How to avoid the work place blues.
Boredom at work is a
tragic yet
bugger issue in the
computing business.
We who weald the
black blade of '
IT' know that relieving boredom is not as easy as it sounds. There is only so much
porn, so much
music and so many funny
pictures you can
download. I shall share with you my daily
routine for
combating boredom.
I shall dispense this information....Now
Background – My name is king, I work for a large IT support company in the middle of England. I have been working here for a year and a few months and I hate it with a passion. As everyone does.
7am – Hey is that my alarm?, suppose this means I have to go to work… Oh well can’t be helped.
7.30am – Bugger…
7.45am – This bed is sooo comfy
7.50am – Time for a shower
8.00 – Breakfast in the hotel is bad again
8.10 – “You know, this is the English breakfast looks like sick on a plate…”
9.00 – Right, time for work. My first point of call is obviously the free coffee and drinks machine. At this time people are booting up their systems and doing menial user tasks like checking email. Perfect opportunity to restock my fridge with mars bars.
9.30 – I’ve had a few cups of black coffee and more than a few bars of chocolate, time to venture down to the IT directors office to pick up my ‘work’ for the day. IE the powerful Sanyo projector that belongs in the board room. The same Sanyo projector that I stuck a “broken” sticker on the day before…
Snacks and entertainment in hand I head to the conference room.
10.00 – It’s taken me half an hour to set the projector back up because I’ve covered the exhaust fan in melted chocolate. Won’t be long before the bulb blows…. Pop some random film into my laptop and away we go.
10.45 – Andy, my partner in crime, strolls in late as usual. Lazy bastards probably been up all night cultivating his ‘crops’. He arrives just in time for his favorite bit of Die Hard and we watch the film in peace until the end.
11.00 – Time to wander into our actual office
11.10 – still wandering
11.20 – it’s a long walk
11.30 - Finally here, that detour to the post office for fags really adds the minutes onto a journey.
11.35 – At my desk now, suppose I better check my email. Unsurprisingly there are around 40 or 50 emails from users at a well known British company, who shall remain nameless. From now on I shall call this company ‘D’.
11.36 – All the emails have been deleted now, time to check my personal email account. All the porn I want, free penis enlargement and if I send this email to 40people I’ll win an all expenses paid vacation to Hawaii you say? Sounds legit…
12.00 – This is when the Cron tables from the D company and all the other companies that use our software come in for inspection. For those who don’t know, a ‘Cron’ is a scheduled ‘job’ that comes from, typically, a UNIX based server. In real terms the Cron tables tell us techies what’s fucked up and where. On a normal day there won’t be a single Cron without some form of error. This is where our first game of the day comes into play. The game is simple. Hide and seek.
12.05 – Both Andy and I have left the office in search of suitable spot to campout. The rules are simple, First person caught by the angry screaming IT director loses. You cannot leave the office site and you cannot hide in female toilets (because the director wont go in there anymore) The point of this game is to be the one who doesn’t have to fix the problems in the Crons, If you could see our Cron lists you would realize how important this game really is…
12.25 – Twenty five minutes in and I’m holed up in the janitor’s closet. James, our one and only duty cleaner comes in three times a week to service our office and a damn good job of it he does too. I can say, with a clean conscience, that my bin has not been emptied in the last few weeks. Well done James, a pillar of the community.
12.30 – The situation has become tense. From here I can listen into the IT director’s office next door and it doesn’t sound good. It seems as though one of the big cheeses from the D company isn’t too happy about the failure of their JIRA server. For those who don’t know, JIRA is a fucked up bag of shit HTML type system that “enables” support staff to contact users easily.
Basically what’s meant to happens is;
An email for help is sent to the JIRA servers email address from a user.
This is then processed at magic light speed by the server
Then the server ships the email into a HTML file and smacks it on the intranet
Here everyone can view the email and the problem at ease with the help of lots of nice tools that do nothing.
The issue can then be assigned to a person or party. I.E. They can ether be bastards and assign it directly to me or saints and assign it to my company… so some other poor fucker (preferably on the helpdesk) can pick it up.
Now what really happens is…
A user sends a help request to JIRA
JIRA takes 4 hours to convert the email into HTML and plaster it all over a badly maintained and clinically fucked up webpage
JIRA then sends an email telling us about the JIRA… To every single person, not only the company I work for, but also all the companies that work for the D company. This is a fair amount of network traffic to say the least.
JIRA then sends the email a further 3 times just to make sure you got it.
JIRA then becomes so backlogged with useless data that it has to shut itself down before the database becomes corrupt.
In doing so JIRA kills the website thus causing the system a major fault and requiring a 2hour re-indexing session.
Fun
12.40 – I can hear the trail end of the conversation between Director Cheese and the IT director and it doesn’t sound good. The slam of the phone indicates that it might well the time to leave. Boss is on the war path…
12.45 – Only 15 minutes to go with no sign of Andy at his desk as I hurry past. He must still be hiding.
12.50 – Just as I duck into the kitchens I spot Andy being goose stepped back to his desk. Amateur.
12.59 – It’s about time to leave the kitchens and head back to claim my victory. The IT manager is still with Andy giving him the “Always one person at the systems desk at any time” talk. He asks me where I’ve been and my reply comes as smooth as silk. "Sorry, I’ve just been restacking our oracle database from this dumb terminal. It’s going to allow us to sort information faster through the UNIX servers...” Happy with this the Director returns to his crypt and I get back to work. Flicking rubber into Andy’s personalized mug,
Happy times…
13.30 – I have been at my desk half an hour and I’m already inundated with calls from worthless internal blood suckers asking for more disk space, more server space and more office space. I deal with one or two and head out to the coffee room. As usual it’s filled with workers slacking off talking about their painful lives, “my partner doesn’t love me” and the cat that was diagnosed with slack jaw disease last week. Fascinating…
14.00 – I return with the gargantuan mugs of coffee making sure to give Andy the one with salt in.
14.10 – It’s getting late in the day now and my rock solid will has started too droop like so many others. One look around the offices weary faces and the damage is obvious. Must be a rare case of co-worker psychosis. They need some entertainment…
14.15 – Andy and I decide to ‘mooch’ around looking for people to annoy and we’ve hit the jackpot. The coffee room is full of preppy sales reps who don’t know the first thing about what they are selling, just how to sell it. Simians. We mock a loud argument about the new policy on msn at work. How people using it will be severely disciplined.
It’s easy to clear a room if your talking amongst the right people isn’t it…
14.30 – It’s time now for one of our patented 2 hour lunch breaks. Basically the plan is; Get fish and chips from Amjed, our chippy come ‘rare herbs’ dealer, head over to the pool hall and play a few games with a few pints. Decent lunch break we think.
16.44 – Were back in the office and our desk is a sea of complaints. Apparently while we were ‘on lunch’ the D Company had a massive server failure. So actually what happened was one of our, extremely well paid and very highly trained, help desk staff decided it would be a good idea to take a trip into the wonderful world of the comms room. His mere presence there is an insult to all that Andy and I stand for so we take this matter to heart. We fix the problem and start the real task. Hunting down the culprit of this atrocity.
To cut a long story short we found the bastard. Sadly it was the IT Director. (This explains why he wasn’t screaming at us when the fault occurred…wanker)
We walked back to our office depressed.
This soon lifts with a good game of networked Unreal tournament. Bliss.
17.00 – Seventeen hundred hours. 8 hours, 480 minutes, 28800seconds.
Its time to go home…