Stress caused severe vomiting at work, luckily no-one saw. The problem with being the unoffical office moral booster is no-one expects you to complain. No expects you to play at office politics either. My offical job title has yet to be decided, 1.5 years after I started. It used to be developer, that was easy, everyone knew where I stood. Now it's either Internet R&D or Emerging Technologies, more of a function that a title. Aside from the R&D role I tend the code monkeys, running their 50 servers, guide my network minion on the rare occasions he needs it, and generally look after the office network, as I get to play R&D on it, like rolling out Active Directory so we know what we're developing code for.
Currently I'm looking at the mobile space. WAP, NTT DoComo/iMode, Symbian, Windows CE and so on. This is generally fun, I tend to attend a lot of bleeding edge conferences and briefings and steer the developers towards coping with the new toys that are becoming available. Except now a consultant wants to play. I don't have a problem with that, if they listen. The problem arises in that a customer wants to pick my brains. It's cool, they pay for half a day of my time each week and I go have coffee with them and steer their strategy. It's laid back. They value my geekdom. On top of this I'm trying to keep the sales staff briefed on the upcoming goodies. The consultant decided last week his niche was not enough. He wanted to setup a mobile strategy group. Fine, I don't mind technically checking stuff. But thats not enough. He scheduled a meeting on Thursday afternoon, the same time as I see the customer. I declined the meeting invite. He then sends an email asking why I declined (guess he didn't check my calender) and demanded I
a) attend his meeting
b) present an hour long briefing on iMode
c) run my work schedule by him, so he can approve whatever I do.
and he copied the technical director on the email. Well bugger me. I don't think so. See I have an advantage. The technical director is a family friend. I go round for dinner. I babysit his kids. His wife sets me up on blind dates. I replied sweetly, stating that customers are more important, and if he wishes to schedule my time here is my sechdule for the next week. It was broken down into 30 minute chunks. There is a lot on it. He walked past my desk on his way out, glared at me, and stomped off.
That was problem number 1. Number 2 was a designer, who decided to upgrade her operating system, without help. She hadn't backed up. She didn't know what NTFS was but thought it sounded good. Oh dear. Afternoon spent rebuilding a machine, as the network admin was building developer boxes, and it's his turn to play with new kit. I am nothing if not fair.
Problem 3 was despite daily warnings for a week that the scratch server was being cleaned down, 4 people didn't move their temporary files. They're gone. Fuck em. Well not really, but I said I could restore them tomorrow. Let them suffer.
Problem 5 was the corporate DHCP died at 8am, and wasn't back till midday.
Problem 6 was a raid array died completly, and I had to stay till 19:45 to get it back up and running. When I find out who configured as just striped they're toast.
Add on top of this rain, big puddles, large lorry, wet clothes I'm going to curl up and cry.
Oh, and my potential date is back from her holiday, but no contact at all today.
My ulcers are coming back.