Just Sort Of, You Know…

in the early morning on Friday, the 27th of June 2008 by Chad

Ok, I get it.

Thousands of you ask every day for what’s going on with me, not just biting witty commentary on the news of the day. You want to know what I’m doing and such…

Fine.

Right now, a ham and cheese omelette and coffee. Leaving in a few minutes to head off to work, where first thing we’re having a meeting with the other side of the company’s messaging group that has been actively but poorly trying to sabotage our project.

You see, our group does engineering. Which means for a project we’ll take six months to a year, produce 10-20 full documents on requirements, design, implementation plan, QA testing, and so on. We’ve implemented the solution in a development network, and then in a QA network. We’re pretty darn good at what we do because we’re so thorough.

The group that thinks they’re equivalent to us in the parent company, well, they’re a buncha sys-admins. The senior manager missed a meeting the other day because he was doing trouble tickets. That’s ridiculous, but their entire group is very disorganized and incompetent as engineers.

But they’re blindly trying the power thing with us. They’re trying to stop our project from going forward that connects the corporate instant messaging systems. We’ve spent a year testing, configuring, finding bugs, and analyzing everything about this project. Then when it comes to their cooperation, they’ve been trying to throw out roadblocks left and right. Problem is, they’re damn amateur about it.

They want to know if its been tested. We throw over a QA analysis document showing 50 pages of test cases that have been completed successfully.

Their own people suggest changes to the design adding a dedicated SIP connector because their current SIP connector has downtime of hours per week. We change and test the design, and now they let us know that their IM software can’t handle multiple SIP connectors per domain.

I’ve only talked to two people in their entire group that has a clue about technology. And one is a consultant no longer able to talk on meetings because she’s a sales engineer for their IM vendor.

It’s frustrating because I could design a replacement design for their system in a few weeks that would support the 150,000 people they have using the current system. That’s what we do. What they do is use paper clips and masking tape to keep things running as much as they can. Notice I didn’t say duct tape, they’re not up to that level.

After that meeting though… smooth sailing. Might leave early and head over to the gun store and browse. Tomorrow night is a party at Bill’s new condo which will be pretty sweet. All the happenin’ folks will be there I’m sure. I’ll have to mow the lawn this weekend but no big deal there.

Next week taking a few extra days off. No plans, just going to enjoy the time.

So right now it’s 68 degrees, and 9% humidity. Got a full tank of gas and a full belly. Time to get off to the day job.