The week was Teh Suck

I thought last week would never be done; it just went from bad to worse.  And most of it was to do with work stuff.

For some time now, our team has been shedding head count on purpose, as we trim down to meet the goals set for company-wide head count reduction.  Since January, we’ve gone from forty members to thirty-two twenty-four.  (Granted, we also got rid of a lot of make-work that accounted for forty percent of our total chat volume, so it mostly balanced out.  Mostly.)  However, we continued to have problems with not enough people being available to take chats after noon, with level-one techs having to wait several minutes to get a Resolver to help them.  Emails flew regularly saying “only one Resolver in chat, where are all the others scheduled to be on right now, please jump in.”

It was an open secret that our chat application had reporting problems, not logging all the traffic that was going through it.  What wasn’t obvious was how badly wrong it was, until three weeks ago I finally stood up (virtually; I was on a con-call) in an operations review with the Tulip, his counterpart in Gemini, my great-grandboss and said “now, LOOK.  I been countin’ (true; I’d been keeping a log sheet for a month) and by my count the chat client is failing to count between twenty and thirty percent of the chats I take.  I got the numbers to back me, and I’ll be happy to share them with anyone wants to see.  Presuming everyone else is seeing the same number not counted that I am, and knowing that you’re using the chats-logged number to forecast volume and scheduling, NO WONDER we got trouble!”

Well, at that point it was official:  the Emperor Had No Clothes.  All over sudden we get this panicky email from my new manager (the Tulip has gone off to be a project manager) and the manager in Gemini, telling us that for the next two-three weeks, until they could figure out what was going on and re-spin a new schedule, it would be All Chat, All the Time for everyone on the team, and here was a tick sheet we were to keep, so they could demonstrate exactly how much was being lost for everyone, not just for me.  Ever since, we’ve been ground into the dirt with All Chat, All the Time.  (And if you don’t think doing that’ll grind you into the dirt in a hurry, just you swap jobs with me for a few days.)  It hit me particularly hard because at the same time, I discovered a Major Addressing Problem with one of our big, BIG accounts that I used to work on (Company E), that had the potential to cause a myriad failed service calls, and I was being asked to participate in the “WTF do we do now??” meetings—and I couldn’t be there.

Then to add to the misery, Thursday morning I took an escalation from someone at a school district in Virginia who had fifty systems that he wanted to boot to a USB drive so he could pull down pre-made hard drive images from a server, and avoid the labor of installing ’em all by hand.  I got a copy of the software he was using, and spent all day struggling with it.  It never did work, and by two o’clock I was so frustrated and frazzled that I got careless with a copy of FDISK—and deleted all the partitions on my own workstation’s hard disk.  EVERYthing gone, beyond any hope of recovery.  That meant I got to reimage my workstation, and spend the rest of Thursday and half Friday morning configuring it to a point of minimal usability.  I lost most of my Company E files, all my Outlook archives (TG, I had the gumption to put my main mailbox on a network drive, so that survived), and most of the supporting files for the chat statistics (but not before I’d turned in the most important parts to my team lead, so the work wasn’t all in vain).  Other casualties included a hundred CDs worth of music I’d ripped to the hard drive, so I could listen to music at work without having to shlep CDs back and forth every day.  (I was probably gonna have to remove them soon anyhow, due to new IT policy.)

I sure hope this week has less suckositude to it.

The photograph of your aunt disambiguates some stored drywall screws.  Fnord.