I Don't Even Have To Try

Grab your guns boys and girls. The red menace has finally made its move. Well, at least they were smart enough to start at our weakest point -- Georgia.

One can never underestimate the ignorance of the people on this planet. The internet was invented to prove this. Out of 1,000,000 people, three might know what the hell is going on and can spot the joke.

Personally, I think only one out of the 3 actually gets it and the other two agree with him to sound smart. And to illustrate stoopidity in the world I offer two items today. The first is found here -- Yahoo Answers, where Yahoo proves that Wikipedia is an anamoly -- Web sites that allow the masses to post and edit information only rarely provide intelligent and accurate information. Most of the people here are either too smart for their own good, or completely clueless.

Attack of the Russkies

My second illustration of the ignorance afflicting this planet -- My sister worked in the travel industry for years. Back when she was taking reservations for Gamma Airlines someone in her office got a call from a young serviceman who had just received his deployment orders. Being a good soldier, he called Gamma Airlines to book his reservation. Only problem was that he didn't know where he was going. He'd never heard of Maconga. No one in the reservation office had heard of it either. Folks were pulling atlases out and poring over World Encyclopedia maps. No one could figure out where Maconga was.

Could it be some small former soviet-bloc province? Maybe some tiny city in South Africa? Or perhaps a tiny island near Grenada?

Finally, a light bulb went off, and my sister asked the young man, "Could that possibly be Macon, GEORGIA, sir?"

It's great to see the military mind at work.

The Inmates are in Control, Part B

Now let us return to that special place that resides between what is and what could be, in a dark corner of the improbably chaotic, surreal, and ridiculous. That little patch of insanity that I call Work Is Hell, otherwise known as my job.

Previously our hero was attempting the herculean effort of navigating the red tape and barriers thrown up by the dastardly staff of the infrastructure services group. Ginger Lynn* and her cronies were stonewalling our man in his attempt to order some mission critical (at least to him) equipment. As we join him he is on the brink of snapping.

The problem is this. These people are morons. Complete. Utter. Morons. And I can't go around them.

For example, the friend who writes hardware specs I mentioned in Part 1 of this little saga, is actually the hardware procurement manager for a major web-based service provider. I sent him pretty much the same information I sent my infrastructure team. He replied within 10 minutes with a basic server configuration specification. I'm still waiting on the infrastructure team more than a week later.

Even if I had the exact hardware requirements and great documentation, I would still have to deal with this. I'll write up the spec, and then these same people will again say, "You can't do that -- we have to have meetings and discuss the funding and the purpose and whether it fits our strategic goals (which we haven't looked at since they were written five years ago) and by the way, have you checked to see if you could do this in Excel?"

And that is not bullshit.

This should only take 10 f*king minutes. But instead it will take at least another week of my time. A week I don't have and will never get back.

After multiple secondhand conversations, between my engineer contact and Ginger Lynn* and Ron Jeremy*, the infrastructure team has this recommendation: if we want to integrate the help system content with the ERP, we will need, get this, three servers. One database server (for the content indexes), one web server (which has to be secured out the wazoo because it is "public" facing), and the App server (contains and pushes the content out).

On a side note, perhaps you can explain this to me -- since the Help system will only be available to the "outside world" through the exceedingly secure ERP, why does it need to be so heavily secured itself. I'm sure there are a lot of good reasons, but nothing explains why we need to secure a server that contains absolutely no sensitive data on it. Unless we're worried some hackers are going to steal Mighty Mouse's Social Security number, or get Bruce Wayne's employee ID, I don't think we have to worry about this stuff. Most companies don't even bother securing this type of data. Is anyone really going to be able to hack our system because they know how to use the ERP to assign Service Indicators? I don't think so.

And here's another logic-challenging conundrum. Apparently, since power is such an issue here, we need to host these three servers on three separate machines -- that's physical machines, not virtual machines. Huh? Apparently our power problems mean we aren't configured correctly to power Blade Servers, and I guess I'm crazy to think one can create virtual servers on anything other than a Blade, ergo, our power problems require us to use three servers instead of one. Does anyone else expect Alan Arkin to show up just about now?

Now, if we decide not to integrate the help (which makes complete fucking sense since we wouldn't want anyone to actually know how to use the new system), we will still need two hardware servers. And, unless we can somehow manage the help system development without any administrative rights, we will have to purchase and support these servers ourselves. At least that's what I understand from my conversations with my engineer contact. Of course it would be helpful if we could have a meeting about this, but since I don't know the answers to the question I want to discuss in the meeting, I can't call the meeting. Makes sense.

I think the infrastructure team is possessed by the spirit of Dilbert's pointy-haired-boss. Either that, or that other Dilbert character, Mordac, The Preventer of Information Services, or probably the guy with the spoon - Phil, the prince of insufficient light, the ruler of Heck, the punisher of minor sins, the dark angel of demos:

Yossarian: Let me see if I've got this straight: in order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy and I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy any more and I have to keep flying.

The Inmates are in Control, Part Uno

Over the years I have worked at a variety of different places some small, some megalithic in size. In that time I have come to the not surprising conclusion that all companies are dysfunctional. And to paraphrase Oscar Wilde (?), all companies are dysfunctional in their own unique way.

This list includes a variety of issues and ills. One small startup company suffered from some major delusions of grandeur. An international conglomerate was more religion than multi-level marketing company.

Currently I work for a medium to gigantic (it depends on how you count) corporation. It suffers so many ills that it’s hard to know where to start. It’s equally hard to believe.

My latest trials and tribulations will have to serve for now.

Recently, I started (or tried to start) the process of ordering a web server and a database server. I’m pretty sure these can run on the same piece of equipment. The web server will host a help/training solution for our Enterprise resource planning (ERP) package. I don't expect a lot of heavy usage of this small help system, except at the beginning of the implementation.

The file server would house the shared content for developers to work with. The application is a process capture/playback tool that will (possibly) hook into the ERP. I know the fileserver piece will host a SQL database. But beyond that I’ve had difficulty discovering the actual hardware requirements. The associated installation documentation never deviates from the procedural style: Click this, Type that, wipe my butt. I think you know what I mean.

As I pursued this simple item, my encounters confirmed my worst suspicion: The people here have their heads so far up their asses they can watch their dentist at work.

All I want is a web-server/file server. I know nothing about writing hardware specs, but how hard can it be? A friend of mine does it for a living – and he used to be technical writer. Anyway -- Friday I met with an engineer who also knows nothing about writing any kind of hardware spec. He had talked to one of our managers in the infrastructure services area. He said we needed to talk to another manager (let’s call her Ginger Lynn) in his group who does database stuff. Of course, she was on vacation until today.

When Ginger Lynn got back she sent me a reply to my meeting request (which she tentatively accepted). It was classic SOP for this company:

Unless there is (sic) any database requirements for this software, my team would not be involved. You probably should ask Tera Patrick* (windows) and Ron Jeremy* (unix) to review the technical specifications. If there is (sic) staffing resources needed to implement and support this product, you would need to send the request to Rocco Siffredi* [ed. note: her director].

I replied with some more background – trying to explain this simple task. Her reply to that was also more red tape.

You will need to get the Windows and Unix teams included for these areas. I can only represent the database team. I think it would be best to put this request to Rocco Siffredi for his group involvement. What is the priority of this project? With other projects, security incident and the ERP go-live [ed. note: I did mention in my request that this was for the ERP implementation], resource availability for John’s team is limited. What funding is available for hardware/software for this project? Is this a product for which we are licensed [ed. note: WTF?]? What about using product X [ed. note: Again, WTF? Product X is a tool a different department purchased 2-3 years ago to track temporary employee’s hours for state reporting purposes. On an ironic side note – this has yet to be implemented, because they don't have a server!]

She goes on:

What do you plan on achieving in this meeting? I don’t have a space available that can hold more than three people. You can ask Bree Olson* if she knows of a room available or your admin. assistant.

If I weren't so angry, I'd cry. And trust me, this is very typical. In fact, the infrastructure group is so screwed up they seem to think every web application needs to reside on its own web server hardware. The other problem this request faces is something I've never heard affecting a company, especially one of this size -- most server requests are currently on indefinite hold because we don't have the power to support the servers we already have.

Then of course we have the other idiocies - Rocco Siffredi filled an entire room with server racks only to find out they are too small (or maybe too big) for our servers. Also, I'm pretty sure that the security incident referred to above was related to a DNS flaw -- the hacker was able to mimic a DNS and redirect traffic or something like that. This is just a hunch, but I think that flaw was publicly exposed and documented more than a week before the breach was discovered. The most annoying thing for me is, I don't think anyone will even be written up for this, never mind fired. Our CIO has really fostered a culture for accepting failure as standard practice.

I feel like a true idiot for working here.