Scenario At Work: A required resource service is not functioning properly.

Manager: Get somebody to fix it. ASAP!
Me: Will do.
[Me contacts internal support]
Me: Did we change something in the configuration? Product X is borked.
Internal Support: Nope. Everything is dandy. Try contacting the provider.
[Me contacts provider’s support hot line]
Me: Your service is not working properly. Please check.
ABC Support: Thank you for contacting Company ABC’s support hotline where (long spiel about how they are $DEITY’s gift to my poor existence). We’ll ask our technical team to look at it. Here is your cookie reference number.

[after an hour]
Manager: Well?
Me: (looking up from the pile of tasks being worked on) Err, ABC support hasn’t called back yet. Ill follow it up.
Manager: Should have done that eons ago…
Me: right! (whispering inside my head: and i am just twiddling my thumbs here… )

[calls ABC hot line]
Me: Im calling regarding reference number 123456. Any updates?
ABC Support: Thank you for contacting Company ABC’s support hot line where (long spiel about how they are $DEITY’s gift to my poor existence). Tech team has stated that they don’t see any problem with your service. It must be something internal (read between the lines: you are a stupid customer. all of your problems are your imagination. ITS NOT OUR FAULT, ITS YOURS). Please check your lines again.
Me: [groan]

[calls internal support]
Me:ABC said there is no problem from their side. Are you sure there isn’t any test that we need to do to isolate this?
Internal Support: We already executed all tests. Everything is still dandy.
Me: (whispering in my head: Oh crap) Uhhh, ok.

[puts down phone, somebody speaks up from behind]
Manager: Well?
Me: (startled) uhh, wait a second.

[pulls open the drawer, takes out the gun, points it in my temple and pulls the trigger]

Problem solved.

Note: Manager, ABC company, and Internal support are all fictitious characters. But they represent somebody real though may not be their literal counterparts.

ciao!

I wasn’t able to say a face-to-face goodbye to my “adopted” protege when she had her last day in the company since my wife and I are leaving for our annual vacation to Bohol and I was working from home the previous day. I never liked good-byes anyway and it isn’t like I will not be communicating with her after her stint with the “COMPANY”. 🙂

I have already experienced leaving a company and, many times over, have experienced being the one left in the company. Each one is hard but this one is special so I decided to write a homage to Joypo. I can’t say I am devastated since I am actually happy for her. I don’t know if its eagles or condors, but some birds teach their young how to fly by dropping them off from the safety of their nest. I won’t grab the whole credit for mentoring this specific hatchling but I think it is my due to say that I have some contribution in kicking her quiet @$$ over the edge. 🙂

For those interested, her name is not really Joypo. I have this habit of encoding the names in my phonebook and that is the name I gave her number. It is actually my wife who coined the codename because when she first talked to Joy she said she is very respectful that she inserts “po” (the Filipino term for respect) multiple times in a sentence that she started referring to her as Joypo. We have a lot of friends named Joy so it gave an easy to recall distinction. 🙂

Enough of the segue. Let me just list down the reasons why this lone wolf has taken an interest in taking this hatchling under my spiny wing:

• She was my real first subordinate. My supervisor then advised that I need to learn how to manage somebody if I want to better my chances of getting promoted to a lead position. Joypo was my first victim. 😀
• Since our work as all-around tech support and interim project infrastructure admins were very technical in nature and requires some hefty lifting (computer miniaturization was not that prevalent back then), I was actually expecting to get a male subordinate. Instead I got this wiry lass. But she proved me wrong by being my yardstick of what qualities a “DevArch” apprentice should have.
• She was my gender equalizer. I still laugh about the amount of flak I received when I actually made her lift and transport whole workstations from one cube to another. I just shrugged my shoulders to my “critics” and said it is part of the initiation for the team. Every devarch should experience lifting and moving workstations. Funny thing is that it became true. 😀
• I vowed that any devarch apprentice should just have the technical capabilities and I will handle fitting them with horns needed when coordinating with external resources. Joypo, with her uber-religious background, gave me a challenge. I think I was able to grow her some sharp horns. Unfortunately she also uses them on me. /lol
• I admire her guts. She actually gave me a prayer book. ME! A PRAYER BOOK! I wasn’t an agnostic back then but what the hell? I think I still have that prayer book in my cabinet. No offense Joy, I just have this habit of not being organized when it comes to my possessions. I value the thought more than the actual physical object. 🙂
• I value her honesty and inputs even if she doesn’t think so. Once I asked her if she thinks I am a good leader. She bluntly replied “Opo, kahit nakakainis na kayo minsan (Yes, even if you are sometimes irritating)”. I couldn’t feel more validated and prouder. 🙂

I think I am obligated to talk her out of leaving but I don’t think that makes sense coming from somebody who has left a previous company for greener pastures. I would only do such thing if I don’t think the person has thought things through but I had no doubt Joypo has already weighed all the possibilities.

So see you around kiddo. This industry is too small and too connected to be a stranger.

Me and Joypo in her farewell libre 🙂

ciao!

I like freebies may it be useful or a one-time quirky curiosity thing. I admittedly have a weird standard on what counts as curious which sometimes explain the amount of trash in my storage spaces. My wife calls them junk, I call them as my collection of “probably usefuls”. 😀

I also have this limit on what I would like to get. To the probable disbelief of those who know me, I can say no to a freebie especially if it fails to rouse my interest. One such thing is the freebie that the company hyped and gave its employees: a dog tag.

Not the actual dogtag freebie

Yes, a dog tag. And no ordinary dog tag like what is in the image above. The dog tag is engraved with a list of qualities that the company wants everybody to be governed with in their everyday life; to breathe and live so to speak. The thought is sweet but I wonder what kind of crack is being smoked by the person who conceived this “promotion.” This is for the same company who revamped the design of its electronic badges because it doesn’t want the badges to have a distinct link to the company as a form of security against lost and forged badges.

The day they sent out the invite, Mike and the others in the Bench project was asking if I was going to get my dog tag. I gave them a big “HELL NO!” for the simple reason that I don’t see any practical nor interesting use for it. I like war video games like the Medal of Honor series which revolves about war campaigns but I am not fanatical enough to consider dog tags as a cool accessory. I also don’t have any dog that I can attach the tag. 😛 I am also trying to minimize the weight of my electronic badge since its weight alone is already noticeable. I gave a tongue-in-cheek retort that maybe we can collect all the dog tags in the project team and sell them in the junkyard for twenty pesos and buy ourselves two sticks of banana-que. 😛 Nope, I am not going to go into long queues to redeem that.

Early last week a company memo was sent to the email system which made me drop my jaws with laughter. The memo was warning against selling the tags and giving them away to non-company employed persons (e.g., friends, family, etc.). Much as I find it funny that somebody had the cajones to actually sell the tags, it kills me to think that somebody actually bought the craptag. /lol

And then here is the final kicker: I was told that the tags, like the electronic badges, should not be displayed when outside the company premises as they provide a direct link to the company. They should be hidden when going outside.

Yeah right, like I would go through the hassle of queuing for the tags, weighing down my e-badge, and then remind myself to keep it hidden from plain sight. I wonder if the organizers of that promotion really believed that people would wear them in company premises willingly. I can’t figure out any reason though but there must be something out there even if they are beyond normal reasoning.

Maybe they should have given out board magnets. Or maybe paper weights. Or maybe something useful like a shirt, notebook or bookmarks.

[update] Curiously enough, another memo is sent out regarding this illustrious freebie. It seems the voice of the disgruntled is strong. The memo clarifies that the dogtag can be worn outside office premises but should be on a separate chain than the e-badge. The rationale is that the dogtag, which displays the company name, will link the e-badge back to the company if it gets lost. That makes sense, sort of. The wife makes a strong argument against that logic: but WE KNOW that badge is from your company. Apparently taking out the company name and colors from the badge will prevent outsiders from putting two and two together and arrive at the conclusion that persons wearing badges coming out of offices with big company logo is not affiliated with the company. Yeah, that makes absolute perfect sense. In the ideal world, everybody hides the badge every time they go out.

Oh, I got a deed here for the Guadalupe bridge for anybody willing to buy it. I am selling it cheap. 😀

ciao!

Nazistic proxy love that is.

For the first time in 5 years in the company I finally experienced being ‘benched’. That is the local term for any resources who are in-between projects. After going through several mind-benders, I figured this is a welcome opportunity to get some training done.

I have two options, either go for the trainings in the company online learning repository or pursue more job-directed tutorials that proliferate the net. In my perspective the second option means a wealth of information right in my fingertips as soon as I get clearance from my superiors that I can do so. First I have to make sure that I have completed all of those mandatory trainings. Ok, fair enough. I even tried taking some of the available CBTs to (in the words of my counselors) “round-up my non-technical skills.” Being a geek by nature, I can describe those trainings in two words: boring and under-estimated. Boring does not need further explanation and yes I already sent the proper feedback. Under-estimated means that the allocated time to complete each course is severely underestimated. My impression is that whoever timed these courses have used people gifted with super-human reading and compression skills. For the rest of us, good luck in finishing the courses in the allocated time. Think about what you can remember on the course on your way home.

After the non-technical traiing torture has ended, I set my sights on these cool Java frameworks and technologies that I kept promising myself that I would get an overview. I am talking hibernate, spring, struts, aspect oriented programming, design patters, eclipse framework, and what have you. The mere thought makes me salivate. 😀

First in line is the spring framework as this is being touted as the emerging de facto standard for J2EE development. The spring home site has a nifty tutorial that is easy to follow. Since the tutorial uses Apache Tomcat for deployment and testing and I am using Eclipse as my IDE, it makes logical sense to install an Eclipse plug-in to manage the Tomcat start/stop process. That is the goal of IDEs in the first place: so you have a one-stop shop for all your development needs.

Ok, now to put the good idea in practice: Fire up google, search for “best eclipse tomcat plugin”. What do you know, the first few hits lists the eclipse plug-in central site. The cherry is that you can sort based on rating and the best one is the sysdeo plugin which I remember using eons ago. This is where the love entered the scene: clicking the plug-in homepage returns a proxy blocked page because it is classified under “Freeware and Software Download”. Very nice. /roll-eyes

And now in order to use this “should-have-been-a-great-idea” I need to secure a manager’s approval, hunt down whoever is managing the elusive Websense white-list, make the actual appeal, probably need to secure a local security exception for something that common sense should dictate as something useful, which in turn would probably result to securing a global exception, and then doing the whole red-tape-esque dance of e-paper processing. Assuming my request gets approved I guess my grandchildren who would be in the company by then be able to use an Eclipse Tomcat plug-in if I am careful enough to word it that the request is not version-constrained. 🙁

Or I can circumvent the process by downloading the plugin from outside the external network and then send it in.

Or revert to using one command terminal to start tomcat, and then my IDE for development.

Guess which one won? Yay for progress and efficieny. CLI rules. 🙁

ciao!