March 12, 1998
Dear Everyone:
Didn’t get to go shopping with “Jeannie” last
weekend after all. In fact,
except for one quick emergency trip to the
Lancôme counter, I
haven’t even been inside a store.
But, when you’re out of toner, you’re out of toner.
Instead, “Wilbur” and I spent the whole weekend
configuring PC’s after the GIL Teams were through with them.
On Friday, the Blue Team came and took the old PC’s away, leaving
behind just the new monitors and keyboards and mice.
Saturday morning, the Red Team arrived with the new PC’s and
started setting them up.
There are many mysterious things that the Red Team does, finishing with
placing a special Red sticky note on the front of the monitor to show
that they have completed whatever it was that they did.
This might have worked pretty well if more than
just one member of the Red Team actually used the Red sticky notes.
All the other programmers just ignored this piece of procedure.
In fact, from listening to the various Red Team members during a
pizza break Saturday afternoon, it was clear that these people were
contractors, hired for the GIL project by an outside company, and not
really concerned with working together as a “team”.
Nevertheless, by about 4:00 Saturday afternoon, all
of the PC’s were pretty much set up, and “Wilbur” and I were free to
work our own “magic”. This
consisted of logging onto each PC using the actual User’s ID and
password. Then we would set
up connections, based on the User’s needs; make sure their email was
working; make sure they were able to print; and generally “pre-fix” 90%
of the problems that we could anticipate would come up first thing
Monday morning.
Each PC took about half an hour and, with some 30
machines to do, it became clear that we weren’t going to finish Saturday
night. Instead, we went back
on Sunday to complete the job, culminating with instructions for
changing the User’s password and a problem reporting form that allowed
four levels of priority:
- I am unable to do critical work.
- I can work around the problem for a short time.
- I can work around the problem for a longer time, but it’s bugging the heck out of me.
- I can live with it indefinitely, but would like it fixed before the next Ice Age.
So far, the problems have been either very simple,
like “How do I change my Screen Saver?” (the same way you did it before)
or very difficult and usually out of our control; so we refer it back to
the GIL people and hope for the best.
All in all, it has been a long two weeks, but it looks like
“Wilbur” and I will be able to start taking our 9/80 Off Days off again
and spend the weekends doing something besides work.
In the meantime, I’ve become quite adept at
borrowing time when I really need to get something done, like that
emergency trip to Lancôme.
We keep “time logs” which are actually incredibly complex
Excel
spreadsheets that were set up by our previous manager.
Their purpose is not to track our actual hours, but to track what
percent of our time is spent supporting various parts of our business.
Like how much of my time went to
Versatile as
compared to how much went to Sydney.
Each day adds up to nine hours, plus any additional
hours you might have worked, like weekends, lately.
So, when I needed to go to the store last Monday, I just left an
hour early, borrowing an hour from the time I worked the Sunday before.
And I was so tired Wednesday afternoon that I decided to borrow
another half-hour from Sunday so I could leave early while still getting
my nine hours in.
There are only two rules:
Rule Number One:
You can only borrow time within the same month.
This is because the percentages are calculated on a monthly
basis.
Rule Number Two:
You can only borrow time from overtime hours that you’ve already
logged. In other words, you
can only borrow time that you’ve already spent.
With a philosophy like this, you can understand why I haven’t
tried to balance my checking account in years.
By the way, the
Area Code
around here changes this Saturday.
For both “Jeannie” and me, the new Code will be 925.
That should be easy to remember.
Love, as always,
Pete
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