Category: Work

This one's mostly for me, to help sort out the exact reasons why I told my previous employer to go take a hike. The reason I've been giving when asked is, "Lack of Leadership," but that's only a small part of it.

When I started at the place that will henceforth be known as Head-in-the-Sand Central, it was a godsend. We'd moved to Denver two months earlier, and while Ben had guaranteed employment secured beforehand, I had thrown my very stable and secure life up in the air to move here and despite my experience and history, had been unable to find work. After two months of filling out application after application with nothing to show for it, when I got a call from a temp agency (the same agency who'd placed me at my previous job in Phoenix that ended up lasting seven years) for this "emergency" 3-month contract position, I was literally down to my last ten dollars.

I'm starting to fear that I may be faced with that situation again, because despite submitting countless applications online, I've only managed to secure a single bonafide face-to-face interview since August—and that was an unmitigated disaster. I've had a couple very good phone interviews, one of which is supposed to be followed by a face-to-face sometime this week, but despite the number of "available" jobs, it's been pretty slim out there. What I don't understand is that my resume is almost a bullet point match for most of these positions' posted requirements—and yet I've heard nothing—other than the couple of outright rejection emails I've received. (This does not come as a complete surprise because about a year ago I got a response to one application I submitted just after we moved here.)

About the only people I have heard from are the questionable Indian placement agencies that have vacuumed my resume off the job boards that I absolutely refuse to deal with.

But back to Head-in-the-Sand Central, I had a bad feeling from the moment I walked in. But let's face it—at that point desperation had set in and I leapt at the opportunity to get back to work without even having to go through the interview process. Even when the reason for this "emergency" became clear (my predecessor had been fired the day before amid a meltdown of both their mail and file servers), I chose to ignore the warning klaxons going off in my head. Even if it was only a 3-month contract, it was a paycheck and we needed to get the hell out of that pot-infused hotel and resettled!

I came to HITSC with a set of "best practices" in place that I learned at my previous job. Nothing about the company spoke best practices of any kind, and more than once I found myself wondering, "How does this place stay in business?" There was no documentation, no inventory tracking, and next to no I.T. standards and procedures. HIPAA compliance on the desktop was laughable. "What do you mean I have to lock my workstation?"

I soon learned that not only were there approximately 20 single-purpose servers (for a company of only about 300 employees), the majority of them were aging, desktop class machines. The mail server that crashed prior to my arrival (and to this day remains tied into the system—though no longer active in that role—because no one knows all its dependencies and is too frightened to simply disconnect it outright) is a seven-year-old Dell desktop. The domain server was an 11-year old 512MB Dell desktop running Windows 2000. (That server was finally virtualized onto proper HP hardware after it crashed last summer, but they didn't want to spend the time or money to upgrade it to Server 2008, so it's still running Windows 2000.)

Okay, I thought, this stuff can be fixed. The mail server and the file server had to be replaced because of their outright failure. (There had been no reliable, trusted backup, of course.) But what I soon realized was that management had a strange attitude of not only resistance, but outright denial that anything was wrong with the existing infrastructure. Seriously?

Tom (my boss) the I.T. Director, brought in an outside consulting firm to help clean up this mess, and to their credit they came with some really good ideas. But again, the push-back from management was palpable—especially when presented with the cost of making things right.

You would think that a company lives and dies by providing reliable services that demand data integrity to outside companies would be a little more concerned that their infrastructure was held together with the digital equivalent of duct tape and chicken wire. But no! Maybe I'm crazy, but $65,000 in hardware and another few thousand in billable time to get this mess cleaned up did not seem out of line to me.

And don't even get me started on the connection between the Denver and Colorado Springs offices—supposedly a multiple T1 pipeline that has the actual throughput of a dialup connection. And they wonder why things don't work.

Anyhow, I got along well with Tom; we both were in agreement as to the critical nature of getting this disaster-waiting-to-happen cleaned up. He also convinced the company that they needed me full time to handle the day-to-day desktop support of the company (they had at one point been considering outsourcing that to the network consultants as well) and I was hired on as a full employee. The first few months went well, even if I was making significantly less money for more work than I'd been in Phoenix. I could deal with the little annoyances I encountered and much like my previous supervisor, Tom "got" me.

Needing the kind of organization to maintain my own sanity that was sorely lacking in this company, I began creating documentation for all desktop-related procedures, including the standard PC builds and general troubleshooting guides. I also brought the inventory tracking expertise I had gathered at my previous job to bear—and for the first time in what I understood was forever, the accounting department actually had everything they needed in that regard when it was time for their annual audit.

Then my boss quit. Or was forced to quit.  I don't remember the exact circumstances but I think he'd probably reached the end of his rope with upper management and their ridiculous expectations of what was to be accomplished with no resources. It was only after he left that I realized the enormous amount of stupid he was able to deflect off our department from everyone else higher up the organizational ladder and my job was never the same again. We were without an I.T. Director for six months as the people with the Os in their titles took their sweet time to make sure they got the perfect replacement.

During this time, a lot of the crap Tom had previously dealt with fell into my lap. And when the chicken-wire-and-duct-tape infrastructure started fraying, it was my fault responsibility to fix it. Thankfully the network consultants and I had developed a good working relationship at this point and I was able to call upon them for assistance, because a lot of what I had to deal with was definitely outside my skill set. Yet management asked why I wasn't able to fix this crap myself.

It's because I'm a Desktop Tech, not a Network Administrator, assholes!

It was also during this time that after receiving numerous kudos for my customer service that I started getting called out about my attitude. Little wonder, when the overwhelming impression I started receiving was the company viewed me more as a necessary evil than an asset when I couldn't fix this crap by myself.

As I tell people, I'm a Desktop Tech. I like being a Desktop Tech. It's what I do. I hope to retire as a Desktop Tech. I don't have the full skill set of a Network Administrator nor do I particularly want it. I have no desire to become a Network Administrator beyond doing basic stuff like adding/removing users and simple Active Directory maintenance. I deal with everything on this side of the wall, and the Administrators deal with everything behind the wall. All of my supervisors to date have gotten that, and in fact have fostered it. The COO and pretty much everyone else at Head-in-the-Sand Central did not. The overwhelming attitude I got from almost everyone who worked at that company was "if it plugs in, it's your responsibility."

To illustrate this, at one point someone showed up in my cube one day to tell me one of the microwave ovens in the break room wasn't working. "What do you want me to do about it?" I asked, incredulously. The response? "Well, you're I.T. aren't you?" I told her to talk to the office manager.

I'm convinced the COO—despite being able to "talk the talk" really didn't have a clue what anyone in I.T. actually did. I know for sure that after Tom left she didn't know specifically what I did. Furthermore, she didn't seem to trust anyone in tech to begin with. I don't know if she'd been continually lied to in the past or just had an untrusting nature to begin with, but after Tom's departure at one point she asked if I thought the network consultants knew what they were doing. I told her I did. It turns out she asked the same question—about me—to the network consultants! What? Did she think we didn't talk?

There's a reason that during the summer without leadership I started channeling all her emails into a folder called The Stupid, it Burns!

It was kind of rocky when they finally hired Tom's replacement, if only because once again I had to go through the whole proving myself while simultaneously training him thing—making it damn clear what my strengths, my weaknesses, and my boundaries—were. In the end, we developed a decent relationship and like Tom, he "got" me and leveraged my skills appropriately—even if, as he reported to the COO at one point, did not think I was indispensable…unlike the two data analysts in the department.

I even reached the point that I felt comfortable enough to vent my general frustrations about the company with him. (It always seemed there was a distinct level of distrust percolating through the entire company, so this was noteworthy.) During one of our weekly one-on-ones, I asked him how he dealt with the stress and the continual feeling of banging one's head against the wall in regards to getting anything accomplished there. He surprised me by opening up and confessing that he was going through the same things.

When I heard that, I knew it would only be a matter of time until the announcement came down from on high that Chris was "leaving to pursue other opportunities."

And almost right on cue, it happened less than a month later. I'd sworn that if I were ever again in the target-on-my-back position I'd been in the previous summer, I would quit. I didn't. I absolutely loathe looking for work, and this camel's back can carry quite a load before it snaps. But the stress started adding up, and by the time it started manifesting as physical pain I knew something was going to have to give.

I hung on through the summer. In June they found an "interim" I.T. Director who—like all the ones who had come before—had a ton of good ideas to get the place in order and was actually getting some of those things accomplished (much to my total shock and surprise). I genuinely liked Jason, and by the time that fateful morning two months ago arrived, we'd talked enough and gotten to know each other to such a degree that he didn't seem at all surprised when that final straw broke the camel's back and I tendered my resignation. I believe his exact words were, "I understand completely."

Still nothing, but I'm not worried. At least not yet.

I had a good interview about a week and a half ago. It wasn't one of those magic, gives-you-chills, kismet interviews, but it was good. And yet, there was something that felt off.

I guess the interviewer must've felt it too, because I got word late last week that, "the client is moving forward with a couple other candidates."

Oh well.

I was a perfect fit for what they were looking for, but apparently not perfect enough. And the kicker? I got a call from a different recruiter yesterday describing a job I'd be a perfect fit for and was ready to submit me…until it was revealed it was the exact same fucking position. Seriously?

That was followed up later in the afternoon by an emergency email from a different agency looking to hire about a half dozen techs for a post-PC rollout cleanup project for the next five days. No interview required, just show up at 7 am and start work. The money was good, and I thought what the hell…it would give me something to occupy my time while I'm waiting for "the next big thing."

After everything was set up and confirmed, the recruiter called me to say the client had changed their mind and decided to do it all in-house.

Fuck.

It's no secret that I hate interviewing. The whole process of going out and selling myself to strangers is the reason (a) I could never be an effective prostitute, and (b) why I stayed as long as I did at that hellhole of a job.

But since I am now—as they say—between engagements, I've got to saddle up and head on out again.

Last Friday I met with a headhunter regarding a direct-hire full time placement at a company in Littleton. While Littleton is more of a commute than I would like, the job itself was in a totally different industry than any of the ones I'd worked in previously and sounded wonderful. It's a smaller (100 employee) company, had a very laid back, casual atmosphere, and the job description was almost tailor made for what I do.

I finally scored an interview this morning with their I.T. Director.

As expected, the position is a perfect fit for my skill set and what I want to do. It was a good interview. Not a great interview, not one of those magic, gives-you-chills kismet interviews, but overall, a good one nonetheless. It lasted about forty-five minutes, and while most of that time was spent with the Director telling me what he was looking for, I did manage to get enough words in edgewise to present my strengths and stress what a good fit this job would be for us both without coming off as an arrogant asshole.

The guy was very hard to read; his eyes lit up at a few of the things I said, which I took at as a good sign, but the fact that he mentioned he also wanted to speak to the two other candidates the agency was sending over next week told me that even if I was a near-perfect fit in some areas, I was obviously missing something he was looking for. The other two candidates may end up being complete losers, so I'm not giving up hope completely, but I'll go back to filling in online applications again on Monday.

I hear the new Target is hiring worker bees…

Well, I did it.  I trusted in the universe and stepped off that cliff.

I returned to work today to find 160 emails, most of which were revolving around the fact that the big project we've been working on has been derailed because "the wrong version of Citrix is installed."

Excuse me, but that is the version I got directly from the vendor—the same vendor who was now telling us that it's the wrong one.

This meant that all the work I'd done over the last month, reimaging machines in both our facilities—has been wasted. Adding insult to injury, the interim IT Director has decided that Windows 7 needs to be rolled out NOW instead of after this project is in place. I hadn't even gotten through all the emails before I had one of the project testers standing in my cube telling me I had to call the vendor NOW and get this sorted out.

I told her I needed to meet with my director first. After she left, I texted Ben and said, "I'm quitting."

"Today?"

"Yes."

I went out to my car and called him. While I know he has his own concerns about temporarily cutting our income in half, he said he backed me one hundred percent and to go ahead and do it.

I grabbed my parking pass, went back into the building, gathered up my keys and key cards, and went to the IT Director's office, where I put it on his desk and I told him I was giving notice, effective immediately. He said he understood completely.

We walked over to HR and I turned in my stuff.

No one seemed the least bit upset—or even surprised. No one even asked why. I guess they've chewed through so many IT people over the years this was almost expected. There wasn't even an exit interview.

And so begins the next chapter.

Via.

I had my usual Friday afternoon one-on-one with the COO today. We're about to embark on a major upgrade to one of our mission critical applications, and I had discovered during testing a few days ago that the instructions from the vendor are not exactly accurate. What follows will probably  sound like so much technobabble to a lot of my readers, but if there is an existing Citrix installation on the workstation, it needs to be removed before upgrading, and for whatever reason this process just wasn't working properly. I uninstalled the existing clients—per the instructions—on a couple test machines and after rebooting and installing the new client I discovered that the machines were still referencing and trying to log into the old server. (What a surprise!) Anyhow, I didn't want to mess around with rooting out this crap, so the quickest way to fix it was to just reimage the problematic workstations—all of which were my predecessor's craptastic builds and overdue for a refresh—thereby eliminating all references to the old client since it wasn't part of my standard image anyway.

I reported my findings to the COO and the other stakeholders. Enter our outside network consultant who is of the "Scripting, scripting, scripting!" philosophy and promptly proceeded to woo the COO with promises that everything could be handled with a login script—even after hearing about the problems with the client not completely uninstalling. "I can bring in a Citrix expert at x-dollars an hour who will get that sorted." Well, knowing this consultant, I knew if this didn't work I would end up cleaning his mess by reimaiging everything anyway, so I told the COO, "I may not know scripting, or the arcane aspects of Citrix, but I do know desktop, and this is a clear-cut desktop issue that I would feel much better handling manually. You'd be a fool if you didn't leverage me here."

She was a bit taken aback that I actually dared to question the consultant's promises (who, only a year ago she had asked if I thought he knew what he was talking about) and countered with, "Can you get it all done in time for the rollout without any overtime?" I said I could—because I'd already started on it, and the half-dozen machines I'd already swapped out were working perfectly.

I honestly don't know why I even care about this, other than I don't want to get stuck cleaning up yet another huge mess that I had nothing to do with creating.

In the last week I've had two phone interviews for two different jobs. The first was one a bust almost from the beginning. I knew going in that it was for only a short-term (3 month) contract with no possibility of going permanent, but at this point I'm so fed up with the situation where I'm at now even that would be a relief. Unfortunately, while the interview went well, the person I was speaking with told me she couldn't even guarantee six weeks, much less three months; something that came to a complete surprise to the recruiter who put us together. I politely thanked her for her time and told her I this really wasn't what I was looking for. 3 months I could live with. Half that? Not so much.

The other interview—just this morning, for a six-month contract-to-hire—went very well. I had all the "right" answers to his questions, and the technical aspects of the job sounded like exactly what I was looking for. He suggested I stop by this afternoon to meet in person and tour of the facility. My little heart went pitter-patter. Would this be one of those "kismet" interviews?

The answer to that would be no. Almost from from the moment I arrived, my spidey sense started tingling—and not in a good way. And it only got worse. The guy I interviewed with—my would-be future supervisor—was nice enough and I could tell I'd really enjoy working with him—but he wouldn't be on site. He's based in Salt Lake City.

And that brings me to the biggest reason I quickly decided I didn't want to work there: I would be one half of only a two-man on-site team—pretty much the same thing I've got going on now (at least when we have an I.T. Director) but with twice as many users as I currently support. Secondly, the rest of the I.T. department is spread out across other cities, so there isn't going to be a whole lot of bonding going on there. Maybe this is a trend; I know we were moving in that direction at my last job in Phoenix, but it was only implemented long after I'd departed. And lastly, it took only a few minutes in the building to remember why I turned down so many offers from investment bankers during the 90s; the atmosphere—even though this place was brand new—was just plain skeevy.

Being a responsible self-starter, I certainly enjoy the freedom that the situation of being more-or-less alone and unsupervised would have provided, but I what I really want (and miss) is what I had at my last job in Arizona; I want to once again be part of a bigger work "family"—one that's linked by more than telephone and video conferences.

I know my ideal job in Denver is still out there, it's just a matter of time before it shows up. It has been my experience that whenever I've moved to a new city, the first job I land there is only a stepping stone; something to simply get me settled. It's the second job that always seems to turn into something magical—and while I am rather disappointed at the turn of events, I can say unequivocally that the position I interviewed for today wasn't that job.

When we moved to Denver, I was dead-set against going back into supporting a hospital environment, but now that I've been away from it for almost four years (I worked at my company's insurance division for 18 months before leaving Phoenix), I think I might actually be ready to return, and I told the Universe as much. The last time I told the Universe I was ready for something, Ben appeared. We'll see if it's still listening…

I started digging through my old journals trying to track down when I took a certain trip, and I ran across this. From 22 July 1997:

Life at work hasn't improved much since I last bothered to record anything for posterity.  If it weren't for the fact I really want to get my Novell and WinNT certifications, I would've packed up and headed over to PC Personnel a long time ago.

Joel and I were briefly discussing that subject this morning.  Joel, who gave notice last week, has severe "short-timer" attitude, so he probably isn't the best counselor, but I asked him why things are so god-awful at OHS.  I mean, I'm going to be asked (assuming I leave for reasons other than geographic relocation) why I decided to leave an ostensibly good job.  That's where I'm faced with the conundrum. Neither one of us can put our fingers on any one thing that makes the job so horrible.  In fact, if I have to really sit and think about it, it's got to be one of the easiest jobs I've ever had.  So why do we all dread coming to it each morning?

It could be the constant attitude we get from the users.  The "us-versus-them" mentality rampant in the company certainly doesn't contribute to a healthy, encouraging work environment.  Nor does the fact the vast majority of the people upstairs don't want to bother learning the myriad tools at their disposal—that they simply want their hands held when things go wrong—and you can no doubt understand our frustration.  The idiot users don't care how things work, or even why they work a particular way.  If it doesn't work they way they expect—which seems to be way too often based on my own observations—they want us to simply wave a magic wand and bend it to their will, not understanding that this isn't Burger King and you can't always have it your way. No one takes the initiative to do anything on their own, and that's what's most irritating to me.  Easily 75% of the calls that come in are for stupid, stupid things; stuff the users could easily take care of if they thought past fucking step one!

But no one—well, almost no one—does that.  It truly surprises me when I run across someone who's bothered to do some independent learning (or even thinking) on their own and is capable of taking care of the little day-to-day glitches that show up with the tools that their entire employment revolves around. 

You would think that when a computer locks up, most people would simply have the sense to reboot it or turn the fucking thing off and on again.  But no! It's far easier to call 4259 and whine to us.*

Of course, arriving at work in an absolutely foul mood because of the absolute idiocy of drivers in this town doesn't contribute to a positive work attitude either.

I'm not exactly sure what to make of this, other than what I chose for the title of this post.

*OMG! Just as true today as it was fifteen years ago!

I now know the most intimate details of the 60-year-old Catholic, Goes-to-Mass-every-Sunday-but-somehow-knows-when-Mercury-is-in-retrograde, had-a-hysterectomy-when-she-was-50, allergic to tree nuts, nurse's life who sits on the other side of the cube divider from me.

That includes where she lives, the details of each and every commute, every medication she's taking, where she goes to purchase those meds, every doctor appointment, the never-ending medical problems with her aging dog—that she flat out refuses to put down no matter what it ends up costing her—and of course, every. little. thing. her impossibly adorable grandchildren do.

She doesn't get along with her brother, and has berated him at length for having bought their mother a complicated, flat panel television last Christmas that the mother is forever screwing up and calling her to fix.

And she giggles. Constantly. Like a teenager. She doesn't work for us; she works for our parent company, so I didn't have any interaction with her when she came on board and had no idea what she even looked like for weeks. In fact, before I actually saw her, I thought they'd hired a co-ed fresh out of nursing school. Imagine my surprise when I heard her say she was 60.

The only thing I don't know is whether or not she swallows, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time until that bit of unwelcome knowledge is forced upon me as well.

Did I mention a day doesn't go by where she's not on the phone to HER Help Desk for some incredibly stupid issue?

All I can say is thank the FSM I don't have to support this woman. AND for headphones. Most definitely for headphones.

That was the response from a coworker this afternoon after I replied, "And why are you telling me?" when she came to my cubicle and announced that one of the microwave ovens in the break room wasn't working, thus confirming that the attitude at my workplace is that if it's electrical and plugs into a wall, it's my responsibility.

Seriously.

My boss gave notice on Friday.

It took this fucking company and its prima donna management less than a year to burn through another great I.T. Manager. I really liked Chris and was frankly amazed that he was able to push through so many of the needed fixes and improvements that the previous manager couldn't seem to. And just when we were on the verge of really getting our house in order, he's decided to "leave to pursue other opportunities."

Yeah, we all know what that means. He pissed off the wrong person. I wonder which one of the self-important assholes with an "O" after name it was?

I had confided to him a couple weeks ago that I was burnt out and asked how he handled being in that situation himself. I was surprised that he opened up and confessed that he was growing increasingly tired of the disarray and the almost pathological resistance to change this company possesses, so Friday's announcement didn't come as a complete surprise.

Immediately afterward Friday's meeting, I went back on Monster and Dice and updated my resume to tone down the "I want to do Mac!" vibe I'd imparted a few weeks ago. At this point I can't afford to be that picky. I just need to find another desktop support job and get out. I'm not going to go through another three months of hell that was the last time we were without a director while they took their sweet time finding a replacement; three months that I became the de facto whipping boy for the alcoholic CEO and clueless COO. Fuck that shit.

Wish me luck.

I called out sick today, for no reason other than I simply didn't want to deal with the rank stupidity of my workplace.

There was only one other place in my employment history that I hated going to as much I do this one. It was in 1997 at an architectural firm in San Francisco that was owned—ironically—by a very cool guy I'd worked with about fifteen years prior in Phoenix. It turned out while he owned the place, he didn't really run the office and the guy who did had no management skills whatsoever.

While I was working as an architectural drafter at the time, the owner knew of my mad PC skillz, going so far as to say it would be a tremendous asset at the office. But as it turned out, even with my skills, I wasn't allowed to touch anything when stuff broke because a friend of the office manager "handled all that." So every time something went down (which happened on a fairly regular basis), we had to wait—sometimes for days—for the friend to show up and fix it.

I'd discussed this with the owner on more than one occasion, willing to take on the responsibility myself, and he said that would be great, but nothing ever came of it. It made me wonder who was actually in charge of the place.

Anyhow, sometime shortly after the fifth or sixth time we were required to do mandatory weekend overtime because of this ongoing bullshit with the system going down, I'd decided I'd had enough. One morning I had a particularly frustrating commute via the good ol' SF MUNI, and by the time I got off at the Montgomery Station, I knew was going to end up being about 20 minutes late. I said, "Fuck this!" and turned around and got on the next outbound train and returned home. I spent the rest of the day composing my resignation letter.

The following day was Friday (and pay day), so I returned to work, intending to deliver my resignation to the owner in person and explain why I was leaving, but fate didn't afford me the opportunity; he wasn't in the office and wasn't due back until the following week. So, after receiving my check, I left the letter on his desk, quietly packed my things, and left for lunch—and never went back.

As much as I'd like to do the same thing where I'm at now, I simply can't afford to. Those carefree days of youth are gone and I can't just walk into a new job like I used to be able to. I have to at least act like a responsible adult and make sure I have something else lined up first.

To that end, I've been in contact with a recruiter who has submitted me for a full time, benefits-paid position at a non-healthcare-related company that's in the same general area where I'm working now. This place also has the benefit of being a mixed Apple/Microsoft environment, something I've been really hoping to get into. Their hiring manager was out all last week, so I'm hoping to get a phone call this week saying they want to talk to me.

Last week, Jeff Weiner gave every one of his employees at LinkedIn an iPad Mini.

Yes, every one of LinkedIn's 3500 employees received one for a job well done. While I'm sure the employees would've preferred a pay raise or a big fat bonus, this little gesture no doubt created quite a morale boost among the workers.

This is what a good company looks like.

On the other hand, at my company, one—one—iPad Mini was given out today to a single employee—out of the 49 who bothered to play and had correct responses to a stupid scavenger hunt on our intranet website. But I guess the morale boost that the $87K for 250 iPads would generate here isn't nearly as important as…oh, I dunno…a guaranteed bonus for anyone with a corner office?

Priorities, after all.