Saturday, March 26, 2005
Long day
So I went to Stanford. Had to get there by FIVE O'CLOCK in the morning tho. I get up at 4:15, get ready, promptly get lost. Call the main IS guy, uh-oh I get his voicemail. Turns out he was playing World of Warcraft all evening and slept through his alarm clock (me totally understands!). So we get off to a bit of a late start, but once we show up, nothing really happens. I guess we were just there in case anything went wrong. In other words, I DIDN'T NEED TO BE THERE. We had 5 EMC guys there which was way more than enough.
Anyways I figure that's that, then Rob says you wanna come alone to SF we have a quickie install there. He says 2 hours, I figure maybe 5 hours based on Murphy's Law. It ends up taking eight hours because someone messed up somewhere. Just a lot of waiting around til they got their shit together and we could go in and quickly do clone groups (which took like five minutes tops). I guess the only redeeming factor is Rob telling us a bunch of crazy stories about corporate politics on the ride to SF. That guy is awesome. Just things like, someone messing up an install, then having a conf call with 40 people on it where someone gets fired. Or VPs setting up fall guys in case something goes wrong and SOMEONE needs to be the sacrificial lamb and get fired.
In our case it was a partner company who installed the hardware and the problem we ran across was hardware related. So looks like the client's VP won't want to pay the big bill and will yell at the partner until he gets free stuff. That data center was pretty hard-core too. There were security cameras everywhere and you needed biometric verification to enter. As well as key-card access to leave the area (or else you would trip the alarm and ppl would get pissed off).
What a way to spend a Saturday. Ten hours on the job. At least I got out of the house right? :p
On the good side, I'm slightly more motivated on doing my job now. Mostly due to Rob and his zany stories.
WOW footnote: so after Rob keeps mentioning how awesome the game is, I had to get out to Frys and buy a copy. So from now on, anytime I disappear completely from society, blame WOW. Nah that's too geeky, blame my imaginary girlfriend. ¶ 11:26 PM
Anyways I figure that's that, then Rob says you wanna come alone to SF we have a quickie install there. He says 2 hours, I figure maybe 5 hours based on Murphy's Law. It ends up taking eight hours because someone messed up somewhere. Just a lot of waiting around til they got their shit together and we could go in and quickly do clone groups (which took like five minutes tops). I guess the only redeeming factor is Rob telling us a bunch of crazy stories about corporate politics on the ride to SF. That guy is awesome. Just things like, someone messing up an install, then having a conf call with 40 people on it where someone gets fired. Or VPs setting up fall guys in case something goes wrong and SOMEONE needs to be the sacrificial lamb and get fired.
In our case it was a partner company who installed the hardware and the problem we ran across was hardware related. So looks like the client's VP won't want to pay the big bill and will yell at the partner until he gets free stuff. That data center was pretty hard-core too. There were security cameras everywhere and you needed biometric verification to enter. As well as key-card access to leave the area (or else you would trip the alarm and ppl would get pissed off).
What a way to spend a Saturday. Ten hours on the job. At least I got out of the house right? :p
On the good side, I'm slightly more motivated on doing my job now. Mostly due to Rob and his zany stories.
WOW footnote: so after Rob keeps mentioning how awesome the game is, I had to get out to Frys and buy a copy. So from now on, anytime I disappear completely from society, blame WOW. Nah that's too geeky, blame my imaginary girlfriend. ¶ 11:26 PM
