Monday Fun

So I get into work today, hoping for a nice quiet Monday morning. Go from 3 day weekend to a quiet day to another day off tomorrow for Vet's day would have been perfect. No such luck.

I arrive today a bit before 6am to find my office open already, some lights and computers on and music playing. Odd for 6am on a Monday as I'm usually the first one here. Turns out one of the main revenue generating systems at work was having 'issues'. I get up to speed on what the problems were over the weekend and my coworker that was on call said he has been here since 2am working on it with our vendor.

My immediate supervisor shows up around 6am, which is surprising as he was supposed to be in training this week. He comes over to my desk and says he needs a writeup on how we can move forward very quickly on viruatlizing the servers associated with this revenue generating system. It has been our plan all along, but there have been many difficulties along the way that have pushed it back time and again.

Here's the basics. We want to virtualize the servers so we can fail them over to a remote site quickly and easily should a HARDWARE issue occur. We made it perfectly clear when we requested the money for this project that it only provided us safety from HARDWARE problems. Once more.. HARDWARE only. Meaning if we lost the servers or the server room, we could bring those servers back up at a different location.

Enter in our department head Dedicated Understanding Magnificent Badass Astute Supervisor Stud... or DUMBASS for short. Now let say DUMBASS doesn't have a clear understanding of what this project actually allows us to do. Lets say he only hears "quick failover" out of the whole thing. Instead of getting clarification before making promises.. he decides to just go all out and promise the powers that be that we will never have more than 15 minutes downtime on this system. Ever. Boy.. that is a DUMBASS move to the core if I have ever seen one.

This weekends issues I found out are all software related. So even if we had been setup for failover, the data is replicated realtime. Meaning the same software issues would have existed on the hardware at the remote site if we had failed them over. The issues had to be resolved within the software. It had NOTHING to do with hardware. That didn't stop DUMBASS from cancelling training, pushing the panic button and calling a meeting to discuss how we can fast track a very detailed, risky server and SQL database conversion. Thats always the best choice. If something goes wrong, panic and make snap decisions without thought to the consequences!

There are 3 kinds of bosses. Two of them you can work easily with. The third is a nightmare.

1. Your boss knows as much or more than you. If you boss has a full understanding of what you are working on, he can provide guidance and direction and is easy to discuss things with. Its easier to get support for projects etc.

2. Your boss knows almost nothing about your area of expertise and admits it. This kind of boss will listen and try to follow your explanation. He is smart enough to know he doesn't know much about the topic and knows he hired you for your knowledge in the area and takes your recommendation. He knows his limitations and is willing to let the people who know what they are doing take care of it.

3. Your boss knows almost nothing about your area, but likes to fake it.

This kind of boss does things like:
-Pulls random keywords out of an article on the topic he found on the internet an hour before the meeting.
-Makes your department look like a bunch of circus clowns when he asks questions that don't even belong in the current discussion or asks them in a way that makes no sense
-Likes to ramble on about random topics not related the issue at hand because maybe he knows something about that random topic.
-Likes to offer support and guidance which you must listen to until he lets you leave the meeting so you can ignore said guidance and continue to do it the right way.
-Makes grand assumptions based off of nothing more than a random though that flitted into their head while having a beer the night before.
-Listens to what people have to say and then takes credit for it 2 seconds later with a "Thats what I was thinking last night, but I wanted to see if you would come up with it too"


Yes.. DUMBASS is a fine example of #3. Oh how he keeps life interesting around here. Only problem is.. I work in IT. The ideal situation for your IT staff is to walk into their office and find them all asleep or surfing the web. Oh I know.. as a general rule that is very unproductive. Think about it though. Think of it like you are walking into a nuclear weapon facility. Do you want to see those people running around in a panic? Hell no. You want them half asleep in their chair. That means things are running smooth and there is nothing to worry about. Its the same in IT. We don't want exciting in IT. We want smooth, steady, stable, status quo. Excitement is for after work. We don't need a DUMBASS creating issues for us.