Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

November 1, 2013

it’s not all that….

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 10:41 am

The reality is, my job, much as I like it, much as everything appears to be going well (as in the squeaky wheel gets the oil, and I have seen no oil cans heading my way) much as everything seems to be trickling along nicely, could end tomorrow.

It could end for a variety of reasons, from a management decision that wipes out 10% of the staff overnight, to a single line manager decision that for some (real or imagined) reason my face doesn’t fit.

Pretty much all you can do is enjoy it while you can, and certainly not worry about what it takes to be a better employee with more job security.

Now, if I talked about being a better boyfriend / husband with better relationship security, y’all would be chanting “Beta $, Alpha fucks”

But the fact is, it is true, I can no more make my self an attractive boyfriend to a wimminz who just ain’t interested, no matter what I have to offer, than I can make myself an attractive employee to a company that just ain’t interested, no matter what I have to offer.

The parallels are exact.

I don’t *want* my job to end, but the reality is I can no more influence that than I can the weather, all I *can* do, is do my job, the same as I did on my first day, no less, and no more.

The reality is that employers can and do bail on great employees as arbitrarily and unfairly as wives bail on great husbands and fathers, and there is *nothing* that you can do as a man to either influence that decision, or influence the relative value that you are assigned as a part of that decision making.

We had an *incident* at work recently, and you have to remember “work” is reseller > client > us > various departments in our place > me actually turning up on site.

The incident is I did everything I was told, to the letter, and fulfilled both the letter and the spirit of my contract, and yet, the job didn’t end up with a working widget, and nobody was happy, and so everyone started in on the blame game, and by the way I am talking global brands here… not mom and pop’s lemonade stand.

Since I was the only fucker who had actually been on site, naturally I was the only suspect in the murder case, and naturally I have not been included in the loop in all the hand wringing and blame game and no, you pay, we ain’t paying, horse-shit and horse-trading.

Bottom line?

Bottom line is two layers and seventeen levels away in the layer cake, the reseller was in possession of some data, and despite three explicit opportunities to provide this data, one of which was when I personally called their 3rd line support to ask if I was missing anything, it was never provided.

It was never provided because there were so many layers in their own organisation, nobody saw the whole picture, and nobody had any incentive to wonder what if anything was on the pieces of jigsaw that they could not see, eg the other 4,999 pieces that make up the whole.

Nor was the system itself designed in such a way as to fail gracefully, if it did not find the *thing* it wanted, all it would do is reboot, endlessly, no diagnostics, no error messages, no output, nothing.

By now it is obvious, it’s a software fault, it could be a crypto key or a TPM tie in or a licence file, it doesn’t matter, the bitch has been written to look for this shit as an integral part of the boot process, and if it doesn’t find it, reboot instantly and try again.

Which is great with 20/20 hindsight, but the people who provided this system and who resold our engineers as their own to the end user and who approved the purchase of parts that amounted to a complete new system, never though to tell the field engineer (me) this, even when he asked.

No, much easier to wait for it to go wrong and start playing the blame game.

Of course, when I point all this out, because, you know, that is the job of the field engineer, to join all the dots that everyone on higher salaries sat in their offices already has, and suddenly the blame game is reversed and all agree that actually yours truly didn’t fuck up, and the reseller will foot the bill in full, and my employer says to me you are quite right….

Yeah, and fair play to y’all for admitting it and not actually blaming me the instant the reseller tried to dump on me, but, the fact is if y’all could do *your* fucking jobs properly in the first place it would never have gotten this far.

Y’all should have been, hey reseller, our guy did, exactly and to the letter, what he was told to do and authorised to do by you, now fuck off and pay up. Any fuck up ain’t with us or our guy.

As the beta boyfriend / husband / father, it isn’t my fucking job to point out to you where you or your friends or advisers are wrong about me.

As a man with my self employed hat on, said reseller would be on my blacklist for life, not for fucking up and not telling the field engineer relevant data, but for trying to blame him as a first resort, rather than FIRST trying to identify what went wrong and where and how.

***THIS***

As a lowly employee, no doubt I’ll be doing another job for this reseller soon.

Interestingly, and notably, my fellow field engineers instantly knew that I was seriously pissed off with the whole thing, despite remaining outwardly utterly professional and calm, and as soon as they knew the facts they all sided with me 100%

Interestingly also, they all also equally apportioned the blame between our employer and the reseller, I heard more than once “redacted are known for always trying to blame everyone else.”

Learn the lesson WOPR learned, many games are un-winnable, to play is to lose.

To try to be a good employee is to lose.

To try to be a good boyfriend / husband / father is to lose.

My company DO NOT WANT an uber mega kick-ass cool slick mother-fucker of a field engineer, if they did they woulda hired one, at 20x my current salary.

Same with bitches, you want a great man you’ll hire one, you are master of this house and of me.

*THEN* you can fucking complain when your employee doesn’t live up to spec, or your man doesn’t put food on the table or coal in the hearth, as per the original bill of goods.

Trying not to be a squeaky wheel is one thing, trying to be a teflon coated hub motor 100 kW drive wheel will get you sacked, part not suitable for role.

The HR bitch DOES NOT FUCKING GET IT, pathetic little circular mails about employee of the week and Fred has had such good feedback from acme corp and don’t y’all wanna compete with Fred and be even more alpha and uber than he is?

NO

I

FUCKING

DON’T

In my ideal world you won’t even have heard of me bitch, in fact in my ideal world the only people in the company who even know I exist would be three or four people in the service department who assign me work, and the fucking payroll computer.

We have quite a few ex military types, you can see the look on their faces, like being smacked across the face with a fresh wet halibut, when I say shit to them.

I’ll get emails circulars from them about company policy and procedures and looking good for clients, and email circulars from HR about who got prizes for the best fucking Halloween costume at work, so I’ll ask them when they were on patrol in Helmand Province, was it the Afghans or the Brass who formed the judging panel for the best Halloween outfit while on patrol?

Did they have a dress down Friday where everyone went out on patrol in denim and cheesecloth and the wimminz soldiers looked like they were clubbing?

Did they hire people from the job-centre in Watford and tell them to make their own way to Kandahar, DHL should be delivering your weapons and ammo on-site for a pre-midday and you got to look for a guy wearing an aqualung who answers to the name of Trevor and fix whatever it is he says needs fixing so you can get your paperwork signed and we all get paid?

Gotta be careful who you say this shit to though…. real careful… or you’ll be seen as the squeaky wheel.

Fuck all you can do to improve your lot, as an employee or as a beta boyfriend, but plenty you can do to fuck it up…. and 99% of that will come from trying to improve your lot, or your status. or what others think of you.

 

September 12, 2013

It hurts, being a soldier, behind enemy lines.

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 10:55 am

In the postbag, stuff from guys toughing it out and swallowing red pills like ludes at a dead concert, yeah we know we are doing the right thing for our own survival, but why does it hurt so much?

In brief, it hurts because you are down behind enemy lines, on your own, it sucks, but it is better than being in the trenches outside Damascus.

It hurts, because not only the ones you correctly identified as your enemies are out to get you, but also those you formerly incorrectly identified as allies and colleagues.

It hurts, because it is lonely, you don’t have the faux comradeship and faux companionship you had before.

It hurts, because it is supposed to….

As for Damascus itself….

Well, in my day job, I turn up on site, after a bunch or resellers of resellers of resellers have resold a product, and outsourced parts of that product to four different suppliers at the end of four different reseller chains, of which I am but one.

The customer, the site, it is a major high street brand with over a thousand outlets in mainland England alone, you know the name, hell, you’ve probably spent money there yourself.

Fact is I could pull a couple of other equally large or larger jobs out of last weeks diary, the only reason I don’t is I couldn’t give *any* clues about who they are or what they do, or you would immediately know exactly who they were, but, the story is *exactly* the same.

So 5 site visits in a row to 5 different sites, and in every one, I cannot do the job I was there to do, and the reason I cannot do it is not;

  • that someone else forgot to tell anyone to do x
  • that someone wasn’t told by someone else to do x
  • that x itself wasn’t documented and planned up the wazoo

you get the picture.

No, the problem in every case is that everyone prior to me in the process has played their part, but the process itself is specifically designed so that no one person has any knowledge or interest in what those following on are supposed to do.

So one guy will come alone and install a new cabinet over there next to the spare power sockets, and another guy will come along and install the dsl/pstn lines over there next to the existing phone sockets, and the distance between the two “there’s” exceeds the length of the RJ11 cable supplied to connect the two together.

And nobody has done anything wrong, and everyone, even me, who doesn’t do the job he turned up to do, can get his paperwork signed, and everyone goes home happy, except the customer.

When things *do* work out, it isn’t because everyone is working to IS0/BS/six sigma or any of that crap, or because everyone is a certified nintendo developer, or because the whole project is managed and documented so well.

It is because there are enough people in the system like me, with a spread of knowledge and experience much broader than my job description calls for, who can go the extra mile in some cases, and use their fucking brain in others, so that the next guy in the chain can do his bit and forge another link in the chain.

Not *because* of the system, but *despite* the system.

If you think the fields of politics or economics or war are any different, you’re in for a rude surprise…. especially if you find yourself in a trench outside Damascus.

So, enough time has passed I can tell you a true story.

Anyone who has been in the armed forces knows it moves on bullshit paperwork, just like the jobs I describe above, with the added pleasure of you yourself being a thing with a number, not an intelligent free agent like I am at work.

So, let’s call him Pete.

Pete is an army driver, he is given orders and papers, go to the motor pool, draw a truck and 30,000 litre trailer, go here and fill the truck with diesel, then go here and deliver that 30,000 litres of diesel, then bring the truck and trailer back.

So, all goes well until Pete gets to his destination with 30k litres of diesel, and he is told we got no room, the bunkers are full, go away.

Pete goes back to the fuel depot, told to go way, no paperwork for no 30k litre delivery.

Pete goes back to his base and the motor pool, told to go away, no paperwork for a truck and FULL 30k tanker trailer.

Pete goes to a pub down the road to ponder his dilemma, everyone has been scrupulous in doing their job, nobody has done anything wrong, in fact to fix this problem, someone would have to exceed their authority and do something wrong.

Pete sinks a couple more beers, pondering all this, and a friendly local farmer offer to solve his problem, he will buy the 30k litres of diesel, at a discounted price, of course.

Pete sells the farmer the diesel, returns to base with an empty truck, waved straight through, job done, paperwork filled, away you go brother.

Of course, sooner or later the missing 30k litres was flagged and Pete got dishonourably discharged, which in reality didn’t bother him a bit, saved him 5 more years in the green.

Ok, we all know Pete did the wrong thing, but the situation he found himself in was not one of his own making, and if he hadn’t had that exact same sort of shit every other day of his life, he might have done the right thing that day.

SNAFU

But things become slightly more likely to escalate out of control in totally unplanned directions that have no stop, pause or rewind buttons, when you are playing around in potential war zones.

And if excuse like “but I did everything my job sheet said, and I got it signed off” or “but I was unable through the actions of someone else to complete my job sheet, but it clearly wasn’t my fault, so I got it signed off” become ever so slightly more annoying when we are not talking about a customer whose site is hard down with no net connection, but when we are talking about a village and 5,000 inhabitants turned into grit and brown paint.

So, brothers, it may be unpleasant to find yourself down alone behind enemy lines, but it will get several orders of magnitude more unpleasant if you are dumb enough to stick your head up outta your foxhole and ask where the pussy has gone.

 

March 8, 2013

Living in a virtualised world

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 10:39 am

I’ve been busy of late, hence the dearth of new posts..

My current gig is basically summed up thus, world + dog are chasing economies wherever they can find them (a good example is regional offices that years ago would have been on leased lines now being connected by xDSL) and so ACME corp’s 447 regional offices get new Cisco 887 adsl routers and all that, and the IT management can then be outsourced and offshored…. 447 expensive leased lines dropped, the in house 500 strong IT department sacked en masse, loadsa money saved, trebles all around at the bean-counters offices.

But some cunt has to turn up with the box and physically plug in the patch cables and so on, and when, not if, when that shit breaks, some cunt has to turn up and physically reset or repair the thing that cannot be fixed remotely…. even if that someone is just a remote pair of hands for a resellers resellers resellers reseller….

Don’t get me wrong, this shit is slick, but it is a basic engineering principle that the more layers of complexity you build up, the more there is to go wrong… which is why twice in the last week alone the NatWest Bank customers have seen all the ATM‘s simply stop working and no on-line banking either, and this is being repeated across the nation in all things IT.

Like the song says, Do your fucking job till the end

Till your job ends that is…. meanwhile back at the gig the crowd I work for are all gung ho, gangbusters and corporate image, which is fucking great while it lasts, which is by definition going to be a finite amount of time, we are hyenas feeding on corpses, for the moment it is a banquet…

I smile sweetly at them all, and friday rolls around and I think to myself that is another week’s money grabbed, wonder what next week will bring, because you see I am old enough and cynical enough to know that in this solyent green world, the crowd I work for can disappear with as little warning as the jobs of those we are replacing with little Cisco boxes (themselves now made in the Czech republic, oh the irony) went down the swannee…

They tell me about all the valuable skills and qualifications I can earn while working for them, and there is an element of truth in that, but I had valuable skills and qualifications in my previous trade of marine engineering, and they don’t put food on the table today, but my survivalist attitudes to life do, so what is more useful to me?

Never take a job you aren’t prepared to walk away from on a moment’s notice is a good motto, because already in this young and dynamic company I can see signs of the rot setting in, and the infection is spreading a lot faster than it did 20 years ago… I see this all over now, they will give some guy a £25k car to turn up at the customers premises in, because it looks good, but no 5 dollar uniform sweatshirt, just wear something of your own, and if you are given any tools they came from walmart, it is utter fucking madness…. exactly the same brand of utter fucking madness that created the jobs in do in the first place… by sacking all the IT staff and sticking in a remotely managed router and some switches.

Of course VOIP is all the rage, so when the cute little cabinet goes down the ACME corp regional office does not just disappear from the HQ WAN, all the fucking phone lines go down too… how many of these sites have all this shit running on a UPS, even a cheap and nasty will only keep it running for ten minutes SOHO job from APC or similar?

You got it, haven’t seen a single fucking one yet….

It is fucking dreadfully incompetent and amateurish, I don’t give a flying fuck how swish and fancy and cute all this remotely managed Cisco kit is, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care how impressive the tricks are that you can do, WHEN IT IS WORKING, I don’t care with what ease you can do quite complex tasks, WHEN IT IS WORKING, all I see is a system that studiously ignores the 9,000lb gorilla in the room, what the fuck do you do when it stops working, and their answer to that is to point at dudes like me…. whoooosh…

So anyway I’m chilling after a job yesterday with another of the field engineers, who is of a similar age to me, and we are discussing this, and the one thing my extensive experience has taught me…. and this is from the year dot of web servers on…

  1. The least likely person to bork such a box is the field engineer sat there physically in front of it, in true CYA mode he covers his ass at every step, when I am asked to type in console commands for a box that has lost connectivity to a remote IT management centre I read and spell everything back phoenetically, and then ask them, do you want me to press return now? No matter how simple the command.
  2. The MOST likely person to bork such a box is the remotely connected tech telnetting in or whatever, they don’t give a fuck, and this is before they get confused between the three other field techs they are talking to simultaneously to me.
  3. The MORE of a wizard the remote tech is, the WORSE they will bork the box…

All of which means that instead of us field guys being remote waldoes for the megamind remote admin guys, which is how all this shit is marketed by the bean-counters, we are just another point of failure, for exactly the same reasons that someone playing Call of Duty will have a different approach to a crunchie on the ground in Afdiggastan with actual bullets flying around…Networkfailure

Now these people, if you push them, will admit that there are things like the graphic above, a “cascade failure”, but these same cunts have never had to RECOVER from one, because the fact is they have never been in one, of if they have, they were but one node…

I can distinctly remember being in a large hydroelectric turbine hall when a (local) cascade failure hit, because one of the turbines was tripped out by a vibration sensor, which they think was caused by a log getting down into the vent, so one goes down, and it takes aaaaaages to spin down, but the SOUND is indescribably different when it is not under load, and then the next one went because it was overloaded thanks to the first one going down, and then then remaining three went almost together…. and everyone is stood there looking at each other and the hall lighting goes out, and emergency DC lighting flicks on and the turbines continue to spool down… it is the most eerie motherfucking experience… and it took on the onsite diesel gen set and four hours or work before they could start spooling up again, another two hours to get the first two turbines synced to the grid, and another four hours for the remaining three.

But they had ENGINEERS on site, not fucking remote wizards and the only thing on-site some field techs told on a phone press this button now, now press this one, now type this in, now move that cable from here to there, OK I’m in, you can go to the next job ta….

SLA’s, well SLA’s are fulfilled if the resellers reseller can get a warm body on site within 4 hours, that warm body doesn’t have to actually DO anything, or FIX anything, he is just there so the SLA penalties can’t be invoked.

What the people I am currently working for do not know, that I do, is this.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE, IS GREATER IN PRACTICE THAN IN THEORY.

So what happens in extreme cases, well someone ships a new box down, and it gets swapped out and we see if that fixes the problem, the only thing rarer than a UPS is the proverbial “smoking gun” when responding to an error call, nobody know what went wrong or what the causes were, and nobody gives a fuck, this job has had a 2 hour slot allocated to it, and that’s all there is.

Various three letter government agencies are waffling on about the threat of cyber terrorism, and hackers are getting sent to gitmo for 999 years of waterboarding pre trial, but the fact is that the real terrorists are all the fucking beancounters putting these bastard systems in place in the first fucking place, it isn’t IF it falls over, it is WHEN it falls over.

Currently these failures ain’t that bad, wossname bank goes down for 6 hours, wossname ISP goes down for 8 hours, wossname supermarket goes down for 4 hours, but no measures are being put in place to improve on this, on the contrary…. the opposite is what is happening.

Currently, cascade failures in IT have been confined to so called fucked up countries where fucked up stuff like the so called arab spring uprisings were going on, and again shit was blamed of guvvmint shutting shit down, hasn’t YET happened to a western country on the scale of the seventies east coast USA power grid cascade failure, which was ultimately caused by ONE part dying…  hasn’t happened YET.

But it’s gonna, why else is everyone getting the pre – emptive bullshit excuses in place about digital pearl harbours.

And it is not just ACME corp and your local supermarket and your local mobile phone shop doing this shit, it is also your local Court of law, your local Police station, your local lawyers, your local bank, your local hospital, and the technology is spreading in all these places.

Sure, they may well have a diesel genny out back that can be fired up to keep the lights on, but what fucking use is that when packets carrying everything from data to voice suddenly find no routes outside the LAN?

Which reminds me, next week’s money I need to buy myself a new NAS box and a couple of WD Red 3tb disks… lol

 

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