I nearly cracked the sads and left work mid-afternoon today. I was doing my usual ‘extremely polite email responses to complete idiocy’ trick, where the more annoyed I am, the more polite and urbane the language I use in email. I get quite formal, in fact. I have single-handedly made the work ‘sub-optimal’ a common euphemism in my department. Today was another in a string of days where I have to restrain myself from flaming someone into oblivion for some completely random act of stupidity. We all make mistakes, right?
Sure, but we don’t all make them consistently, repeatedly and after we’ve just been told exactly what not to do. When I say make the file readable by my userid, I expect that that is what will happen. Not owned and readable only by root. I also don’t expect someone to run a packet capture for 70 hours when I specifically asked that it be run for a well defined test, especially after being warned in the same email what that would mean. Before you ask, yes, I had to trawl through a 72 Megabyte packet trace file to find the information I wanted, and couldn’t filter the data unless I wanted to wait 15 minutes for ethereal to scan over a quarter of a million packets just so I could get the datestamp in non-relative mode.
I could say that this means I have enormous job security, because if these clowns can keep their job, I shouldn’t have any trouble, right? This assumes I want to continue having roles with this level of hair-pulling frustration attached to them. I left the helldesk years ago for a reason. It’s not fun, and I don’t like doing it. Just because I’m good at it doesn’t mean you should give me lots of it. Ditto documentation. I don’t know who said it, but they were right: Hell is other people.
I’m off to bed to read some Calvin & Hobbes, scratch the cat’s ears and get a good night’s rest. With a bit of luck, a wandering band of Clues will set up camp overnight somewhere near the weenies I’m currently dealing with.