Lawnmower Man

O.K. So apparently I was kind of wrong. That kid with the corner market on mowing the neighborhood lawns still lives in my new neighborhood. He’s about my age now and has a cute little girl and a Pug named Bruno.

He also has a riding lawnmower and for $25 a mow, he’ll mow your lawn and every other mow, he’ll weedwhack — by the way, spellcheck doesn’t like the word “weedwhack. His little girl rides up on top of the lawnmower with him, which is probably one of the cutest selling points. I think if he could have fit Bruno up there too, he could have charged me more.

I talked to him about frequency since he’s familiar with my lawn and the neighborhood and the weather and climate. He said that my across the street neighbor gets more sun and she needs to have it mowed more often than I do — she also has a prettier lawn than I do. Still, for me that’s less mowing and less paying.

I did tell him that I need to do some work in the back yard this weekend; I still have some fallen branches from the last Nor’Easter that need to be hauled off. I also want to square off the garden in the front. I don’t know which previous home owner thought it would be neat to do the swirly non-edge edge garden in the front, but I imagine that it can’t be easy to keep weeds out of or mow next to. So, I want to straighten that out and put some edging down and mulch.

Of course, I still don’t know what’s in the current garden. I’m considering taking photos of each section and posting them here and asking people to tell me what’s what.

Unfortunately, were I’d like to plant sunflowers, there are some mysterious flowers and I don’t want to uproot them until I know what they are.

And I’m wondering if it’s too late to try to start a vegetable garden in the backyard and if not, what I should try to grow. I’d like some tomatoes and zucchini and cucumber, but what else?

Tags: grass, garden, lawnmower, yard work

Don’t Feed The Crazy People

I’ve been meaning to stop by for weeks now and let everyone know that I’m alive and well.

(Ironically when I tried to stop by to leave a note, the server was down… grrrr)

Lots of changes going on around here, lots of stuff to deal with.

I’ve had my surgery now. It went very well. The surgeon said that my gallbladder was very inflamed and, of course, full of stones when they removed it (through my belly button — how?) and that I was lucky they removed it when they did. Well, duh! No one listens to me.

My recovery also went very well, except for my mother’s apparent obsession with my personal plumbing. It did take me about 3 or 4 days to get everything going again and I admit that was quite painful and uncomfortable in the meantime.

My mother, being the taskmaster that she is, the nurse who never let me stay home sick as a child, had me hanging curtains in the guest room 3 days after surgery. So, I didn’t really start resting until after she went home a week after surgery.

I have to say that the two weeks of recovery that I spent at home away from the stress of dealing with all the crazy people at work was the best medicine ever. I really needed that break. I came back so incredibly relaxed and with an entirely different outlook.

The environment at work is incredibly different now. During the month(s) leading up to my surgery, things had gotten completely out of control, Lord of the Flies out-of-control.

I have mentioned on this blog how frustrated I was about my problems with FW and in particular MJ and how unprofessional their behavior was to me. The closer it got to the deadline of our project — Daylight Saving Time (March 11th), the more certain I was that MJ was actually working against me, keeping me from getting my work done. Looking back now, a month later, I don’t know that she consciously did it, but I do know that I still feel that she didn’t support me and didn’t help me and certainly didn’t give me the respect of a peer. I know that she didn’t treat me the way I would have treated her if things had been reversed and I have come to realize that more than anything this so-called team, works more against itself than together.

In fact, I specifically asked GE on one occasion to help me with testing after he told me he literally had nothing to do because his projects were on hold and he was just sitting at his desk reading articles. He actually told me “Hell, no.”

My project didn’t make the deadline because of lack of support within my own department. It still is sitting waiting to go live, waiting approval from another division within the department. Every other person who needed to sign off on it has — all outside of this department — but our own department couldn’t make it a priority to meet our own deadline and my director who I report to won’t push the subject with the manager of the person — the manager reports to him. Yet, this project was my director’s priority. Suposedly.

I was so completely stressed out that I literally wanted to quit on March 10th. I just felt like a failure because I hadn’t made my deadline and no matter what I did I couldn’t get my project to budge forward for weeks. Then it suddenly occurred to me — I had done the best job I could do; I can’t control anyone but myself. All of those other people are outside of my authority, out of my control. All I can do is know that they are crazy.

That made me feel a little better, but still I needed a break and the two weeks I was recovering from surgery and didn’t have any contact with anyone helped.

GE has become come some sort of self-appointed hall monitor of the interface engines, making up rules for how he wants things configured and set up and childishly harassing the rest of us through nasty emails until we do things his way. He has also said some pretty nasty things in email about people on our team, not on our team, and even our boss and cc’d pretty much everyone and then he was sent to training and told no one about it until he got there. There was quite a bit of resentment on the part of the rest of the Interface Team because everyone has been asking to go to training for over a year and no one could get a straight answer out of our boss, who is the department director. (Note, our “team” does not have a manager to report to.)

Somewhere in there, there was a procedural disagreement between GE and FW that turned into a very childish argument that turned into a tattletale email where GE recounted the whole conversation with a so-there attitude and demanded that the director make this tiny procedural decision. Mind you, that one of FW’s biggest complaints is that the director hasn’t made an actual decision concerning us in a year and FW commented that the director would never make a decision about coding procedure. Well, he did and he made it in GE’s favor. Fifteen minutes after that email went out, FW quit.

His last day is May 18th. Now we’re trying to sort out FW’s projects, which GE sent an email saying he absolutely would not take on (right before he went to training without telling any of the rest of the “team”, which is why everyone is pissed off that he’s being rewarded for bad behavior — he gets to go to training so he can not work some more?), and how we’re going to divide up his duty officer call. There’s talk about how we might try to hire someone from with-in and train him.

There has even been a demand by MJ to our director that we be given a manager. She can get away with saying a lot to him because he’s married to her sister. Apparently he told her that he got tired of dealing with the Interface Team’s “personalities” so he’s been avoiding them and she told him that when you ignore dysfunctional personalities, they get worse in a cry for help. MJ and FW both tried talking to the director and tried to say that they were willing to make an effort to discuss the dysfunction in the group and talk about getting the group a manager and FW is willing to stay if an effort toward change is going to be made, but the director appears to be doing what he does best, which is ignoring the real issue.

Mind you, they aren’t the only ones who’ve been to talk to him. In the weeks before my surgery, I went to the director and I told him that the working situation was making me ill. I talked to him about the need for some sort of management involvement with the Interface Team, but he was at that time, unwilling to get involved himself.

So, FW is leaving. GE is getting my new project load. MJ is getting one of FW’s projects and I am getting FW’s biggest projects. My Daylight Savings Project remains unfinished — I sent another email yesterday reminding everyone involved that I’d like to complete it this week and it’s waiting on them. My current attitude is watch the crazy people but don’t get involved.

Tags: gallbladder surgery, work

Stress, Procrastination, Paralysis

I’ve been completely stressed out lately.  Stressed to the point of being overwhelmed.  Overwhelmed to the point of near-paralysis.

I spent a rather eye-opening hour with the shrink last night who pointed out how connected my home-related stress is to my work-related stress is and how it all is just merging with my Winter-related depression and weighing me down to the point where I’m allowing myself to live up or down to whatever expectations certain people have of me.

I don’t know if I can explain this.  It all seems so circular.

So, at work, my top thought is always that I’m going to lose my job, though that’s not necessarily the case.  That, of course, is the result of my last job and looking back now, the jobs before that where the threat was always made present by the higher-ups as a form of possible punishment.  So, the more negativity that MJ and FW present toward me, the more MJ hovers and tells me that I’m not doing my job correctly, the more FW unprofessionally berates me in public and tells me that he and MJ are worried they are going to have to finish my work, the more anxious it makes me — especially since I am currently already highly anxious due to a very high-anxiety-producing deadline looming.  I just want some sort of validation that my job is not at risk.

On top of that I just bought a house, right?

A house that appears to have some “issues”.  The beadboard in the kitchen appears to be drying out from what little heat I’m using.  The paint is bubbling and splitting.  It looks horrible.  Cracks are forming between the ceiling and the slanted part of the wall in the rooms upstairs and the hall.  The paint between the wall and the linen closet in the bathroom has split.  The wall where the wood and the drywall meet beneath the stairs has distinctly separated.  I’m starting to see where seams and boards are in the walls and ceiling.  Oh, and there’s two small cracks in the paint in the bathroom over the shower/tub, which I suspect is hiding an army of mold spores beneath it’s plastic sheath.

My father wants me to talk to the people I bought the house from and make them come fix it, though I doubt I they are liable.  And someone told me some houses resettle every Winter.

However, I’m so miserable because I worry that there’s something wrong with the walls that I don’t want to do anything like finish unpacking or hang pictures or window treatments because that would be a waste of time because I’d just have to undo that stuff.  If I hang stuff, it’ll have to be unhung when the walls have to be fixed after all.

But my mother has decided to come for my surgery next month, which means I need to get the house in some sort of order or she’ll be disappointed, but there’s just so much to do and I just don’t know where to start.  I need to hang the shelves I bought for the office to finish unpacking, but the curio cabinet I bought and haven’t put together is in the way.  The curio cabinet is in like 1000 pieces and it just looks too hard.  I don’t want to do it alone but I don’t have anyone to help but I don’t want it still sitting there when my mom comes.

And on and on it goes…

And part of the house comes back to work…why unpack and finish the house if I’m going to lose my job and have to move.  Traditionally I take years to finish unpacking and hang every thing up and then it’s time to move.  Everyone who knows me knows this.  Which is why my mother keeps asking if I’ve hung stuff on the walls, I’m sure.

And some of the stuff I keep putting off saying I’ll do it when it gets warmer.  I have a ton of boxes from the move.  They’re all broken down and against the wall in my garage.  I want to put them in the rafters of my garage, but it’s friggin’ cold outside.  Who wants to spend that long outside?  I’m waiting for a warmer day.

Anyway, my job isn’t at risk.  I still have an immobile deadline.  MJ and FW are just unprofessional, nasty people; I think no matter where you go, there’s always one or two of those.  My boss is entirely understanding, if conflict avoiding.  I hung some curtains up last night and even unpacked a box.  I’ll have to see how I feel about my Susy Homemaker list when I get home tonight, but I’m o.k. with the stress I feel for work.  It’s just regular deadline anxiety and not “I’m going to lose my job if I don’t meet this deadline” anxiety and that’s o.k.

Maybe I’ll be able to crawl out of the overwhelmedness and depression and stressful paralysis and start posting again.

Tags: work, anxiety, job loss, depression, overwhelmed, stress, paralysis

The Choices I Make

I apologize for not at least popping on and saying that I survived the norovirus and that there was an epidemic at my workplace.  I have no idea who the carrier was but a bunch of us came down with it all on the same day, but that Thursday afternoon we were all quite ill.  There’ve been some trailing illnesses but it seems to have completed its course through this office now.

But that’s not what has kept me away.

Let me explain about the Daylight Savings Time “issue”.  Remember how panicked everyone was about Y2K?  No one knew what was going to happen to the computers; everyone was afraid that they were just going to meltdown or something because they might not be able to handle the wrap from 1999 to 2000 because they were missing those first two digits and the computers wouldn’t know if it was 1900 or 2000?  Yadda yadda yadda….

O.K. So, many of those ancient computers also had the Daylight Savings schedule hardcoded into their OS and bios because that stuff never changes.  It’s the same formula every year, right?

Wrong.  Last year, the President and Congress decided it would save so much American dollars in heat costs if we moved Daylight Savings Time up three weeks in the Spring and back one week in the Fall.  For Windows users and anyone or any business who’s bought a computer or hardware or software in the last 5 years that’s considered still “supported” that’s not a problem because basically the software company is responsible for guaranteeing that when the time change happens, everything still works fine and dandy and that your software actually manages a time change and probably not one in March and then another in April.

So, our problem is that we have this fabulous Interface Engine that runs on some ancient form of UNIX is on ancient RIS box and the software for the engine, the version of UNIX, and the RIS box are not supported by anyone, which is probably why they’ve been running pretty much problem-free for about 10-years — our secondary Interface Engine is Windows-based on an IBM server and there are daily challenges; not to mention upgrades and “hot fixes”, etc.

O.K. So we have this looming deadline of Daylight Savings Time where we don’t know what’s going to happen to out old Interface Engine and the consensus is to get all of the remaining interfaces and programs off of the old box before then because the time change is hardcoded into the OS and bios and get them onto yet another new Interface Engine, also Windows-based but more stable.  The good news is that this isn’t technically new development because there’s already a road map, right?  We just have to take the old code and rewrite it.  The analysis and logic has already been done for us; the hard part is re-interpreting the old code into the new code — the old interface engine did somethings easier than the new interface engine and vice versa.

O.K. Now, you know I work with crazy people, right?  Two of these people believe that they are the only people who are capable of doing anything correctly and completing anything.  Of course, they’re way of doing things is the only way to do things as well — that last one fits all three.  Mind you, none of them exactly do things the same way.  Madness and harsh words usually ensues at that point.

So, I was assigned MJ’s usual pet project and when I was, she sat me down and talked to me about it, about how careful I had to be about it all, like I’ve never done this kind of work before.  Did I mention that I’ve been working here since April 2004 and was in Hospital IT for six years before that?  Oh, and I’ve been working in IT since ‘94.  Let’s not forget that I have a BS in CS.

Anyway, since then, at least once a week, she’s been checking on me, reminding me of how important the project is.  O.K.  Let me explain.  This is the patient demographics for every patient in the hospital and this particular interface goes from the admitting software to the secondary interface engine which will then pass it to the ordering software and also half a dozen other software packages, including medical records.  I’ve got the big picture of how important this is.  Every little field has to be correct from the patient’s id to the patient’s name to his insurance to his next of kin to his allergies and diagnosis.  It’s a patient care issue if it’s not right.  I don’t want to be responsible for something happening to a patient because I coded something incorrectly.  I get it.  Stop harassing me already.  I stress myself out over the whole thing I don’t need someone else hovering over me.

Then of course, I had my Gallstone Surgery scheduled for February 2 — yes, you might notice that’s today.  You might notice I don’t appear to be knocked unconscious on a surgery table either.  There’s an explanation for that.  I was scheduled for the surgery and to be out for 2 weeks with the idea that I would work from home.

But the Friday before I came down with the Norovirus, I got a call from one of my other projects that had gone stalled sometime last summer.  The person on the phone suddenly announced to me that she wanted me to turn on the demographic feed to her application on the following Monday and that they were planning to “go-live” with the application, interfaces and all, in 2 weeks.  Well, I had a complete meltdown in my boss’ office.  In my opinion, they had not fully tested any of their interfaces before it had stalled — I suspect it had lost direction after their project lead had been shipped to Iraq.  I was told to basically let them “hang themselves”, but in my opinion this would look bad on me because I had written the interfaces.

Fortunately, by Monday, things had changed.  They decided not to turn anything on and had postponed the “go-live” to February 6th.  However, I was then bombarded with minute by minute requests to make changes to their interfaces as they began actually testing and I couldn’t get my work done on my Daylight Savings Time projects.  I was becoming very frustrated because just as I’d get started back on what I wanted to work on, someone would ask me to do something else.

That is when MJ came and asked me to take out some changes I made to an interface in the secondary interface engine for the stalled project so she could put that interface in production for another project that day.  It was the morning of the norovirus.  Probably I was already not feeling well.  I was feeling frustrated.  We were in my cubicle and I commented to her that I was feeling frustrated that I couldn’t seem to work on the Daylight Savings Time project because of the other thing.  And that is when Drama Queen FW butted in from across the cubicle aisle from his own cubicle and very loudly announced to the whole frickin’ building that “We’re all frustrated but we get our work done.”  This started a back and forth and he basically said something along the lines that he and MJ were worried that they were going to end up having to do my work that they shouldn’t have to do.  I told him that I never said I couldn’t do the work, just that I was frustrated.
I didn’t talk to him the rest of the day, but what he said ate at me…it still eats at me.  Now it’s pissing me off and you’ll see why.

What he said gave me nightmares the whole weekend of my norovirus.  You know, I have a fear of being fired because I was involuntarily terminated from my last job and they made up claims that I couldn’t do my job anymore by changing my job description and they assigning me things I couldn’t do and not training me.  So, now I’m afraid that if I miss these deadlines, I’m going to lose my job.  It’s eating away at me.  I’m terrified.  It’s making me ill.  It’s almost all I think about…and I feel like MJ and FW are somehow setting me up to fail.  I just don’t know how, but I feel like they’re doing something behind my back to make me look bad on this project.

Anyway, the Monday after the Norovirus, I moved my surgery.  MJ had made more than a few comments about how she didn’t think we’d be able to get everything done if I was out for two weeks in February, so I moved my surgery to March 16th, after Daylight Savings kicks in.  So now no one can say that my surgery affected anything.  I’m here, I’m visibly working.  And I’m working long hours — 9 and 10 hour days.  I’ve even been working on Sundays.

And guess who’s on vacation?  FW started a week long vacation Wednesday.  MJ is taking most of February to go skiing.

WTF?

But, guess what?  She’s going to help me with my testing, but only if my code is really “clean” and I’ve made sure everything is perfect before I start testing with the applications.

She had a meltdown when I told her I’d be ready to start testing next week.  She gave me a long lecture again about how everything has to be perfect.  Then she told me we don’t have much time, only a month.  Then she started again on how necessary it is to have every field correct.  She said she’d been working for two weeks on one translator and it wasn’t working right yet with the system, so I couldn’t possibly be ready to test.

But then yesterday when I discovered some incorrect code in her interface after she told me to use it as an example for something I was working on, she had another meltdown.  She refused to believe me when I said it wouldn’t work the way she thought it would once she fixed it.  I knew this because I was using it in my own code.

I think she just makes things harder than they have to be sometimes.

Oh, and the stalled project has moved their “go-live” to March 6th now.  They’ll be doing some serious testing next week.

Anyway, for the next month, I’m going to work my ass off to get my projects finished.  MJ told me yesterday she doesn’t think “we all” will be able to make the deadline.  I plan to meet the deadline as best as I can.  I don’t want to be the one holding it up.  I certainly don’t want my work to fall on MJ or FW.  So, if my posting if few and far between, you know what’s up.

In the meantime, you can keep up with me and my Project 365 photos here.

Tags: work, my life, project 365, choices, norovirus, stress

My Kind Of Luck

Something told me that I was tempting fate last night as I took both my new 10mg of ambien and an oxycodone for my migraine as I was going to bed at 9:30pm.  I even told Pugly that with my luck I’d get paged since I was on call.  But the regular MaxAlt migraine med just wasn’t cutting the migraine pain yesterday.  Not even a dent.  In fact, it was worse by bedtime.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, at 3am, I got paged.  It could have been a five minute deal really except that it turned out that the translator that was misbehaving wasn’t one I was familiar with.  The translator happened to be an outgoing one and it looked like it was working fine but that whatever was on the other end wasn’t accepting the data.  Here’s where the problem came in.  I couldn’t find any documentation saying what application the translator was associated with.  Hours later when I found one tiny mention in a file that wasn’t with the other documentation, I thought it was misleading.  At least it misled me.  Phone calls were made; people were paged; pages weren’t returned.

Let’s just say that it was after 9am before I finally tracked down what application it belonged to and the Help Desk had me page someone who didn’t work at the hospital anymore.  Talk about outdated information.  I finally found someone in Radiology where the application was and spoke with them.  They had just discovered the problem five minutes before I finally got to them.  At that time, the interface had been down about 8 ½ hours.

It’s still down.  They’re working on it.

Needless to say that I’m very tired and sleepy.  I can feel the hint of the migraine taunting me in the back of my head somewhere but at the moment I’m too tired to care.

My small victory is that my complaint about the undocumented translator did not go unheard.  Much to the grumbling, pouting, foot-stomping diva-tude chagrins of my fellow teammates, we’ve been told to get our act together in the next 6 weeks.  Not only are we to have everything documented, but it all has to be in Visio.  FW, king of the divas, is pissed because he apparently hates Visio and prefers Word.  He at least has been trying to keep everything documented but it just wasn’t in Visio.  So he threw a real pissy fit.  He looked just like Pugly, all wide-eyed and foot-stomping and pouting, does when Needy is getting away with something he doesn’t like.  GE on the other hand, stupidly admitted that he never documents anything — something I have commented to him about before and for this very reason.

So, it all has to be in Visio and in one place and we all have to do it.

Meanwhile, Radiology just got their side working and FW is petulantly working on changing the error message so it includes the pager number of the Radiology DO since one of my complaints on top of everything else was that even once I figured out who the application belonged to, no one seemed to know who the DO was or what the DO pager was, especially not the Help Desk, who is supposed to know these things or the night time desk support.

Oy.

Tags: work, sleep, migraine

Pets In The Workplace

Over the weekend, I saw a segment on Today Weekend Edition which must have been filler leftover from their show on “Take Your Dog To Work Week” back in June. However, I was attracted to the story because it focused on workplaces that are pet-friendly all year round, not just one day a year.

According to this national poll of working Americans 18 years of age and over, nearly one in five U.S. companies allows pets at work. And, a majority of those polled believe there are benefits to having pets at work such as relieving stress, improving relationships with coworkers, making for a happier workforce and creating a happier work environment.

According to the survey:

• 55 million Americans believe having pets in the workplace leads to a more creative environment
• 53 million believe having pets in the workplace decreases absenteeism
• 50 million believe having pets in the workplace helps co-workers get along better
• 38 million believe having pets in the workplace creates a more productive work environment
• 32 million believe having pets in the workplace decreases smoking in the workplace
• 37 million believe having pets in the workplace helps improve the relationship between managers and their employees
• And, 46 million people who bring their pets to the workplace work longer hours! [APPMA]

More

Tags: pets in the workplace

What Part Of “Not Far” Didn’t You Understand?

Originally when the vacation planning was being done, my parents were only supposed to be here until last Thursday so when I was trying to swap the on-call pager, I thought it’d be o.k. to be on-call starting last Thursday as long as I was clear for the weekend before so I could travel to see my aunt and drive back with my parents. And let me tell you, it hasn’t been easy, the last month or so with the pager swapping. We’re all getting a little picky or we all have particular plans around this time. No one wants to be on-call due to social events and Fall and life. So, after my parents announced their change of plans to stay through the weekend, I knew there was no way out of being on-call for the time they were here. So, I told them that whatever we did, we just had to stay close and not go far. They both said, “O.K.” I thought they understood.

So, anyway, I wasn’t feeling well yesterday morning. It was one of those on-the-verge-of-a-migraine mornings where I felt queasy and achy and headachy but I was functioning anyway like I do when I have to go to work. After all, my parents don’t visit often. I didn’t want to spend any part of their visit upstairs in bed making them feel like I was ignoring them or neglecting them. So, I put on a semi-pretty-semi-cranky face and got ready for the day’s adventure, which I was told was going to be the Desert of Maine because it is near my house (thus it follows the “not far” rule) and because the weather people were reporting an incoming storm which my mom wanted to beat home. Since I’ve never been to the Desert of Maine but I’ve wanted to check it out, I was fairly excited about the daily outing. Even Pugly was invited.

Now…I had a strange sense of foreboding as we were leaving the house that made me grab the book I am reading, though I would wish later that I’d grab my new knitting stuff so I could play with that.  If only I had paid more attention to my instincts…

When everyone was in the car and we began to pull out of the parking lot, my father suddenly announced that he had changed his mind and he didn’t want to go to the desert.  Instead, he wanted to drive around and look at “the color” more — meaning that he wanted to drive around and check out the changing leaves of New England, which, by the way, is the real reason my parents are visiting.

Have I mentioned that being in a car is one of my least favorite activities?  Have I mentioned that I get car sick?  I mean, granted, it’s better in the back seat, but I despise any lengthy time in a car.  I even hate driving myself longer than 30 minutes.  In fact, driving myself between Portland and Boston makes me car sick, I kid you not.

Anyway, I was already not feeling well, remember?  So not long into this kidnapping of me and my dog, who doesn’t like long trips either, I broke down and took a Maxalt for the migraine.  This kind of made me sleepy.  After a while, since I didn’t feel well, was drugged with cough syrup that had codeine and migraine med and was bored from looking at trees that while prettily colored, looked remarkably similar mile after mile, I decided to take a nap in the back of the rented SUV.

So, when my pager went off, I was groggy.  When I opened my cel phone to try to call work and got a “no service” message, I was a bit surprised.  I said, “How far from Portland are we?”

My dad was like “New Hampshire.”  Then he was kind of laughing and appologetic.  He was sorry because he forgot but he was like “Well, this was the farthest point we were going to go anyway.”  Like that was supposed to somehow make it better.  And “If they’d just waited 15 minutes, we’ve have been 15 miles closer.”

So, there I was in some small town in New Hampshire outside of a sporting goods store at a pay phone using my Rite Aid long distance card calling work to find out what was going on.  Then I was calling a co-worker who happened to be at his desk and begging him to do me a big favor as I explained what had happened, how I had been kidnapped by my parents who don’t listen to me.  Since he really couldn’t help resolve the issue, I actually needed him to page another person on the Integration Team — you know, one of those other people who didn’t want to be on-call this weekend because they had other plans?

Then I hopped back into the SUV and we started heading the 111 miles back at top speed.

You want to talk about car sick.

When I finally got service on my cell phone, I still hadn’t gotten a page back from the co-worker at his desk who was supposed to page me to let me know if he’d gotten ahold of anyone.  So I called him to check.  Voice mail.  Left a message.  Thirty minutes went by.  Still no page.  Called again.  Voice mail.

I am so dead.

Meanwhile, my parents are like, “Just blame us.  Tell your boss it was all our fault.  We forgot.”  And I’m thinking, I’m 35 years old.  This isn’t high school anymore.  I cannot go to my the boss of my job and say “It’s my parents’ fault.”  Ultimately it’s my fault.  I should have said “no” when my father changed the day’s plans.  I should have been paying attention while he was driving around all willy-nilly.

Finally I got a page saying that the drama-queeniest of all of the Integration Team has solved “both pages” (I only got one, remember?) and everything was o.k. now.

At least I got to tell my father he could stop speeding and could he pull over at a gas station somewhere so the dog and I could pee-pee.  For once, he let us have the break.

Then he got all pissy when he discovered that I was extra dizzy from the speeding and needed to eat something with sugar because that was going to spoil the dinner we were going to have in an hour or two — we hadn’t had lunch, mind you.  Ah, memories of family vacations are flooding back now.  Fortunately my mom backed me up this time.  God bless her.

Given a second chance, did he continue on toward home?

No.

There was more wandering.  We just can’t learn our lesson.

I do love my parents, but I don’t think they always listen or remember what I say.  I did tell my dad that this incident was a prime example of him not listening but ironically, he didn’t want to hear that.

Tags: dysfunctional family, work, sight-seeing, Fall

Just Friggin’ Let Me Do My Job

I’m just plain livid.  You know I have to be if I’m writing a second post about work in one day.  And it’s about the same “clients”/department.  Damned troublemakers.

Anyway, a little back story.

After my arrival, I was handed this small little project to finish implementing the pathology interfaces for the lab department.   Basically they’d already been done, they just needed some tweaking — ADT, orders, results, and billing.  And the “go-live” went beautifully over a year ago.

However, there’ve been a few issues with their billing.  Mostly it’s user error.  Those of you who work in IT understand what I mean.  Generally it’s because of something someone in the lab department has changed on their side and didn’t think to tell anyone over here.

One time, they changed when their billing file was generated and then couldn’t figure out why our scripts weren’t picking them up at night.  Well, if we pick them up at 10pm and you generate them at 10:05pm…

Anyway, they did some sort of upgrade Tuesday night before the billing file was generated and when it was time for the billing file to be picked up by our side, we didn’t get any billing file, though they insist there was one.

Now, here’s one of the pet peevy things.  They are supposed to call the help desk and log a problem when billing doesn’t work and then the help desk will page the Inteface Duty Officer for that week.  We have a rotation.

What they do is email me.

So, I emailed them back and said that I tried to ftp to their server to get the file manually and got an error saying that there is no such ftp directory, meaning that there is something wrong with their server.  That was at 9am.  I said that if they didn’t fix it, the billing wouldn’t work that night either.

When I hadn’t heard back by 2pm, I thought I’d call and talk to the person in charge of the application.  Mind you, this is someone who “tattled” that I hadn’t brought a pen to a meeting.  For the next hour and a half, slow emails went back and forth between myself, her, and some tech support person on her side who apparently didn’t have a lot of experience with ftp, about what to do.  They wanted to manually (re: email) me the files for the billing from the night before.  I wanted to know what they were going to do about the billing for that night.

Round and round it went.

I did indicate to the lab person that I was leaving the office at 3:30pm but I had my pager and would be at home where I could dial in and I wanted her to page me when they knew what they wanted to do.  I told her I would do what she wanted.  I gave her my pager number twice.

Here’s the kicker.  I talked to MJ who was taking over being the Interface DO and she wanted nothing to do with the issue, which is what I wanted.  I wanted to finish handing the problem.  For some reason, the lab person didn’t like my answers and had started including FHW on the emails — I’ve noticed she does this — so I talked to him and he said he had no interest in being involved and I asked him to stay out of it.  I told him that I gave her my pager number and told her to page me.

No one paged me.

When I got into work this morning, the first email I saw was from FHW at 5:04pm last night telling the lab person that he and MJ had resolved her billing issue from the night before and turned off the script so it wouldn’t try to run the billing last night.

WTF?!

So, I talked to my boss,which is actually when I learned about the whole “pen/meeting” issue, and I expressed my frustration with the lab that I can’t do my job if they run to FHW every time.  Why didn’t they page me?  Why didn’t they page the Interface DO in the first place?  (Mind you, I was the Interface DO at the time, but it’s the principle.)
I also expressed my frustration with FHW that I can’t do my job if FHW jumps in after I’ve asked him not to get involved and he does it anyway.  Obviously no one is going to respect me and expect me to be able to do my job if he does that.  Yes, he likes to be the hero, but so do I.  No wonder people wonder about my capability if I don’t bring a pen.
Now that I think about it, FHW never brings a pen to a meeting either.

Tags: work

Workplace Note-taking OCD

O.K. I don’t get this whole note-taking obsession in meetings here at my workplace.

First, everyone sits around in a meeting with printouts and pens and madly scribbles as they talk.  Generally, they’re all scribbling the same thing.  Then after the meeting, someone is designated as the person to type it all up and send it out in an email so everyone has those print-outs for the next meeting so everyone can repeat the process at the next meeting.

Anyway, I apparently got “in trouble” yesterday as I was reported to my boss for showing up to a meeting with no pen or printouts.  The meeting-callers felt that I did not appear “engaged” in the project.

So, of course, my boss wanted to know if I was “engaged” in the project.

Well, first I told him that I was ambushed as I my schedule indicated that it wasn’t that kind of meeting.  Second, I told him that at the end of the meeting I had requested them (the clients) to please type up their new request and sign off on it before I started work on it so that I would know that this is the final plan from the project.

Once he heard that he was o.k. with it.  This project has been going along since before I was here and apparently yesterday’s meeting was the kind of meeting you have at the very beginning of a project — for example, when you sit down and start discussing with the interface programmer what you want in each field of the interface after you’ve basically signed off on the interface being done and it’s being tested, there’s a serious pbroblem.  I basically told them that this sort of discussion means that we are going to have to start completely over.

So, apparently, I did need a pen, but when I went into the meeting, I believed that the interfaces were finished and my job was basically done.  I thought we were just reviewing.

Tags: work

Judge Rules Web-Surfing Can’t Get You Fired

Today in New York, Administrative Law Judge John Spooner ruled that Toguir Choudhri, a 14-year veteran of the Department of Education, who had been accused of browsing the internet at work and ignoring supervisors’ requests to stop, cannot be fired.

“It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.”

He added: “For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes.”

Spooner dispensed the lightest possible punishment on Choudhri, a reprimand, after a search of Choudhri’s computer files revealed he had visited several news and travel sites. [“Web-surfing worker can’t be fired” (Yahoo!News)]

(emphasis, mine of course)

More

Tags: Internet, work

Standing Up In The Boat Without Rocking It

There is a difference it appears between rocking the boat and standing up for yourself.

I’m still struggling to see where the line is exactly.  I could picture my father frowning in disapproval as I made my decision this morning to stand up for myself and rock the boat just a little.

I’ve described my co-teammates drama queens on more than one occassion, but the queeniest of them all is definitely FW.  He certainly gets himself into these pissy, martyr-like moods.  Mind you, he certainly knows pretty much everything about everything and he deserves respect and I am certainly in awe of his knowledge but the diva belittling ‘tude can go.

Last night, something went horribly wrong with our ancient, on it’s last legs, no longer supported by anyone by us interface engine that’s connected to our ancient and barely supported HIS (Hospital Info System) and pretty much everything else.  (We have 2 other interface engines — one really terrible one that kind of goes with a package of software that doesn’t really work with it and one we just got to replace the dying engine.)   Now, while I was the one on call, I felt unsure about a few things and there were a few things beyond me.  I admit it.  However, I’m not completely stupid.  I do have 8 years working in Hospital IS and over 10 years in IT.  However, one of the problems I’ve run into with training on the ancient interface is that it’s pretty stable and when it does go into crisis, no one really wants to take the time to show me how to fix it; they generally want me to get out of the way and let them do the fixing.  There never seems to be any real follow up either.

Let’s just say that through a series of events I ended up on the phone multiple times with FW and his increased pissy Drama Queen attitude telling me to butt out.  He basically wouldn’t even give me the chance to do the things I actually do know how to do and there was a lot of miscommunication because he was talking to some of the users and I was talking to users and who knows who was saying what, but what I was hearing wasn’t right and I know it couldn’t be what he was saying.

But to me personally, he was dismissive, snotty, unprofessional.  He treated me like I knew nothing and was worth nothing and the more I thought about it, I got angry because I’ve heard him talk to our users like that and I realzed that it was kind of abusive.

I normally try to stay out of the drama at work.  That’s pretty much my motto.  Stay out of work drama.

So, after getting paged repeatedly through the night and not having much sleep, I had plenty of time to think about it.  I never complain about anything where I work now.  In two years, I’ve hardly had a complaint other than that issue with my monitor which was an ergnomic problem.  I mean, I’ve been told that I have a calming effect on the integration team.  Certainly, of the four of us, I’m the least likely to cause a scene.  I’m considered the most laid back and the least likely to be bothered by anything in particular — all of these things, I’m sure, would surprise my former co-workers and bosses.  I’ve worked very hard to make myself over, learning from my mistakes at my last job.  I have no desire to be the boat rocking Diva I used to be.

Well, apparently, all of my hard work  to be laid back has paid off.  When I emailed my boss that I needed to discuss something with him, he took it very seriously.  I think he was actually worried that I was going to tell him I was going to quit or something.  He asked me if he should he “scared”.

When I explained that I was concerned about FW’s treatment of me last evening and how he speaks to users lately, he took me seriously.  We discussed that FW does seem to cycle through this and sometimes he needs to be taken aside and reminded to tone it down.  My boss pointed out that FW may have been brushing me off because he likes to play the hero and I pointed out that I like to play the hero too.  I did make a point of commenting that I understand that FW does in fact have more experience and knowledge about the engine than I do and that I value and respect both which is why I was wary of commenting at all.

My boss was very glad that I came to him and he recognized that since I never come to him with a complaint it must have been very important to me that I bring it up.

I’m quite proud of myself.  I recognized that FW was abusive to me.  I tried to talk to him last night.  When he continued to be a prick, I stood up for myself in a professional manner, even if my father is frowning at me in my mind.  I just don’t understand how he could have taught me to stand up for myself and yet expect me not to make waves at work.  Anyway, I think it’s possible to stand up for yourself without rocking the boat.

Tags: work, drama queen

Unscheduled Absenses & Unscheduled Presences

Lately this has become a hot topic where I work.

But let me start from way back…

I came from an office where there was no give and take from management as far as time management. Oh, they claimed we were all professional adults and that we were going to be treated as such, but then they’d make you work 60 hours one week to get a project done and if you asked for a day off the next week to have a root canal, they’d force you to take a vacation day. And if you called in sick more than 3 times in a 12 month period you were written up. That kind of mentality.

The Minion Supervisor had a little black book that he kept track of everyone’s time in and he would comment to you if you came in more than five minutes late on any given day — in fact, you were supposed to call if you were going to be more than five minutes late. That went in your permanent record if you called to say you were going to be late and you could be written up for so many late times too.

But we supposedly were professional adults who were supposed to act and be treated as such.
My current boss’ attititude is that we’re all actually professional adults and as long as we get our work done and show up at meetings, he doesn’t really care if we have to run errands in the middle of the day or if we have to leave early because we’re sick. Once, I had to leave after working two hours because I was literally throwing up in my trash can and when I asked how to put that on my time sheet, he told me to mark myself as being at work. Of course, I’ve been at work for twelve hours without complaint before too and I volunteer to take midnight install and upgrade shifts too.
Plus, I’m more likely to give 200% at this job because I know it’s give and take. At my last job, I counted the minutes quite literally. Now I come and go and some weeks I might work 38 or 39 hours and the next week I might work 50 and the next 40. It’s all good.
Recently, another boss-type person in the same department has started to nitpick the time of her employees — people who have in the past given up a lot of their own personal time to get projects done and without complaint — well, without much complaint :P. It seems that lately, people have been written up or spoken too or emailed for taking personal time for things like doctors appointments, personal crises, for coming in late, or being sick. One person who left early when her brother-in-law was rushed to the ER for a seizure was told (in an email) that in the future she should schedule her family crises around her work priorities.
There’s suddenly been a lot of hubub about it because people feel like the extra time they’ve put in isn’t being acknowledged and they aren’t being respected. Without warning there’s been a shift in the mentality of what an exempt salaried employee is. There’s that disturbing feeling that the company owns the employee and that the only time that matters is company time. People feel like they are expected to give without receiving anything in return and that isn’t fair.
Since I’d never worked in an environment that actually was give and take until I came to work for my current wonderful boss, it took me some time to get used to the mentality of fairness. Now I’m wondering now what it’s like where other people work. What’s the norm?

Is it really practical for a business to think a person will call in “sick” three or less times a year when everything from personal illness to family crises can happen on a whim?

Tags: PTO, work, scheduled absense, sick leave, company loyalty

Workplace Violence & Gun Control

Gun-related violence is one of the leading causes of workplace deaths. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports that there were 632 workplace homicides in 2003 - accounting for over one-tenth of all workplace fatalities.

In addition, a recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that workplaces that allow workers to carry firearms and other weapons at work were 5-7 times more likely to be the site of an on the job homicide compared to workplaces that prohibit workers from carrying weapons. [“NRA Calls for Boycott of ConocoPhillips; Visit your Neighborhood Phillips 66 Today”]

Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Some sort of “No Gun Policy” at work seems to make the workplace just a tad safer. I like the idea of going to work and not being a little worried about what might be in who’s briefcase.

If you aren’t a Federal Marshall, a hunter, a law enforcer, or a security guard, why would you need to bring a gun to work?

Apparently there are two states (Oklahoma and Kentucky) that prohibit businesses from banning weapons on their own property. Several companies including ConocoPhillips are fighting the Oklahoma 2003 law in Federal Court

“ConocoPhillips supports the Second Amendment and respects the rights of law abiding citizens to own guns,” the Houston-based oil company says in a written statement. “Our primary concern is the safety of all our employees. We are simply trying to provide a safe and secure working environment for our employees by keeping guns out of our facilities, including our company parking lots.” [“Worker right or workplace danger?”]

In response, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has called for a boycott of ConocoPhillips, despite evidence that workplace gun bans do lower risk to employees.

Businesses should have a reasonable right to restrict what employees can and can’t do on their own property (just like I do not allow anyone to smoke in my home). If my employer can tell me what I can and can’t wear or pierce or tattoo then they should also be able to make rules that will protect me while I’m in their dress-code, right? I think it’s even more important that they have control over what gets brought on their property since they are the ones libale if someone is shot or injured while on the property.

Anyway, I’m off to find a Conoco or Phillips 66 gas station to fill up my Jeep.

On a personal note, having once been mugged at gunpoint and realizing at the time that even if I had been armed, there was nothing I could have done, plus having nearly been shot in a New Year’s Eve celebration (bullets that get disharged have to go somewhere, folks!), I have no liking for weapons and my friends back home knew that guns were not welcome in my home. Yet they still came to visit and quite often.

Tags: gun control, workplace violence, NRA, boycott

Stress & Confusion

Things at work are getting hectic. Too much going on all at once. Everything is a priority, of course. Except that one project has become the priority of the priorities. Supposedly, it’s work comes first whether or not other things need to get done before it does.

Part of the problem is we have a number of immeninent projects that all have the same resources and not enough time to do it all.

I am the integration lead on the SCM3.5 Upgrade project; however, before that happens (scheduled for April 29th at 1am), we absolutely have to upgrade the interface engine again to eWebIt 4.0 SP1 and SIM 2.0. We had originally planned on doing that as a two phase process. We borrowed a server from another project and did a clean install of eWebIt 4.0 SP1 and SIM 2.0. We swapped out the production server with the borrowed server two Fridays ago.

It was nasty.

Despite testing of the SIM 2.0 translators, they didn’t work correctly in the production environment. There is something wrong with the server and we can’t figure out if our eWebIt 4.0 SP1 is the problem or if it’s the server.

We were supposed to do Phase II the following Friday at 1am, but due to all the problems with the initial swap, there was no time for anyone to wipe the old server and do a clean install and the vendor told us we should just upgrade it anyway. So, it was postponed to this coming Friday.

However, GE didn’t bother to start work on it until this past Monday and ran into all sorts of problems. None of us have been able to start our work on the original production server because we are waiting on him to finish the upgrade/install.

So, it’s been postponed another week…making it only a week from the SCM3.5 upgrade. Dangerously endangering that date.

On top of that, there’s AMPFM. This is the project that MJ has meltdowns over and it got reassigned to all of us.

They were supposed to begin “functional” testing next week and we were told there was no moving the date. Howerever, none of the integration team thinks it’s ready. In fact, even I have found issues with my assigned area that are dependent on the vendor fixing them. What I can’t understand is that the applications having the most trouble interfacing are all owned by the same vendor and are advertised as being integrated. Yeah. Right.

Anyway, as the date approaches we are finding more and more stuff that just doesn’t work and more and more stuff that needs to be changed and whenever we change stuff, we then have to retest.

And I’m feeling a little panicky because I promised my part would be ready for the “functional” test but that was before the changes and the discoveries.

As of last week, the integration team was suggesting that starting “functional” testing next Tuesday would be a bad idea as it probably will not be a true “functional” test.

Yesterday, the web access for the application went out of service with no ETA as to when it will be running again. Not to mention, I’ve been in an email war with the sys admin over a ton of things, including how I can possibly test if I don’t have access to do so.

As of this afternoon, the “functional” test has been moved to April 25th.

Now, those of you keeping track will note that this is now 3 days after the eWebIt 4.0 SP1 & SIM 2.0 upgrade and 5 days prior to the SCM 3.5 Upgrade. It’s important to note that the resources expected to help with the AMPFM testing are the same ones responsible for the SCM3.5 Upgrade.

Oh, and AMPFM? Going “live” on November 1rst, whether we are ready or not.

And I feel like I’m running the wrong direction on one of those People Movers in the airports while banging my forehead repeatedly against a brick wall.

###In other news, my new boss has announced that he can no longer manage the Database & Integration Group and do the rest of his job. He is going to higher a manager just for us. The good news is that he’s not just sticking us under one of the questionable managers — some of the team would up and quit, I think.While I look at this with some feeling of deja vu, I do see his point. With all the Drama Queens and Divas in this group (me included), he needs someone to cater to us, to make us their priority, to hold our hands and babysit us.

I just don’t like the unknown of who this might be and what his/her personality might be. My experience with managers of such type has not been good. I like my current boss. I like working for him. He doesn’t micromanage and I’m afraid we will get a micromanager.

###Peter started emailing talking about writing stuff. I’m not sure what to think and general chit chat. I like talking to him, but I do have to wonder why the sudden interest in my life after silence so long.The present I sent Meg for her birthday should have arrived but, of course, no thank you note or call, despite the fact that I hand made it, cut myself on the glass, and put some thought into what I thought she would like. I know I need to let go. I’m working on it.

###PW’s computer apparently caught fire. I suspect El’s boyfriend as he was the only one in the room when it happened, but PW thinks it was something spontaneous. ###My friend TT was told he’s being laid off just as he moved into a more expensive apartment. He is now debating getting loans/scholarships and going back to school. Good for him. ###On the plus side, I think the Prosac may be helping. Either that or the arrival of Spring.Oh, and it snowed yesterday.

Tags: work, discombobulated