Rants and Revelations

Wow, never thought I’d utter that sentence.

Every two years, I have to re-take the Health Safety and Environment Orientation for contract employees. In the past, that’s always required me to show up at the HSE office at 7am, sit with a bunch of the type of contractors who do actual work (you know, with tools and stuff instead of computers), and be lectured on the proper way to dispose of dirt or what to do if your backhoe (or computer, in my case) accidentally ruptures a line carrying something nasty. Usually the lecturer is some grumpy old guy who reminds me of Jasper in that Simpson’s episode where he ends up teaching a class in the school. “Using a camera? That’s a paddling. Smoking on the property? Immediate firing, then a paddling. Improperly disposing of construction garbage? First we fine your employer, then fire you, then a paddling.” And of course, I can’t tell you how useful it is to know that I’m not allowed to use Kodak ladders or oxygen lines in my line of work.

This year, however, they’ve got on-line training. And not only that, but they have different training for outside workers and office workers. So I clicked the link, and got a stupid animated guy pointing at a button on the side menu saying “Start by clicking this button”. “Fuck that”, I thought, and clicked on the button marked “Final Assessment”. I took the test, got 10 out of 10, and got the certificate, all in way less time than I’m wasting on writing this blog post. So hooray for on-line training where you skip the boring bits (ie. all of it) and go straight to the incredibly obvious test questions.

BTW, the test questions were all on the order of “Where do you dispose of waste? A) toss it over the fence onto non-Kodak property, B) make a big pile and set fire to it C) put it in designated containers or D) Your contract will have instructions on proper waste disposal” And I’m not kidding, that is pretty much verbatim. (BTW: The correct answer is D - sometimes the contract will require you to remove the waste yourself.)

I’ve got an idea: When you’re trying to motivate people, don’t try to promote the concept of “Teamwork” by showing something that was built by slaves at the whim of a despot, which killed millions of the people involved in its construction, and which failed miserably at its design goal. Just sayin’.

If I ever write a book about management, my first rule will be:

If you don’t trust your experienced employees, then the only people who will want to work for you are people who know they can’t be trusted.

Unfortunately, that’s the only rule I have, so the handbook will probably have to wait.

A. Evidently, when it’s given to you by your boss’s boss’s secretary.

Every month, we have to fill in this stupid charge code thing. It’s especially stupid for me, because I only ever have one charge number, so it’s just a matter of pulling out my timesheets for the month and adding up the numbers. But it’s always due on the last business day of the month. So we get a reminder email saying “Please have your [foo] hours in by noon on Friday” about a week before. Then we get another reminder at the beginning of the week. Then a few of us get another email a few days before it’s due. And then today, 21 hours before the deadline we were given, my boss forwards me an email from the secretary saying “I sent these guys three reminders already and they still haven’t put in their time”, and a note from the boss saying “PUT THEM IN ASAP!”. WTF? If the deadline is noon tomorrow, why can’t I put it in tomorrow morning? I wrote back to her saying “if noon Friday isn’t the real deadline, why were we told that was the deadline?”

The way I see it, I have a very good reason for waiting. I’m paid hourly. That means if there is nothing for me to do, (and or the weather is nice for flying or kayaking), then I have a duty to bugger off and stop costing them money for nothing. So I don’t put in my hours until the last minute, because I could end up putting in my hours on Thursday morning and then run out of task so need to take off Thursday afternoon.

So I guess it comes down to: do they want accurate numbers, or is this just an exercise in bureaucratic masturbation?

Update:
Oh, it gets better. Here’s an email from my boss

Curious why you can’t just complete a simple little task without making a big deal about it and copying in the rest of the team. In doing so you take up additional time on their parts as well as mine. Mike and Wanda review the input prior to noon to ensure it is correct. Noon is the actual cutoff time in the system. I find it absolutely ridiculous the amount of time it takes us chase all of you down each month. You have an entire month to put your time in - why wait until the very last minute to do so?

I’ve been thinking a lot about working overtime, mostly because I’ve been doing a lot of it. I haven’t taken a day off since the day after Christmas, as I struggle to meet an impossible deadline.
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I have an urgent need for the Dilbert cartoon where Alice assaults a cow orker for having a prolonged loud conversation right outside myher cubicle. Either that, or I need help hiding the body. I think the cartoon ends with the person’s head being pounded down to his belt buckle and him yelling “melp”.

My contract got extended. Only for 6 months this time, but man that’s a load off my mind.

I hate this holiday brinksmanship. I bet nothing sucks worse than getting told your contract won’t be renewed the week before Christmas.

Any time I’m feeling that my job sucks, I just have to watch a few episodes of “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe”, and suddenly I don’t feel so bad. There are some pretty horrible and thankless jobs out there, and the people who do these smelly, disgusting, dirty, dangerous and/or back-breaking jobs make civilized life possible for the rest of us.

It’s coming up to the end of my contract. My boss’s boss’s boss asked all the contractors for copies of our resumes to help him get approval to renew the contracts, as we’ve all been here far longer than is allowed by company policy, and so he has to do whatever crafty tricks he does in order to keep us. But I figured a good resume isn’t a bad thing to have if his tricks stop working, so I spent some time on it and asked some friends to review it.

My old resume was, in the words of one person who looked at it, a “bit last millenium”. He suggested that I find a nice template somewhere and redo it. The problem is that I like having the resume there on the web both for portability and accessibilty, and most of the templates you find are Microsoft Word. But in googling around, I stumbled across a pretty nice looking resume that was implemented as an XML file with an XSL file to translate it into html. Now that is 21st century! Unfortunately, I lost the link and the guy’s name in my rush to stealadopt his technology. The XML has optional “hide=’true’” attributes so you can leave out different bits for different applications, although I haven’t made use of that.

The new resume looks pretty good. Have a look. Offer me a fulfilling job with lots of money.

As I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Hey, Google, Google still hasn’t reimbursed me for my hotel, cab and food while I was in New York City. Today, I discovered why. Evidently when one of their recruiters leaves them, instead of arranging some sort of orderly transfer of her unfinished work to somebody else, they just throw all her email into the garbage and mark any mail that she hasn’t dealt with “Return to Sender” and send it back. I got my reciepts back, over a month and a half after I sent them, which means that undoubtedly they fished them out of her inbox rather than just refusing them at the front door. So I wrote to the only other recruiter there I have been in contact with, and he gave me the name of a third recruiter that I need to send all my stuff to, including the claim form that I’d emailed to the first recruiter on July 21st.

You know, if their tech departments were run as well as their recruiting organization, Microsoft could stop worrying about them.

A few weeks ago we had a “lessons learned” session where all the developers, QA people and field circus engineers got to talk about why development cycles are getting longer, we’re finding more and more bugs, and people are getting more disgruntled. It was amazing how many people thought that what we really need are clear requirements that don’t change from day to day, proper development methodologies, design review meetings, code reviews, etc. At the end of the meeting, our boss’s boss came into the meeting and the meeting facilitator gave him a precis of what was going to be in his report. On the way out of the meeting, a developer who is just as experienced and cynical as I turned to one of our younger colleagues and said “You realize that now that we’ve had the meeting and had a chance to vent, management will think the problem is fixed”.
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This morning I was investigating a problem at a customer site where their Manager (a program I wrote most of) is hanging. Thanks to “kill -3 pid” I discovered it was building a tool tip. Thanks to a database query, I found that the tool tip it was building was trying to display 430,000+ identical date ranges. Hmmm, looks like we’re going to be a while, and probably a little short of screen real estate at the same time.

I did a few database commands to remove the 430,000+ records and put back one copy of it. (I’m sure somebody has a command that will do both in one step - I did a “delete” followed by an “insert” because I’m lame.)

The Field Engineer at the customer site wrote to ask if I could tell him the database commands in case this happens again. I politely declined. I told my boss that this would be somewhat like giving handguns and tequila to a bunch of 9 year old boys. Repeat after me:

I’m sorry, you appear to have totally hosed the database. You’re going to have to wipe the database and re-injest all your content. You’ll probably be up and running again in two days or so.

One of the “joys” of working in a large, old, poorly maintained and shrinking chemical plant is the constant barrage of dangerous chemical smells. I used to walk from the parking lot to the entrance under a pipe bridge that carried a bunch of pipes, one of which was labelled “Ketone”. There was often a strong smell of aromatic hydrocarbons under that bridge.

Today, just after I’d posted my previous posting, three company firemen were standing in front of my cube, wearing breathing tanks on their backs (but thankfully not using them). One of my co-workers came by and said he’d reported a nasty smell and something dripping onto his desk from the ceiling above, and they’d come out.

Our project has a custom of handing out free movie ticket coupons every year as sort of a bonus. In the past, either one of the admins has handed them out, or just stuck them in an interoffice envelope. No ceremony or fuss.

This year, my boss Nancy comes over. She says that she’d had to go through my pimp for this (and I’m suddenly thinking “hey, is this my first raise in 5 years?”) and then congratulates me for a good year and hands me the movie tickets. Sure enough, as well as the usual cover letter from my boss’s boss, there is another one from the pimp agency. Knowing it went through them, I immediately counted the coupons to see if they took 35% of them. But no, it appears they’re all there. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Somebody has put up a bunch of those oh-so-inspirational quotes where business leaders said something really stupid. I’m not sure how these are supposed to inspire us, especially since almost all of them are urban legends. One of them I walk by every day says

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

— William Orton, president of Western Union, in 1876

I’m trying to figure out the clip art they used for a banner on the quote, because I really want to replace it with

“These digital cameras are a fad. People will always want the quality that they can only get with film”

– Any Kodak executive from 1975 to about 2005