple times already).

Normally, we wouldnt have a situation like this when someone has time off,
but its like this:

November 1st: we had 6 people
November 29th: 1 person laid off (company wide, 900)
One week later: 2 contractors in our group terminated early
One week later: Out of the 3 guys left (me and 2 others), one of them
 leaves for his 30-day vacation, which was scheduled at least 2 months
 previously - due to the new company "use your vacation before the end of
 the year, or lose it" policy.
So, for the past 30 days, its been me and the sr. admin. 

Nothing my boss could have done about it, really.  Just a sucky situation.

> My favorite saying:
> "A lack of planning on your part, does not constitute an emergency on my
> part"
> Your boss failed to plan...

No, he had most of his staff ripped out from under him a month ago. He's
really good about doing the "you have an emergency? at 5pm?  because you
 forgot to tell us to do <x>?  Well, I think all my staff just went home
at five, you'll have to wait till tomorrow" (on non-critical stuff, of
course).  He's *really* good at "running interference", and keeping the
company politics off our heads.  In his words, "Its my job to make it so
that the only thing you guys have to deal with are the systems."

> <rant>
> When I give an employee the day off, I maintain *no* contact with that
> employee regarding office/business issues.  If I can't fill in for an
> employee, either by myself or by teaming other members of my department, I
> need to rethink how I've fleshed out my organization.  I just shouldn't have
> to revoke time off because something is broken or needs rebooted.  At the
> minimum, procedures should be in place so that any arbitrary person with
> systems knowledge should be able to perform routine operations - especially
> rebooting.
> </rant>

Yeah, the problem here was that the department got gutted, not lack of 
planning.

> I feel very strongly about that.  Time off is *time off* - not time off
> except when [x] happens.  I have, at times, disabled the VPN connections of
> employees that *knew* couldn't take time off (workaholics).  I even told an
> employee once that "Dammit, if I give you a day off, I expect you not to
> work!  Now take an *actual* day off."

Hahahahaha.  I think I need a boss like that sometimes. 8-)  Altho, there's
been times when I've had to work early-AM hours to fix things, and I show up
on time the next day, and boss said "uh, go home".  He even gave one of
our other guys the day off when he found out it was his wedding anniversary -
"What are you doing here?  GO HOME! " etc.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX