Well, So Much For Making it Easier

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Due to a massive communications failure of which I was not aware until after a deadline had gone whooshing past, I spent my blogging time in a four-way e-conversation trying to sort something out and discover why I literally did not get the memo.

As the Air Force Academy student newsletter phrased it so well: Good communication is never having to say, “Huh?!?” Good communication . . . was not achieved.

I’m a third of the way through the edits on Horribly Familiar.

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11 thoughts on “Well, So Much For Making it Easier”

  3. “I checked the email. I checked the bulletin board. I checked the office mailbox. I **ASKED** the previous shift. Now, do you REALLY want to ask *me* why $THING wasn’t one the things we did on the shift?”

    • In my case, “Why did you send it to the e-mail system I do not have access to, even though you assigned me an e-mail account there while knowing that I don’t have access to it?”

      Blessings and glory and honor to [redacted] for getting the most important part of the mess un-fouled-up and the thing sent where it needed to go.

    • In one of my stints as a corporate IT sarariman I got called in for a Stern Interview. Apparently I wasn’t responding to trouble tickets within the maximum 30-minute response window. What was my excuse?

      Uh, *what* trouble tickets? Some system they’d bought and set up out in userland, on the Novell network. I wasn’t even connected to that network; I was the senior Unix admin. Oh, my responsibilities had been “expanded” to Windows user support. Even though I knew considerably less about Windows than anyone who might be sending me a trouble ticket. Yes, I am an initiate of the arcana of Unix printer setups, the zen of relinking the SCO kernel, and the secret lore of swapping ASCII PC data with EBCDIC mainframes. That doesn’t mean I know how to set up hanging indents in WordPerfect.

      And as for the 30-minute window, they *did* understand that lunch was an hour long, and that I normally worked the 10am-to-6pm shift, so I wasn’t even *there* for two hours of the userland workday? No? No, changing my shift wasn’t the answer, unless they wanted me shutting users down for system maintenance. They were aware that downtime cost four thousand dollars per hour? No? Maybe they should fribble off, then…

      When I hired in, I worked for the Director of Information Services. By that time, I had no less than four “supervisors”, each with an office, and no particular duties I ever discovered. We finally agreed that one of the supervisors could check “my” tickets, and then walk out to my cubicle and inform me if there was something that needed my personal attention.

      I guess that was about where I realized that, much as I liked computers, I hated being a sarariman.

  5. I have long-standing issues with people who expect without communicating. Or worse. I admire your patience and forbearance.

    • “I said it in Hebrew, I said it in Dutch, I said it in German and Greek.
      But I wholly forgot (and it vexes me much) that English is what you speak!”

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