Wednesday, March 22, 2006

In about three hours today should get interesting.
My employer has brought in a highly-paid consultant to fix one of the systems for (company name deleted to comply with non-disclosure agreement). I could have pretty easily done the work myself. I've been working with the technology for years, longer even than the consultant. I just can't call the client to ask "what did you guys change?" and "after the work is finished, what should the solution look like?" Either question could complete work on my part in about an hour, including a reboot.
So the consultant will be here to participate in a conference call for me. I'm to remain silent and answer his questions by writing on a whiteboard in the conference room while the client thinks the answers are all coming directly from the consultant.
No, seriously.
Once we have the questions answered, I'll complete the work and have the consultant call the client to confirm everything is working.
While I guess it beats faking an accent, the whole thing is terribly Cyrano de Bergerac. Anyone who knows me well, knows my almost pathological hatred of all things French.
Anyone who knows me at all knows I will be unable to resist feeding fake answers through the whiteboard in an attempt to make everyone look insane/irrational/incompetent. What does it matter to me? I'm not officially allowed to be there anyway.
I did the math yesterday and over the past month, including weekends and after hours work, I'm averaging about 30 hours a week supporting this customer alone. That means that in a standard week (don't let me get started about the difference between a standard 40 hour work week and a standard broken IT shop 55 hour work week) I can actually officially account for 10 hours of time. No where in any form or time tracking utility (and there are a lot of them) can I account for the time I've spent. And now I'm hearing rumors that upper management is "concerned" about my impaired productivity. These rumors are semi-validated by the fact that the manager who devised my current "ninja tech" work program is actively working to keep upper management from asking me about it.
My biggest fear is that upper management will be okay with it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Man you worry me sometimes!
Shut it down, Yo G! It be D,
War & Peace Outie!